Evolution of Weighted External Owned Accounts Trading Network on Ethereum

Abstract

In this paper, we investigated the evolution of user behavior on Ethereum through building directed and weighted external owned accounts trading networks (DWETN) from August 10th, 2015 to June 9th, 2017. It is showed that the evolution of the structural properties of the DWETN and important events are closely related. The relationship between the number of users and the total number of transactions is linear, and each user will have 1.5 transactions on average. Out-degree, in-degree, out-strength, and in-strength distributions follow the power-law distributions, and the power exponent values of out-degree and in-degree distributions change much more than out-strength and in-strength distributions, which implies that, despite the changes in network structure, the transaction behavior pattern of users have inherent stability. The evolution of directed degree correlation coefficients and directed and weighted Pearson correlation coefficients of the network indicates that in-degree(in-strength) of the source node of an edge has a weak effect on the target node's in-degree(in-strength) and out-degree(out-strength), and as time evolves, the effect of out-degree(out-strength) of the source node of an edge on the target node's in-degree(in-strength) and out-degree(out-strength) from negative to weak.