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.

References

[1]

Bitcoin Wiki. 2018. Bitcoin Script. Retrieved from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script.

[2]

Coin Market Cap. 2018. CrypoCurrency Market Capitalizations. Retrieved from https://coinmarketcap.com/.

[3]

Ethereum. 2018. Ethereum Homestead Documentation. Retrieved from http://www.ethdocs.org/en/latest/.

[4]

Ethereum community. 2018. Etherscan, The Ethereum Blockchain Explorer. Retrieved from https://etherscan.io/.

[5]

Mokhtar Bin Abdullah. 1990. On a robust correlation coefficient. J. Roy. Stat. Soc. Series D (The Stat.) 39, 4 (1990), 455--460.

[6]

Andreas M. Antonopoulos. 2014. Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies. O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Digital Library

[7]

Annika Baumann, Benjamin Fabian, and Matthias Lischke. 2014. Exploring the Bitcoin network. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies.

[8]

Bitcoin. 2017. Change. Retrieved from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Change.

[9]

Bok. 2016. Ethereum Network Attackers IP Address Is Traceable. Retrieved from https://www.bokconsulting.com.au/blog/ethereum-network-attackers-ip-address-is-traceable/.

[10]

Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. 1998. The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine. Comput. Netw. ISDN Syst. 30 (1998), 107--117.

Digital Library

[11]

Andrei Broder, Ravi Kumar, Farzin Maghoul, Prabhakar Raghavan, Sridhar Rajagopalan, Raymie Stata, Andrew Tomkins, and Janet Wiener. 2000. Graph structure in the web. Comput. Netw. 33 (2000), 309--320.

Digital Library

[12]

Christian Cachin, A. D. Caro, Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, Björn Tackmann, and Marko Vukolic. 2017. The transaction graph for modeling blockchain semantics. Retrieved from https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1070.pdf.

[13]

Wren Chan and Aspen Olmsted. 2017. Ethereum transaction graph analysis. In Proceedings of the International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions.

[14]

Jérémy Charlier, Sofiane Lagraa, and Jerome Francois. 2017. Profiling smart contracts interactions with tensor decomposition and graph mining. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases.

[15]

Ting Chen, Xiaoqi Li, Xiapu Luo, and Xiaosong Zhang. 2017. Under-optimized smart contracts devour your money. In Proceedings of the IEEE 24th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering.

[16]

Ting Chen, Xiaoqi Li, Ying Wang, Jiachi Chen, Zihao Li, Xiapu Luo, Man Ho Au, and Xiaosong Zhang. 2017. An adaptive gas cost mechanism for Ethereum to defend against under-priced DoS attacks. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Security Practice and Experience.

[17]

Ting Chen, Zihao Li, Hao Zhou, Jiachi Chen, Xiapu Luo, Xiaoqi Li, and Xiaosong Zhang. 2018. Towards saving money in using smart contracts. In Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Technologies Results.

Digital Library

[18]

Ting Chen, Yuxiao Zhu, Zihao Li, Jiachi Chen, Xiaoqi Li, Xiapu Luo, Xiaodong Lin, and Xiaosong Zhang. 2018. Understanding Ethereum via graph analysis. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Communications.

[19]

Aaron Clauset, Cosma Rohilla Shalizi, and Mark E. J. Newman. 2009. Power-law distributions in empirical data. SIAM Rev. 51 (2009), 661--703. Issue 4.

Digital Library

[20]

Ethereum. 2018. JavaScript API. Retrieved from https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/JavaScript-API#web3ethgettransaction.

[21]

Etherscan. 2018. Ethereum Developer APIs. Retrieved from https://etherscan.io/apis#accounts.

[22]

Gnosis. 2018. Ethereum Multisignature Wallet. Retrieved from https://github.com/Gnosis/MultiSigWallet.

[23]

Alex Greaves and Benjamin Au. 2015. Using the bitcoin transaction graph to predict the price of bitcoin. Retrieved from http://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-2015/projects_2015/Using_the_Bitcoin_Transaction_Graph_to_Predict_the_Price_of_Bitcoin.pdf.

