Ethereum Blockchain Security, Performance, Markets, and Applications: Scoping Review with ☸SAIMSARA

Abstract

To map and synthesize original research on the Ethereum blockchain, emphasizing the dominant study themes, practical implications, recurring technical findings, and future research needs across security, performance, decentralized applications, markets, privacy, governance, and domain-specific implementations. The review uses 250 references and builds its evidence map from 488 original studies with 242345462 total participants/sample observations (topic-deduplicated ΣN). This review suggests that Ethereum is best understood not as a single application but as a programmable settlement layer whose real-world value is consistently conditioned by security, transaction-cost, and governance constraints rather than by immutability alone. The most recurrent result-level signal indicates that openness creates measurable adversarial surfaces, with blockchain extractable value reaching $540.54M over 32 months and censoring actors producing 46% of blocks while delaying affected transactions by an average of 85%. In parallel, machine learning and graph-based methods were repeatedly associated with strong fraud and phishing detection performance, with reported accuracies exceeding 96% in several settings. These patterns support a practical emphasis on gas-aware design, contract assurance, and continuous monitoring, often realized through hybrid on-chain/off-chain and permissioned architectures. Because most evidence comes from experimental and feasibility studies, future work should prioritize longitudinal, real-world deployment studies that measure security incidents, cost, and resilience beyond controlled testnets.