How to trace Bitcoin transactions (public ledger)

A practical guide showing the workflow used by investigators — tools, steps, limits, and legal notes.

Quick overview

Bitcoin transactions are public on the blockchain. By following inputs and outputs you can trace how coins moved. Professional investigators combine this with exchange records and other off-chain data to identify actors.

Essential tools

  • mempool.space
  • blockstream.info
  • WalletExplorer / OXT
  • Bitcoin Core (bitcoind)
  • Chainalysis / Elliptic (commercial)

Explorers show transactions/UTXOs; labeling services and analytics add entity tags and clustering to find likely exchanges or services.

Step-by-step (practical)

  1. Start: get a TXID or address.
  2. Inspect: paste it into a block explorer to view inputs, outputs, confirmations, and timestamps.
  3. Follow: click input addresses to see prior transactions and continue following flows backward or forwards.
  4. Label: look for outputs that hit labeled services (exchanges, mixers, custodians).
  5. Cluster: use heuristics (common-input-ownership, change address patterns) to group addresses that likely belong together.
  6. Close the loop: if funds go to an exchange, legal process + KYC may reveal the real-world identity.

Try it now — open a TXID

This will open the explorer in a new tab so you can visually follow the transaction graph.

Using a local full node (recommended)

Running Bitcoin Core gives you complete, private access to canonical data. Enable txindex=1 to query historical transactions.

Example RPC command (read-only) 
bitcoin-cli getrawtransaction <txid> true

This returns the raw transaction JSON (inputs, outputs, blockhash).

Clustering & heuristics

Common-input-ownership: inputs spent together are often controlled by the same wallet. Change-address detection and address reuse are additional clues. These heuristics are powerful but imperfect; treat results as probabilistic and look for corroborating evidence.

Limitations & privacy tools

Privacy tools such as CoinJoin, mixers, and chain-hopping make tracing harder. Some methods add complexity but do not guarantee anonymity. Investigators use more data and advanced analysis to untangle many flows, but no method is 100% foolproof.

Public resources

Explorer: mempool.space

Blockstream explorer: blockstream.info

Labeling / analysis: OXT, WalletExplorer

Resources & related: mempool.space · blockstream.info · OXT · WalletExplorer