[24]

Neville Grech, Michael Kong, Anton Jurisevic, Lexi Brent, Bernhard Scholz, and Yannis Smaragdakis. 2018. MadMax: Surviving out-of-gas conditions in Ethereum smart contracts. In Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages.

Digital Library

[25]

Hiddentao. 2016. Prevent replay attacks. Retrieved from https://github.com/hiddentao/smart-solidity-docs/blob/master/PreventReplayAttacks.md.

[26]

IC3. 2016. GasToken.io—Cheaper Ethereum Transactions, Today. Retrieved from https://gastoken.io/.

[27]

Phanny ITH. 2009. Guideline for Interpreting Correlation Coefficient. Retrieved from https://www.slideshare.net/phannithrupp/guideline-for-interpreting-correlation-coefficient.

[28]

Jerome Kehrli. 2016. Blockchain 2.0—From Bitcoin Transactions to Smart Contract applications. Retrieved from https://www.niceideas.ch/blockchain_2.0.pdf.

[29]

Kentstate. 2019. SPSS Tutorials: Pearson Correlation. Retrieved from https://libguides.library.kent.edu/SPSS/PearsonCorr.

[30]

Lucianna Kiffer, Dave Levin, and Alan Mislove. 2018. Analyzing Ethereum’s contract topology. In Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference.

Digital Library

[31]

Sergio Demian Lerner. 2015. RSK-White Paper Overview. Retrieved from https://docs.rsk.co/RSK_White_Paper-Overview.pdf.

[32]

Xiaoqi Li, Peng Jiang, Ting Chen, Xiapu Luo, and Qiaoyan Wen. 2017. A survey on the security of blockchain systems. Fut. Gen. Comput. Syst. (Aug. 2017).

[33]

Loi Luu, Duc-Hiep Chu, Hrishi Olickel, Prateek Saxena, and Aquinas Hobor. 2016. Making smart contracts smarter. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

Digital Library

[34]

Damiano Di Francesco Maesa and Laura Ricci. 2016. An analysis of the Bitcoin users graph: Inferring unusual behaviours. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Complex Networks and their Applications.

[35]

Natarajan Meghanathan. 2016. Assortativity analysis of real-world network graphs based on centrality metrics. Comput. Inf. Sci. 9 (2016), 7--25. Issue 3.

[36]

Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole, Grant Jordan, Kirill Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage. 2013. A fistful of bitcoins: Characterizing payments among men with no names. In Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference.

Digital Library

[37]

Nick Mwenda. 2018. Last winner game jams Ethereum network—Is Ethereum (ETH) dominance at stake? Retrieved from https://cryptoglobalist.com/2018/08/17/last-winner-game-jams-ethereum-network-is-ethereum-eth-dominance-at-stake/.

[38]

PeckShield. 2018. Pwning Fomo3D Revealed: Iterative, Pre-Calculated Contract Creation For Airdrop Prizes! Retrieved from https://medium.com/@peckshield/pwning-fomo3d-revealed-iterative-pre-calculated-contract-creation-for-airdrop-prizes-31944a01387e.

[39]

Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan. 2011. An analysis of anonymity in the Bitcoin system. In Security and Privacy in Social Networks. 197--223.

[40]

Sara Nadiv Soffer and Alexei Vazquez. 2005. Network clustering coefficient without degree-correlation biases. Phys. Rev. E 71, 5 (2005).

[41]

Shahar Somin, Goren Gordon, and Yaniv Altshuler. 2018. Network analysis of ERC20 tokens trading on Ethereum blockchain. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Complex Systems.

[42]

Flora Sun. 2018. UTXO vs Account/Balance Model. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@sunflora98/utxo-vs-account-balance-model-5e6470f4e0cf.

[43]

Petar Tsankov, Andrei Dan, Dana Drachsler-Cohen, Arthur Gervais, Florian Bünzli, and Martin Vechev. 2018. Securify: Practical security analysis of smart contracts. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

Digital Library

[44]

Fabian Vogelsteller and Vitalik Buterin. 2015. ERC-20 Token Standard. Retrieved from https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-20.md.

