Static Analysis for Detecting Transaction Conflicts in Ethereum Smart Contracts

TL;DR

This paper introduces a static analysis technique to identify potential transaction conflicts in Ethereum smart contracts, aiming to improve transaction scheduling and blockchain scalability by predicting conflicts before execution.

Contribution

It presents a novel static analysis method that detects various types of transaction conflicts in Solidity contracts, filling a gap in existing conflict detection approaches.

Findings

High precision in conflict detection on real-world contracts

Potential to improve validator throughput and scalability

Supports proactive transaction scheduling strategies

Abstract

Ethereum smart contracts operate in a concurrent environment where multiple transactions can be submitted simultaneously. However, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) enforces sequential execution of transactions within each block to prevent conflicts arising from concurrent access to the same state variables. Although this approach guarantees correct behavior, it limits the ability of validators to leverage multi-core architectures for faster transaction processing, thus restricting throughput. Existing solutions introduce concurrency by allowing simultaneous transaction execution combined with runtime conflict detection and rollback mechanisms to maintain correctness. However, these methods incur significant overhead due to continuous conflict tracking and transaction reversion. Recently, alternative approaches have emerged that aim to predict conflicts statically, before execution, by analyzing smart contract code for potential transaction interactions. Despite their promise, there is a lack of comprehensive studies that examine static conflict detection and its broader implications in specific smart contracts. This paper fills this important gap by proposing a novel static analysis method to detect potential transaction conflicts in Ethereum smart contracts. Our method identifies read-write, write-write, and function call conflicts between transaction pairs by analyzing state variable access patterns in Solidity contracts. We implement a tool that parses contract code and performs conflict detection. Evaluation on a dataset of real-world Ethereum smart contracts demonstrates that our approach achieves high precision in identifying potential conflicts. By enabling proactive conflict detection, our tool supports further design of transaction scheduling strategies that reduce runtime failures, enhance validator throughput, and contribute to blockchain scalability.