Evolution of Locality on Ethereum Transaction Network

Abstract

With a large market capitalization, Ethereum is one of the most famous blockchain platforms supporting smart contracts nowadays. To better understand Ethereum, previous researches have performed numerous analyses on Ethereum via complex network theory, while many of them merely focus on a single perspective of scale or time series. This motivates us to investigate the evolution of Ethereum from a local point of view. We concentrate our study on some key accounts labeled by the community. Then we crawl and extract their transaction subgraphs, and conduct an analysis based on several basic network properties consisting of network scale and triadic tendencies by sliding window. Furthermore, we provide an insight into the local structure of these subgraphs by counting the graphlets induced from the label nodes. Subsequently, we observe diverse similarities and differences between various label nodes in the changing trend and subgraph patterns in the locality of Ethereum networks. The results and findings from this study may help us to understand the activity of Ethereum more comprehensively.