GOV: A Verification Method for Smart Contract Gas-Optimization

Abstract

Developers may not understand the Gas mechanism of Ethereum, so many smart contracts consume a lot of unnecessary Gas. To address this issue, existing studies have proposed several methods to optimize the code of the contracts to reduce Gas consumption. To verify the effectiveness, most of the methods deploy a private chain to make verification. However, a more reasonable way is to employ the real transactions on Ethereum to trigger the contracts before and after optimization, and then compare the Gas consumption. To achieve this goal, we proposed a method, GOV, to estimate the Gas consumption of the optimized contract by using the real transactions on Ethereum. Our method enables the optimized contract to follow the execution path of the contract before optimization, thus solving the problem of inconsistent execution paths before and after optimization. A preliminary evaluation shows that GOV can effectively estimate the Gas consumption of optimized contract.