Analysis of the Behavior of Ethereum Accounts During an Economic Impact Event

Abstract

One of the main events involving the world economy in 2022 was the beginning of the war between Russia and Ukraine. This event offers an opportunity to analyze how a large-magnitude world event can affect the use of cryptocurrencies. Ethereum is one of the most prominent and widely used cryptocurrency platforms and, as such, provides a valuable case study for this scenario. This work investigates the behavior of accounts and their transactions on the Ethereum network during this event. For this purpose, we collect all Ethereum transactions during two distinct periods: (i) during the month the conflict began, and (ii) during the previous year. We organized a dataset with the accounts involved in these transactions and the subset of these accounts that interacted with a service within Ethereum named Flashbots Auction. Flashbots Auction is crucial as it addresses issues regarding transaction ordering and miners exploiting that ordering to make profit. Then, we model temporal graphs in which each vertex represents an account, and each edge represents a transaction between two accounts. We analyzed the behavior of these accounts via graph metrics for both groups during each observed time window. The results show changes in account behavior and activity, as well as variations in daily transaction volume.