Understanding the Issue Types in Open Source Blockchain-based Software Projects with the Transformer-based BERTopic

TL;DR

This study analyzes over 490,000 issues from open-source blockchain projects using transformer-based topic modeling, revealing key issue categories, their evolution, and resolution times to improve blockchain software maintenance.

Contribution

It introduces a large-scale empirical analysis of blockchain issues with transformer-based topic modeling, identifying key issue categories and their temporal dynamics.

Findings

Wallet Management issues are most frequent and have the longest resolution times.

UI Enhancement is among the most prominent issue topics.

Issue frequency peaked after 2016 and declined after 2022.

Abstract

Blockchain-based software systems are increasingly deployed across diverse domains, yet a systematic understanding of their development challenges remains limited. This paper presents a large-scale empirical study of 497,742 issues mined from 1,209 open-source blockchain projects hosted on GitHub. Employing BERTopic, a transformer-based topic modeling technique, we identify 49 distinct issue topics and organize them hierarchically into 11 major subcategories. Our analysis reveals that both general software development issues and blockchain-specific concerns are nearly equally represented, with Wallet Management and UI Enhancement emerging as the most prominent topics. We further examine the temporal evolution of issue categories and resolution times, finding that Wallet issues not only dominate in frequency but also exhibit the longest resolution time. Conversely, Mechanisms issues are resolved significantly faster. Issue frequency surged after 2016 with the rise of Ethereum and decentralized applications, but started declining after 2022. These findings enhance our understanding of blockchain software maintenance, informing the development of specialized tools and practices to improve robustness and maintainability.