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How Similar Are Smart Contracts on the Ethereum?

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Blockchain and Trustworthy Systems (BlockSys 2020)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1267))

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Abstract

Ethereum is a programmable platform that allows everyone to deploy and access the smart contracts on it. Such flexibility can lead everyone to browse or reuse the source code of the existing smart contracts on the Ethereum. In this paper, to characterize the code clone practice of the smart contract, we present a large-scale study on the smart contracts coming from the Ethereum. We firstly collect more than 700,000 open-source smart contracts, and then we employ a highly effective approach (i.e., Locality-Sensitive Hashing, LSH) to cluster the similar smart contracts. At last, we conduct a qualitative analysis to characterize the clone practice of the smart contract, and further analyze the reason why smart contracts are similar. Our analysis revealed that over 96% of the smart contracts can found similar contracts, which indicates that the smart contracts on the Ethereum are highly homogeneous.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop.

  2. 2.

    https://etherscan.io.

  3. 3.

    A standard interface for tokens. https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-20.

  4. 4.

    https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/huobi-token/.

  5. 5.

    https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ftx-token/.

  6. 6.

    https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/usd-coin/.

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Acknowledgments

This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61902105), the Characteristic Innovation Project of Guangdong Province Office of Education (2019GKTSCX129).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management Science and Engineering, Hebei GEO University, Shijiazhuang, 050031, China

    Nan Jia

  2. Department of Basic Courses, Zhaoqing Medical College, Zhaoqing, 526020, China

    Haiping Huang

  3. School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510006, China

    Queping Kong

Authors
  1. Nan Jia
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Haiping Huang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China

    Zibin Zheng

  2. Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau, China

    Hong-Ning Dai

  3. Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, China

    Xiaodong Fu

  4. Dali University, Dali, China

    Benhui Chen

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Jia, N., Kong, Q., Huang, H. (2020). How Similar Are Smart Contracts on the Ethereum?. In: Zheng, Z., Dai, HN., Fu, X., Chen, B. (eds) Blockchain and Trustworthy Systems. BlockSys 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1267. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9213-3_32

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9213-3_32

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  • Online ISBN: 978-981-15-9213-3

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