Analyzing Ethereum's Contract Topology

Abstract

Ethereum is the second most valuable cryptocurrency today, with a current market cap of over $68B. What sets Ethereum apart from other cryptocurrencies is that it uses the blockchain to not only store a record of transactions, but also smart contracts and a history of calls made to those contracts. Thus, Ethereum represents a new form of distributed system: one where users can implement contracts that can provide functionality such as voting protocols, crowdfunding projects, betting agreements, and many more. However, despite the massive investment, little is known about how contracts in Ethereum are actually created and used. In this paper, we examine how contracts in Ethereum are created, and how users and contracts interact with one another. We modify the geth client to log all such interactions, and find that contracts today are three times more likely to be created by other contracts than they are by users, and that over 60% of contracts have never been interacted with. Additionally, we obtain the bytecode of all contracts and look for similarity; we find that less than 10% of user-created contracts are unique, and less than 1% of contract-created contracts are so. Clustering the contracts based on code similarity reveals even further similarity. These results indicate that there is substantial code re-use in Ethereum, suggesting that bugs in such contracts could have wide-spread impact on the Ethereum user population.