ENHANCING THE EFFICIENCY OF ETHEREUM BLOCKCHAIN OPERATIONS BASED ON ONTOLOGY

Abstract

This study presents an ontology-driven framework, EthOn, aimed at enhancing the operational efficiency of the Ethereum blockchain. Despite Ethereum’s prominence as a decentralized platform for executing smart contracts, it still faces significant limitations such as high gas fees, low throughput, and limited semantic processing capabilities. These challenges primarily stem from the platform's reliance on syntactic data structures and the absence of context-aware mechanisms in smart contracts. The proposed framework integrates semantic ontologies to structure blockchain data and enhance smart contract logic through context-driven reasoning. By embedding domain-specific ontologies into the Ethereum layer, EthOn enables intelligent data interpretation, optimized contract execution, and improved interoperability for decentralized applications (dApps). A prototype developed using Protégé, Node.js, Web3.js, Ganache Network and Apache Jena demonstrated notable advancements in both execution speed and gas efficiency. The results demonstrated remarkable improvements: Ethereum required an average block creation time of 10–15 seconds with gas consumption fluctuating between 9.6 million and 44.4 million units, while EthOn achieved block generation within 1–2 seconds and maintained gas usage between 423,630 and 3.7 million units. This represents an overall gas reduction of nearly 90% and a substantial improvement in execution speed.These results highlight the transformative potential of semantic technologies in reshaping blockchain infrastructure, paving the way for more scalable, efficient, and intelligent decentralized systems.