Download the Monero Blockchain

We need to download all the blocks of the CryptoNote blockchain to perform our analysis. This involves downloading the client software and running it.

For Monero, download the latest release of the client from the releases page: https://github.com/monero-project/monero/releases/.

Unzip the archive and run the Monero CLI using the following command in the unzipped directory.

./monerod

It can take more than a day to sync the entire Monero blockchain onto an SSD. Using an HDD can take even longer.