Characterizing and Detecting Gas-Inefficient Patterns in Smart Contracts

【Author】 Kong, Que-Ping; Wang, Zi-Yan; Huang, Yuan; Chen, Xiang-Ping; Zhou, Xiao-Cong; Zheng, Zi-Bin; Huang, Gang

【Source】JOURNAL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

【影响因子】1.871

【Abstract】Ethereum blockchain is a new internetware with tens of millions of smart contracts running on it. Different from general programs, smart contracts are decentralized, tamper-resistant and permanently running. Moreover, to avoid resource abuse, Ethereum charges users for deploying and invoking smart contracts according to the size of contract and the operations executed by contracts. It is necessary to optimize smart contracts to save money. However, since developers are not familiar with the operating environment of smart contracts (i.e., Ethereum virtual machine) or do not pay attention to resource consumption during development, there are many optimization opportunities for smart contracts. To fill this gap, this paper defines six gas-inefficient patterns from more than 25 000 posts and proposes an optimization approach at the source code level to let users know clearly where the contract is optimized. To evaluate the prevalence and economic benefits of gas-inefficient patterns, this paper conducts an empirical study on more than 160 000 real smart contracts. The promising experimental results demonstrate that 52.75% of contracts contain at least one gas-inefficient pattern proposed in this paper. If these patterns are removed from the contract, at least $0.30 can be saved per contract.

【Keywords】smart contract; anti-pattern; detection; optimization; empirical study

【发表时间】2022 FEB

【收录时间】2022-03-09

【文献类型】期刊

【主题类别】

区块链技术-智能合约-