Topology Measurement and Analysis on Ethereum P2P Network

Abstract

Ethereum, one of the most popular cryptocurrencies, has attracted increasing attention of people in various fields. As the backbone of Ethereum, its peer-to-peer network has an effect on almost every aspect of the ecosystem. Consequently, it's necessary to understand the topological properties of Ethereum P2P network. In this paper, we conducted a measurement of Ethereum P2P network. Our result shows that the graphs of Ethereum network have a small average shortest path length and a large clustering coefficient, and the degree distribution of nodes does not follow a pure power-law distribution. These indicate that Ethereum network is very close to a small world network. Though there are a large number of stale nodes and useless nodes, Ethereum is still resilient to both random failures and targeted attacks. What's more, we find that there are around one hundred abnormal nodes in the network. The IP addresses of nodes included in the neighbors messages they reply are replaced with their own IP addresses. Those nodes might have a bad influence on network routing.