Ethereum Conflicts Graphed

TL;DR

This paper analyzes Ethereum's transaction and smart contract interaction structures by tracing millions of blocks, revealing conflict graph properties and implications for parallel execution optimization.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale analysis of Ethereum's conflict graphs and smart contract call structures, highlighting their potential for parallelization.

Findings

Conflict graphs are mostly star-shaped, indicating specific interaction patterns.

Smart contract call trees have distinct structural properties.

Analysis of 2 million blocks reveals transaction and call distribution patterns.

Abstract

Ethereum, a leading blockchain platform, has revolutionized the digital economy by enabling decentralized transactions and the execution of smart contracts. Ethereum transactions form the backbone of its network, facilitating peer-to-peer exchanges and interactions with complex decentralized applications. Smart contracts extend Ethereum's capabilities by automating processes and enabling trustless execution of agreements. Hence, understanding how these smart contracts interact is important in order to facilitate various performance optimizations, such as warming objects before they are being accessed and enabling concurrent execution. Of particular interest to us are the development of the calling graph, as well as the read sets and write sets of invocations within the same block, and the properties of the associated conflict graph that is derived from them. The latter is important for understanding the parallelization potential of smart contracts on Ethereum. We traced upwards of 2 million recent Ethereum blocks using call tracer and prestate tracer, out of a total of 21.4 million blocks at the time of writing. We report on the transactions per block distribution, the structure of call trees in smart contract invocations, the ratio of value-transfer transactions to smart contract invocations, as well as provide a comprehensive study of the structure of blocks' conflict graphs. We find that conflict graphs predominantly show a star like configuration, as well as other noteworthy structural properties.