As a decentralized distributed ledger technology, blockchain is playing a key role in more and more industries, especially in finance, supply chain management, smart contracts and other fields. However, as blockchain networks rapidly expand, capturing their vast amounts of data becomes increasingly complex. The distributed nature of the blockchain, the huge amount of data, the complex structure and the frequent IP bans have brought many challenges to data scrapers. As a tool with high security and flexibility, residential proxies can effectively deal with these challenges and significantly improve the efficiency and success rate of blockchain data capture. This article explores how residential proxies can be used to solve the challenges of blockchain data capture and improve the efficiency and success rate of data capture.

What Is Blockchain? What Are the Application Scenarios?

Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that uses cryptography to ensure data immutability and transparency. In a blockchain network, each participant has the same copy of the ledger, and all transaction records are arranged in chronological order and form "blocks". Multiple blocks are connected together to form a chain. The decentralized nature of blockchain makes data more secure and enables trustless value transfer between participants. The main application scenarios of blockchain are:

• Financial field: The earliest application of blockchain was in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Blockchain technology is used in decentralized payment systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, which can reduce transaction costs and increase transaction speed. In addition, blockchain also supports decentralized finance (DeFi), allowing users to conduct financial activities such as lending and payment without intermediaries.
• Supply chain management: Through the transparency and immutability of blockchain, companies can track the flow of products in real time and improve supply chain management efficiency.
• Digital assets and smart contracts: Blockchain provides the infrastructure for the execution of digital assets (such as NFTs) and smart contracts, ensuring that every transaction is recorded on the chain.
• Identity verification: Blockchain can provide users with more secure digital identity management. Since the data on the blockchain cannot be tampered with, users can use the blockchain to ensure the security of their identity information and avoid problems such as identity theft.
• With the widespread application of blockchain technology, more and more industries are beginning to pay attention to and use the data in the blockchain to make business decisions. However, how to efficiently and securely capture these blockchain data has become a major challenge.

What Are the Challenges of Blockchain Data Capture?

The data capture process still faces a series of challenges due to its decentralized and large-scale distributed characteristics:

• Network distribution and decentralization: The distributed nature of blockchain means that its data is stored in multiple nodes around the world, not concentrated in a single server. This makes data crawling complicated and requires communication with multiple nodes. Since network nodes are distributed in different geographical locations, interacting with multiple nodes may cause delays in data crawling. Some nodes may have low network bandwidth, limiting the speed and efficiency of data crawling.
• The amount of data is huge and growing: New transactions and blocks are constantly generated on the blockchain network, especially large-scale networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. The amount of data is extremely large and continues to increase. As the amount of data grows, the amount of transaction and block data that the crawler system needs to process becomes larger and larger, and the system load and storage requirements will also increase. The blockchain network updates very quickly, and ensuring that the crawled data is the latest is also a problem.
• Complex data structure: Data on the blockchain is packaged and stored in blocks in chronological order. These data structures are complex and involve multiple types of transactions and smart contracts. For example, the Ethereum blockchain contains not only simple transaction records, but also detailed information on the execution of smart contracts. Therefore, a large number of complex data structures need to be parsed, especially when it comes to smart contracts and multi-signature transactions, which requires in-depth understanding and parsing of the data. The technical architecture and data structure of different blockchains are different, and the way to capture Bitcoin and Ethereum data may be completely different.
• IP blocking and crawling restrictions: Since frequent data crawling behavior is easily identified as abnormal by blockchain nodes, some nodes will restrict or block IP addresses with frequent requests. Many nodes have restrictions on request frequency, and excessively high frequency requests may cause nodes to temporarily block IPs. If a large number of crawling requests are sent from a single IP address, it is easy to trigger the anti-crawling mechanism, resulting in crawling interruption.

