Towards Solidity Smart Contract Efficiency Optimization through Code Mining

Abstract

Deploying smart contracts and invoking their functions on block-chains incur gas costs, which depend on the operations executed by those functions. This makes optimizing the gas cost of smart contract functions a rewarding goal. However, existing approaches to gas cost optimization of smart contracts mainly involve rule-based optimization or automatic optimization for specific types of patterns. In this paper, we discuss a novel approach to automatically retrieving optimized versions of Solidity functions from a repository of smart contracts. The system identifies and suggests gas-efficient alternatives that maintain functional equivalence by comparing the opcode sequences of individual functions. We evaluate this approach on a dataset of 16,529 functions from real-world contracts, demonstrating substantial gas savings, as high as 34% on average when considering the most similar functions.