Abstract
Ethereum is the largest blockchain system supporting Turing-complete smart contracts. In recent years, we have witnessed its boom and popularity in various applications. However, since users use pseudonyms in Ethereum, it is hard to know the true identity behind an account. Meanwhile, a large number of cyber-crimes in Ethereum emerged and have been reported. Therefore, it is an important task to analyze the transaction behavior of accounts in Ethereum and conduct account portraits based on the honest and public information which is transaction records. Although facing the anonymity challenge of blockchain, it makes this task possible that some Ethereum analysis platforms provide ground truth by classifying accounts into specific types. However, prior work tried to dig out features of one certain account type but lack of a comparative analysis of multi-class account types. In this paper, we model the partial Ethereum transaction data as a transaction network, then portray the characteristics of six types of accounts in Ethereum according to the obtained labels from both transaction statistics perspective and network structure perspective. Moreover, we adopt a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN)-based model to distinguish different kinds of accounts to verify the effectiveness of the properties we choose. The experimental results show that our model performs well in classifying various types of accounts in Ethereum.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bartoletti, M., Carta, S., Cimoli, T., Saia, R.: Dissecting ponzi schemes on ethereum: identification, analysis, and impact. Futur. Gener. Comput. Syst. 102, 259–277 (2020)
Brewster, T.: Ether cryptocurrency scammers made \$36 million in 2018 - double their 2017 winnings. https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/01/23/ether-scammers-made-36-million-in-2018double-their-2017-winnings
Chen, J., Ma, T., Xiao, C.: FastGCN: fast learning with graph convolutional networks via importance sampling. In: International Conference on Learning Representations (2018)
Chen, T., et al.: Understanding Ethereum via graph analysis. In: Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, pp. 1484–1492. IEEE, Honolulu (2018)
Chen, W., Zheng, Z., Cui, J., Ngai, E.C.H., Zheng, P., Zhou, Y.: Detecting ponzi schemes on ethereum: towards healthier blockchain technology. In: Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2018, pp. 1409–1418. ACM, Lyon (2018)
Feng, C., Niu, J.: Selfish mining in ethereum. In: 2019 IEEE 39th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), pp. 1306–1316 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDCS.2019.00131
Fenu, G., Marchesi, L., Marchesi, M., Tonelli, R.: The ico phenomenon and its relationships with ethereum smart contract environment. In: 2018 International Workshop on Blockchain Oriented Software Engineering (IWBOSE), pp. 26–32. IEEE (2018)
Hu, T., et al.: Transaction-based classification and detection approach for ethereum smart contract. Inf. Process. Manage. 58(2), 102462 (2021)
Lin, D., Wu, J., Yuan, Q., Zheng, Z.: Modeling and understanding Ethereum transaction records via a complex network approach. IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. II Express Briefs 67(11), 2737–2741 (2020)
Lin, D., Wu, J., Yuan, Q., Zheng, Z.: T-edge: temporal weighted multidigraph embedding for ethereum transaction network analysis. Front. Phys. 8, 204 (2020)
Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system (2008). https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Scholten, O.J., Hughes, N.G.J., Deterding, S., Drachen, A., Walker, J.A., Zendle, D.: Ethereum crypto-games: mechanics, prevalence, and gambling similarities. In: Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, pp. 379–389. Association for Computing Machinery (2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3311350.3347178
Szabo, N.: Smart contracts: building blocks for digital markets. EXTROPY: J. Transhumanist Thought, (16) 18(2) (1996)
Tasca, P., Hayes, A., Liu, S.: The evolution of the Bitcoin economy: extracting and analyzing the network of payment relationships. J. Risk Financ. 19(2), 94–126 (2018)
Torres, C.F., Steichen, M., State, R.: The art of the scam: demystifying honeypots in ethereum smart contracts. In: 28th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 19), pp. 1591–1607. USENIX Association, Santa Clara, August 2019. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity19/presentation/ferreira
Wood, G.: Ethereum: A secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger (2014). http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf
Wu, J., Liu, J., Chen, W., Huang, H., Zheng, Z., Zhang, Y.: Detecting mixing services via mining bitcoin transaction network with hybrid motifs. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Syst., 1–13 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1109/TSMC.2021.3049278
Wu, J., Liu, J., Zhao, Y., Zheng, Z.: Analysis of cryptocurrency transactions from a network perspective: an overview. arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.09318 (2020)
Wu, J., et al.: Who are the phishers? Phishing scam detection on Ethereum via network embedding. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Syst. (2020), to be published, 10.1109/TSMC.2020.3016821
Zetzsche, D., Buckley, R., Arner, D., Föhr, L.: The ico gold rush: It’s a scam, it’s a bubble, it’s a super challenge for regulators. SSRN Electron. J., January 2017. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3072298
Acknowledgments
The work described in this paper is supported by the Guangdong Applied R&D Program (2015B010131006), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61973325, U1811462).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this paper
Cite this paper
Xia, Y., Liu, J., Zheng, J., Wu, J., Su, X. (2021). Portraits of Typical Accounts in Ethereum Transaction Network. In: Dai, HN., Liu, X., Luo, D.X., Xiao, J., Chen, X. (eds) Blockchain and Trustworthy Systems. BlockSys 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1490. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7993-3_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7993-3_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-16-7992-6
Online ISBN: 978-981-16-7993-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)