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chainmap: Turn On-Chain Transactions Into a Fund-Flow Graph

· 4 min read
gl0bal01
gl0bal01
Researcher

CTF, a blockchain challenge, clock running. The flag was somewhere down a chain of transactions and I was trying to follow the money by hand — one Etherscan tab, copy the "to" address, paste it into a new tab, scroll, copy the next hop, paste, scroll. Twenty tabs deep I'd lost the thread completely: which branch was I on, had I already seen 0x9f…c2, and was this even the real money or a dust attack dragging me sideways. My teammates were solving things. I was untangling Christmas lights in the dark. We didn't get that flag.

So afterward I built chainmap. Paste an address, it draws the graph — address to address, expanded outward as far as you want. The twenty-tab crawl becomes one picture you can actually read.

It's live at chainmap.gl0bal01.com and runs entirely in your browser — nothing you paste ever leaves the tab. No account, no upload. If you don't have an Etherscan key yet, click Demo mode and a sample investigation loads so you can poke around first.

What it does​

You give it a wallet, it fetches that wallet's transactions and fans out — every counterparty becomes a dot, every transfer an arrow — until it hits the depth you picked. Then it stops being a drawing and starts being an investigation: filter the noise, bundle repeated transfers into one arrow, and let the overlays do the pointing.

The overlays are the good part:

  • Round-trips — money that leaves an address and comes back, the classic wash shape.
  • Hubs — the wallets everything pours into or out of. Usually where an exchange or a mixer sits.
  • Fresh-wallet coloring — spot the burner addresses spun up for one job.
  • Risk score — per wallet, and it tells you why it flagged one. A risk number you can't question is just astrology with hex digits.

One quiet feature that saved me more than once: a token transfer on-chain points at the token, not the person who got paid — the real recipient is hidden in the transaction. chainmap digs it out and draws the arrow to the wallet that actually received the money.

Honest by design​

This is the bit I care about, because crypto tools fudge it constantly. The graph is a sample of history, and chainmap says so instead of pretending it's the whole story. Failed transactions get dropped — they moved no money, so drawing them is a lie. And the amounts are exact, never rounded.

Which is the whole ethic, really: the graph is a lead, not proof. A blockchain is pseudonymous, not anonymous, and not always what it looks like — spoofed token names, dust attacks, exchange wallets that make one address look like a thousand people. It'll show you where the money moved. It won't tell you who someone is, and neither can anything else. Corroborate before you conclude.

It also teaches​

While building it I noticed every feature maps to a blockchain concept you could actually teach — so chainmap doubles as a hands-on course. Accounts, transfers, tokens, how a graph gets built, why sampling matters, why some transactions fail — each one tied to something you can see and do in Demo mode, with eight guided labs. If you've ever wanted to get how a blockchain moves value instead of nodding along to a diagram, that's the way in.

Built for OSINT investigators, journalists chasing a money trail, and anyone who learns a blockchain better by watching it move. Free, works in the browser, English and French. chainmap.gl0bal01.com

For authorized OSINT investigations, journalism, and learning. The graph is a lead, not proof.