[45]

Xiaomin Wang, Matthieu Latapy, and Michele Soria. 2012. Deciding on the type of the degree distribution of a graph from traceroute-like measurements. Int. J. Comput. Netw. Commun. 4, 3 (2012), 151--168.

[46]

Gavin Wood. 2018. Ethereum: A secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger. Retrieved from https://ethereum.github.io/yellowpaper/paper.pdf.

[47]

Steve Y. Yang and Jinhyoung Kim. 2015. Bitcoin market return and volatility forecasting using transaction network flow properties. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence.

[48]

Chen Zhao and Yong Guan. 2015. A Graph-based investigation of bitcoin transactions. In Proceedings of the IFIP International Conference on Digital Forensics.

[49]

Yi Zhou, Deepak Kumar, Surya Bakshi, Joshua Mason, Andrew Miller, and Michael Bailey. 2018. Erays: Reverse engineering Ethereum’s opaque smart contracts. In Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium.

Cited By

Hasnaoui IZrikem MElassali R(2025)Resource Analysis in Blockchain Transactions: An Opcode-Driven Multilayer Graph ApproachADCAIJ: Advances in Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence Journal10.14201/adcaij.3160914(e31609)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.14201/adcaij.31609
Chen BLiu XXu HChen SLi K(2025)BSSN: Enabling Adjustable Blockchain Storage for Resource-Constrained IoT ScenariosIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2024.348389812:4(4262-4274)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2024.3483898
Li PWang GXing XZhu JGu WZhang Y(2025)EAOS: Exposing attacks in smart contracts through analyzing opcode sequences with operandsComputer Networks10.1016/j.comnet.2024.110959257(110959)Online publication date: Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2024.110959
Show More Cited By

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

Recommendations

Detecting Ponzi Schemes on Ethereum: Towards Healthier Blockchain Technology
WWW '18: Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference

Blockchain technology becomes increasingly popular. It also attracts scams, for example, Ponzi scheme, a classic fraud, has been found making a notable amount of money on Blockchain, which has a very negative impact. To help dealing with this issue, ...
Traveling the token world: A graph analysis of Ethereum ERC20 token ecosystem
WWW '20: Proceedings of The Web Conference 2020

The birth of Bitcoin ushered in the era of cryptocurrency, which has now become a financial market attracted extensive attention worldwide. The phenomenon of startups launching Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) to raise capital led to thousands of tokens ...
Ethereum Analysis via Node Clustering
Network and System Security
Abstract
As an open source public blockchain with the capabilities of running smart contract, Ethereum provides decentralized Ethernet virtual machines to handle peer-to-peer contracts through its dedicated cryptocurrency Ether. And as the second largest ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

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]

Publisher

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

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed

Funding Sources

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

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

124
Total Citations
View Citations
3,584
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)386
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)28

Reflects downloads up to 05 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Hasnaoui IZrikem MElassali R(2025)Resource Analysis in Blockchain Transactions: An Opcode-Driven Multilayer Graph ApproachADCAIJ: Advances in Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence Journal10.14201/adcaij.3160914(e31609)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.14201/adcaij.31609
Chen BLiu XXu HChen SLi K(2025)BSSN: Enabling Adjustable Blockchain Storage for Resource-Constrained IoT ScenariosIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2024.348389812:4(4262-4274)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2024.3483898
Li PWang GXing XZhu JGu WZhang Y(2025)EAOS: Exposing attacks in smart contracts through analyzing opcode sequences with operandsComputer Networks10.1016/j.comnet.2024.110959257(110959)Online publication date: Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2024.110959
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
Choi NKim H(2024)Technological Convergence of Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence: A Review and ChallengesElectronics10.3390/electronics1401008414:1(84)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14010084
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
Kiffer LNeu JSridhar SZohar ATse DLuo BLiao XXu JKirda ELie D(2024)Nakamoto Consensus under Bounded Processing CapacityProceedings of the 2024 on ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3658644.3670347(363-377)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3658644.3670347
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
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSMC.2023.3329520
Zhang PWang BLuo XDong H(2024)SCAnoGenerator: Automatic Anomaly Injection for Ethereum Smart ContractsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2024.346453950:11(2983-3006)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2024.3464539
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Issue’s Table of Contents