TY - GEN
T1 - Understanding Ethereum via Graph Analysis
AU - Chen, Ting
AU - Zhu, Yuxiao
AU - Li, Zihao
AU - Chen, Jiachi
AU - Li, Xiaoqi
AU - Luo, Xiapu
AU - Lin, Xiaodong
AU - Zhange, Xiaosong
PY - 2018/10/8
Y1 - 2018/10/8
N2 - Being the largest blockchain with the capability of running smart contracts, Ethereum has attracted wide attention and its market capitalization has reached 20 billion USD. Ethereum not only supports its cryptocurrency named Ether but also provides a decentralized platform to execute smart contracts in the Ethereum virtual machine. Although Ether's price is approaching 200 USD and nearly 600K smart contracts have been deployed to Ethereum, little is known about the characteristics of its users, smart contracts, and the relationships among them. To fill in the gap, in this paper, 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 design a new approach to collect all transaction data, construct three graphs from the data to characterize major activities, and discover new observations and insights from these graphs. Moreover, we propose new approaches based on cross-graph analysis to address two security issues in Ethereum. The evaluation through real cases demonstrates the effectiveness of our new approaches.
AB - Being the largest blockchain with the capability of running smart contracts, Ethereum has attracted wide attention and its market capitalization has reached 20 billion USD. Ethereum not only supports its cryptocurrency named Ether but also provides a decentralized platform to execute smart contracts in the Ethereum virtual machine. Although Ether's price is approaching 200 USD and nearly 600K smart contracts have been deployed to Ethereum, little is known about the characteristics of its users, smart contracts, and the relationships among them. To fill in the gap, in this paper, 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 design a new approach to collect all transaction data, construct three graphs from the data to characterize major activities, and discover new observations and insights from these graphs. Moreover, we propose new approaches based on cross-graph analysis to address two security issues in Ethereum. The evaluation through real cases demonstrates the effectiveness of our new approaches.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85056168392&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/INFOCOM.2018.8486401
DO - 10.1109/INFOCOM.2018.8486401
M3 - Conference article published in proceeding or book
AN - SCOPUS:85056168392
T3 - Proceedings - IEEE INFOCOM
SP - 1484
EP - 1492
BT - INFOCOM 2018 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 2018 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, INFOCOM 2018
Y2 - 15 April 2018 through 19 April 2018
ER -