A Study of Inequality in the Ethereum Smart Contract Ecosystem

Abstract

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.