Evolution of the External Owned Account Trading Network on Ethereum

Abstract

In this paper, we investigated the evolution of the External owned account Trading Network(ETN) on Ethereum from August 10th, 2015 to June 9th, 2017 through the perspective of network science. It is showed that the evolution of the topological properties of the ETN and important events are closely related. The average degree of the ETN is not constant but fluctuates within a small range of (2.1, 3.2). And there exists the extremely strongly positive correlation between the number of nodes and the number of edges in the ETN. Moreover, following the events happening, the degree distribution of ETN changes obviously. Moreover, the ETN has smaller values of degree correlation coefficient and clustering coefficient than that of the randomized graph with the same degree sequence, which implies that ETN shows the disassortative mixing pattern by degree and owns few triangles. Through the method of k-shell decomposition, our investigation shows the core of the ETN grows stepwise.