The Role of Residential Proxies in Blockchain Data Scraping

Residential proxy is a proxy server that uses a real residential IP address to access the Internet, which can effectively avoid being identified as a crawler by a website or node. Compared with a data center proxy, the IP address of a residential proxy is provided by a real network user, so it is more secure, reliable and difficult to be blocked. In blockchain data crawling, the role of a residential proxy is mainly reflected in the following aspects:

• Avoid IP blocking and frequency limits: To prevent malicious crawling, blockchain nodes usually impose frequency limits or directly block frequently accessed IP addresses. This means that if the same IP address is used for a large number of crawls, the IP may be identified as an abnormal request, resulting in a crawl interruption. Residential proxies help crawlers avoid being identified as crawlers by providing a large number of real residential IP addresses. These IP addresses look like requests from ordinary users and are distributed all over the world, so they can effectively reduce the risk of crawling requests being restricted.
• Distributed crawling improves efficiency: The blockchain network is decentralized, and its data is stored in multiple nodes around the world. Crawl nodes in a certain area may be slow or have high latency due to distance, bandwidth, etc. Residential proxies can provide IP addresses from different regions to help crawlers more flexibly choose IP addresses close to the target node, thereby speeding up the data crawling process. For example, by using a residential IP that is geographically close to the target blockchain node, network latency can be reduced and data crawling speed can be increased.
• Handling large-scale crawling needs: The amount of blockchain data is huge, especially for large blockchain networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Cracking all blocks or transaction records requires processing massive amounts of data. If a single IP is used for large-scale crawling, it is not only inefficient, but also easy to trigger frequency restrictions or ban mechanisms. Residential proxies can provide thousands of IP addresses, support concurrent crawling, and greatly improve the efficiency of data crawling.

How to Scrape Blockchain Data Using Residential Proxies

In the specific process of blockchain data crawling, using residential proxies can effectively solve various problems encountered in the crawling process. The following will take 911 Proxy as an example to explain in detail how to crawl blockchain data by using residential proxies:

Step 1: Choose the right crawler and proxy service

First, you need a powerful scraping tool that can parse the structure of blockchain data. For example, you can use Python's web3.py library to interact with the Ethereum blockchain, or use Bitcoin's JSON-RPC interface to scrape Bitcoin transaction data. Other scraping tools such as Scrapy, Selenium, etc. can also be used in conjunction with residential proxies when needed. Choosing a reliable residential proxy service is key. Take 911 Proxy as an example. 911 Proxy provides a large number of real residential IP addresses from all over the world, which can help scrapers bypass the restrictions of blockchain nodes and increase the success rate of scraping.

Step 2: Set up and configure a residential proxy

First, register an account on the proxy platform of your choice and obtain a residential proxy IP. Most proxy services will provide a user interface that allows you to select IP addresses from different countries and regions to ensure that you can access the target blockchain node. Depending on the scraping tool and programming language you use, integrate the residential proxy into your code or tool.

Step 3: Determine the capture target and blockchain node

Determine which blockchain data to crawl. For example, mainstream blockchains such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana all have their own node distribution and API interfaces. Choose the appropriate blockchain network and decide the specific data type to crawl (such as transaction data, block information, or smart contract execution results). Blockchains usually have open API interfaces for developers to access, or you can run a full node yourself. Access the blockchain node interface through a residential proxy to ensure that you will not be banned for frequent requests.

Step 4: Capture and process data

To improve efficiency, blockchain data can be captured in a concurrent or distributed manner. By switching different IP addresses through residential proxies, the crawler can request data from multiple nodes concurrently. Blockchain data is updated in real time, and it is crucial to capture the latest data, especially in scenarios such as finance, transactions, and smart contracts. Using residential proxies can avoid being restricted due to frequent requests and ensure real-time capture.

Summarize

By combining residential proxy technology, blockchain data capture is no longer an insurmountable problem. Residential proxies can not only effectively avoid IP bans and frequency restrictions, but also speed up the speed and efficiency of data acquisition through distributed capture. As blockchain technology becomes increasingly popular, using residential proxies for data capture will become an important means for enterprises and developers to cope with complex network environments. Whether it is finance, supply chain, or identity verification, residential proxies can help crawlers quickly and securely obtain important data on the blockchain, thereby promoting further business development.