Track Token Transactions on the Blockchain with FME

Web3 is here. It has been regarded as the future of the internet. With emerging technologies such as cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DAOs, Decentralized Finance, and more, there has been a lot happening in the blockchain world.

By now, most people have heard of bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies. No matter what your views are on those cryptocurrencies, the blockchain technology is certainly changing the internet from heavy reliance on centralized servers to decentralized computers around the world. Because most of the blockchain technology is open source, FME can be a perfect tool to interact with this decentralized world. Today, I will show you how use FME to track token transactions on the Ethereum network.

First, you will need to create an account and obtain API keys from etherscan.

Once you have signed up, go to Account Overview and add an API key.

The easiest way is to use a transformer called EthereumConnector:

Paste in the API key you got from Etherscan, select the Network to Mainnet and paste the digital wallet address you want to track. Here are the attributes you can extract from the transactions:

That’s it! You will get basic ETH transaction information with this transformer.

Because the Ethereum blockchain is open source, anyone can create their own token called a Smart Contract. I don’t think you can extract the transactions from Smart Contract using EthereumConnector, but you can still get them using HTTPCaller.

For this demo, I created my personal token called Enrique Test (ENT) on the Ethereum Test blockchain. To extract token transactions, use HTTPCaller:

Then use JSONFlattener to flatten nested JSON response, use AttributeExposer to get the attributes you want to extract, and use DateTimeConverter to convert Unix Time to human readable Date/Time.

Here is the result:

You can do a lot more with the blockchain in FME, check out the Ethereum API for more details. Read this blog post if you are interested in a real world use case of blockchain and cryptocurrency I have done recently.