Process Mining Blockchain in 2024: Top 4 Use Cases & Case Studies

Blockchain technology has been applied to different applications across different industries, such as DeFi, NFTs, and DApps. Despite the rising interest in blockchain, business leaders complain about the difficulty of improving customer satisfaction and detecting illegitimate activities in such blockchain-based applications. 

Process mining can overcome such challenges by discovering user behavior, identifying areas for improvement and ensuring efficient audit. Therefore, we’ll explain 4 use cases of process mining for blockchain technology and applications. 

Ensure security audits

One of the major challenges for blockchain technology is the possibility of illegal activities, such as money laundering. In the blockchain, there is no internal control mechanism or central administration that constantly checks, reports, and prevents phishing attacks. 

Process mining can help overcome this challenge by detecting illegitimate activities or actions that lead to undesired outcomes while maintaining independence and autonomy. Process mining is widely used for audit and compliance purposes. Process mining discovers activities, maps workflows and runs conformance checks to compare the level of compliance between the actual and intended usage of blockchain. It also identifies anomalies and unexpected events with root-causes to improve and secure the operations. 

For example, in 2017, an unknown hacker stole around $32 million worth of Ethereum because of a vulnerability in the software. Such loss could be prevented if auditors detected the root cause and improved their IT systems managing the transaction processes. 

Map Inter-organizational processes 

Enterprise-centric blockchain companies look for ways to support multi-party or inter-organizational business processes in blockchain-based systems. Inter or cross-organizational business processes are the activities that are carried out by two or more organizations. For example, regional firms, industry clusters or e-commerce platform operations include several parties from the moment they receive an order until they deliver the product. 

Inter-organizational processes are more complex and difficult to manage and implement a change compared to typical processes. Process mining can systematically identify the most suitable processes for blockchains. It also ensures that the identified process satisfies the conditions set by other organizations or partners.  

Understand user behavior in DApps

Blockchain-based decentralized applications (DApps) refer to programs and apps that are not managed by a third party or central authority and solely rely on blockchains or peer-to-peer networks. BitTorrent, CryptoKitties and Augur are the most known examples of DApps. Although DApps are beneficial in terms of higher data security, lower costs and no single point of server failure, it challenges developers to make updates or fix bugs in the DApps. 

Process mining enables developers to understand how users navigate within the app by identifying:

• events that get triggered more often than others,
• inefficient processes that decrease user experience, 
• pain points such as long delays. 

With process mining tools, the developers can also identify the actual usage of their DApps and compare these findings to the ideal level of usage to make changes and adapt the DApp. 

For example, researchers that applied process mining in analyzing gamer behavior in ChickenHunt, an Ethereum-based game,  identified the most common traces users follow and mapped their upgrade activities. The research illustrated that the developers can leverage these insights from process mining to enhance the game further.

Source: Event Logs of Ethereum-Based Applications

Validate and verify smart contracts 

Smart contracts are an application of blockchain technology to enable secure and accurate exchange of digital or physical assets. These codes record the conditions of the contract and activate the contract once all conditions are satisfied, increasing efficiency. Smart contracts are applied in various sectors, such as NFTs, logistics, insurance and healthcare.  

Process mining can be deployed to the logical flow of the smart contract as a petri-net model in order to validate and verify smart contracts. Researchers find the process mining approach more efficient than semantic error verification. 

Thus, some studies  of process management and blockchain technology show that smart contracts can be encoded according to the idealized process model drawn from process mining. As a result, the execution of the process is activated automatically following the conditions set on the ideal model, reducing the deviations from this model. 

Further reading

Explore other applications and use cases of process mining:

• How to Use IoT & Process Mining Together?
• 33 Use Cases and Applications of Process Mining

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