How to retrieve transfer history of an account in 5.4?

[emclab]

My app needs to retrieve transfer history for an account on a private network within a period of time. Here mentioned a provider.getHistory() to retrieve the history for an account but I could not find doc about this method for version 5.4. What is the way to retrieve the transfer history for an account? Many thanks.

[ricmoo]

It is only available on the EtherscanProvider.

This is only available on the networks that Etherscan indexes. The needed information is generally not available on an Ethereum node. You will need to create indices for the needed data yourself to get the list of transactions for a given network.

[emclab]

Hi ricmoo, can you recommend an example of retrieving and indexing the transaction data for a private network? Or some reading about the topic. Many thanks.

[ricmoo]

I don’t have much to recommend. You will need a database like SQL, with indexes on any column you need to search by (e.g. from and to) and a daemon that will ingest each block, updating the fields you care about in the database for each transaction when a block is mined. If you need internal transactions, you will have to make sure your private node is running in archive mode, so you can trace each transaction and parse the trace log.

It is a huge undertaking though. Keep in mind Etherscan has created an entire business model out of indexing this data.

You might be able to find someone who has wrote an open source block explorer, I know there have been multiple attempts, but I don’t know if any that are comprehensive yet. :s

[zemse]

@emclab TheGraph protocol can be a candidate. It's mostly used for more complex stuff, but they allow you to write handler functions per block or tx using subgraph. If your network isn't already supported by them, you can leverage the open-source indexer. You should be able to spin up an indexer setup and hook up to a private archive node (not sure if it's nicely documented though).

[emclab]

Thanks for the input. The app is only interested in transfer tx for a contract to or from its user. I am thinking about using the app to pull the data which is only interested by its user and store in db (such as sqlite) locally. Not sure how feasible it is. Here is an example I am following and it uses provider.getLogs and decode the log to retrieve to , from and value. The example was developed with v4 and there are a few hick ups with v5.

[zemse]

With logs you will only get ERC20 transfers, since these transfer txs emit events (and any other kind of thing that emits events like ERC721). If you are looking for ETH transfers, then an event is not emitted, so that doesn't allow you to use provider.getLogs.