research-article

Understanding Ethereum via Graph Analysis

Authors:

John Chi-Shing Lui,

Xiaosong ZhangAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), Volume 20, Issue 2

Article No.: 18, Pages 1 - 32

https://doi.org/10.1145/3381036

Published: 17 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Ethereum, a blockchain, supports its own cryptocurrency named Ether and smart contracts. Although more than 8M smart contracts have been deployed on Ethereum, little is known about the characteristics of its users, smart contracts, and the relationships among them. We conduct the first systematic study on Ethereum by leveraging graph analysis to characterize three major activities on Ethereum, namely money transfer, smart contract creation, and smart contract invocation. We collect all transaction data, construct three graphs from the data to characterize major activities via graph analysis, and discover new insights. Moreover, we address three security issues based on graphs.

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Index Terms

Understanding Ethereum via Graph Analysis
1. Networks
  1. Network services
    1. Network monitoring
2. Security and privacy
  1. Systems security
    1. Distributed systems security

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Internet Technology

ACM Transactions on Internet Technology Volume 20, Issue 2

Special Section on Emotions in Conflictual Social Interactions and Regular Papers

May 2020

256 pages

ISSN:1533-5399

EISSN:1557-6051

DOI:10.1145/3386441

Editor:
Ling Liu
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 17 April 2020

Accepted: 01 January 2020

Revised: 01 November 2019

Received: 01 June 2019

Published in TOIT Volume 20, Issue 2

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National Natural Science Foundation of China
Hong Kong RGC Project
National Key R8D Program of China

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Cited By

Zhang JPan LWu J(2024)BitTraceInternational Journal of Information Technologies and Systems Approach10.4018/IJITSA.33900317:1(1-21)Online publication date: 9-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.4018/IJITSA.339003
Zhu JKhan AAkcora C(2024)Data depth and core-based trend detection on blockchain transaction networksFrontiers in Blockchain10.3389/fbloc.2024.13429567Online publication date: 16-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.3389/fbloc.2024.1342956
Yan CHan XZhu YDu DLu ZLiu Y(2024)Phishing behavior detection on different blockchains via adversarial domain adaptationCybersecurity10.1186/s42400-024-00237-57:1Online publication date: 19-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1186/s42400-024-00237-5
Lin DWu JHuang TLin KZheng Z(2024)Who is Who on Ethereum? Account Labeling Using Heterophilic Graph Convolutional NetworkIEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems10.1109/TSMC.2023.332952054:3(1541-1553)Online publication date: Mar-2024
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Li MZhu YLiu YYin C(2024)Classification Method of Ethereum Smart Contracts Based on Statistical Model Checking2024 IEEE 24th International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS)10.1109/QRS62785.2024.00078(733-744)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
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