A Study of Inequality in the Ethereum Smart Contract Ecosystem
Bishwas C Gupta, Sandeep K. Shukla · 2019
Ethereum is one of the most popular blockchain platforms and is the second most valuable cryptocurrency. It allows developers to create smart contracts - small computer programs that sit on the blockchain. These programs can be written in programming languages like solidity and are executed by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Since Ethereum is a public blockchain, all the data of the blockchain is available publicly. However, getting smart contract data is a tedious process and public data-sets for smart contracts are not available for further analysis. Therefore, in this work, we collect a total of 1.9M smart contracts till the block height of 7.1M, and provide a first of its kind analysis across different parameters like duplicity, ether balance, ether moved, etc. We observe that across all these different parameters, only a small fraction of the smart contracts are dominant. We label such 2900 dominant contracts as the `Contracts of Importance' and use it for further analysis using the various tools available to give us an insight into the vulnerability trends and patterns in smart contracts.