research-article

Measurements, Analyses, and Insights on the Entire Ethereum Blockchain Network

Authors:

Sourav Sen Gupta,

Xuan LiuAuthors Info & Claims

WWW '20: Proceedings of The Web Conference 2020

Pages 155 - 166

https://doi.org/10.1145/3366423.3380103

Published: 20 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Blockchains are increasingly becoming popular due to the prevalence of cryptocurrencies and decentralized applications. Ethereum is a distributed public blockchain network that focuses on running code (smart contracts) for decentralized applications. More simply, it is a platform for sharing information in a global state that cannot be manipulated or changed. Ethereum blockchain introduces a novel ecosystem of human users and autonomous agents (smart contracts). In this network, we are interested in all possible interactions: user-to-user, user-to-contract, contract-to-user, and contract-to-contract. This requires us to construct interaction networks from the entire Ethereum blockchain data, where vertices are accounts (users, contracts) and arcs denote interactions. Our analyses on the networks reveal new insights by combining information from the four networks. We perform an in-depth study of these networks based on several graph properties consisting of both local and global properties, discuss their similarities and differences with social networks and the Web, draw interesting conclusions, and highlight important, future research directions.

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cover image ACM Conferences

WWW '20: Proceedings of The Web Conference 2020

April 2020

3143 pages

ISBN:9781450370233

DOI:10.1145/3366423

Editors:
Yennun Huang
Acadmica sinica, Taiwan
,
Irwin King
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
,
Tie-Yan Liu
Microsoft Research Asia, China
,
Maarten van Steen
University of Twente, Netherlands

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