A Source-Code-Based Taxonomy for Ethereum Smart Contracts

Abstract

As blockchain gained a lot of attention in IS research since its emergence, development into networks and applications have made it extremely relevant for multiple industry branches. Yet observations show, that there remains a lack of in-depth knowledge and standardization, particularly in the field of blockchain applications, DApps. These DApps often consist of multiple smart contracts, used to automate different processes and the technical elements have so far remained unexplored in depth. In this paper we address this problem by creating a data-driven taxonomy of the technical elements of 150 smart contracts within 101 DApps following the approach of Nickerson et al. (2013). We identified 28 dimension and 64 characteristics in our technical and code-based taxonomy.