Ethereum in Google BigQuery

Just brought to my attention, implications should be interesting in the ability to test blockchain applications and their data.  Note in particular the possibility of testing smart contract applications with large amounts of public data.   Looks to be a good opportunity.  Powerful opportunity.   And beyond that?

Ethereum in BigQuery  in Medium, Coinscan

Public Analytics for Etherium

August 29, 2018  Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies have captured the imagination of technologists, financiers, and economists. Digital currencies are only one application of the underlying blockchain technology. Earlier this year, we made the Bitcoin dataset publicly available for analysis in Google BigQuery. Today we’re making the Ethereum dataset available.

Like its predecessor, Bitcoin, you might think of the Ethereum blockchain as an immutable distributed ledger. However, creator Vitalik Buterin extended its set of capabilities by including a virtual machine that can execute arbitrary code stored on the blockchain as smart contracts. .... "

And from Google:  https://medium.com/@coinscan/ethereum-in-bigquery-e848812cfefa
And on BigQuery: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/

And Google writes about the smart contract implications:

Ethereum in BigQuery: a Public Dataset for smart contract analytics
Developer Advocate, Google Cloud
Evgeny Medvedev
Author of Blockchain ETL
August 29, 2018

Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies have captured the imagination of technologists, financiers, and economists. Digital currencies are only one application of the underlying blockchain technology. Earlier this year, we made the Bitcoin dataset publicly available for analysis in Google BigQuery. Today we’re making the Ethereum dataset available.

Like its predecessor, Bitcoin, you might think of the Ethereum blockchain as an immutable distributed ledger. However, creator Vitalik Buterin extended its set of capabilities by including a virtual machine that can execute arbitrary code stored on the blockchain as smart contracts.

With regards to the system architecture, Ethereum resembles Bitcoin in that it primarily serves to record immutable transactions. Both are essentially OLTP databases, and provide little in the way of OLAP (analytics) functionality. However, the Ethereum dataset is notably distinct from the Bitcoin dataset:

The Ethereum blockchain’s primary crypto-economic unit of value is Ether, while the Bitcoin blockchain’s unit of value is Bitcoin. However, the majority of value transfer on the Ethereum blockchain is composed of so-called tokens. Tokens are created and managed by smart contracts.

Ether value transfers are precise and direct, resembling accounting ledger debits and credits. This is in contrast to the Bitcoin value transfer mechanism, for which it can be difficult to determine the balance of a given wallet address.

Addresses can be not only be wallets that hold balances, but can also contain smart contract bytecode that allows the programmatic creation of agreements and automatic triggering of their execution. An aggregate of coordinated smart contracts could be used to build a decentralized autonomous organization.

The Ethereum blockchain data are now available for exploration with BigQuery. All historical data are in the ethereum_blockchain dataset (documentation here), which updates daily. The Ethereum ETL project on GitHub contains all source code used to extract data from the Ethereum blockchain and load it into BigQuery—we welcome more contributors and more blockchains!   .... "