TY - GEN
T1 - Measuring ethereum network peers
AU - Kim, Seoung Kyun
AU - Mason, Joshua
AU - Ma, Zane
AU - Miller, Andrew
AU - Murali, Siddharth
AU - Bailey, Michael
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2018/10/31
Y1 - 2018/10/31
N2 - Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency valued at a peak of $138 billion in 2018, is a decentralized, Turing-complete computing platform. Although the stability and security of Ethereum-and blockchain systems in general-have been widely-studied, most analysis has focused on application level features of these systems such as cryptographic mining challenges, smart contract semantics, or block mining operators. Little attention has been paid to the underlying peer-to-peer (P2P) networks that are responsible for information propagation and that enable blockchain consensus. In this work, we develop NodeFinder to measure this previously opaque network at scale and illuminate the properties of its nodes. We analyze the Ethereum network from two vantage points: a three-month long view of nodes on the P2P network, and a single day snapshot of the Ethereum Mainnet peers. We uncover a noisy DEVp2p ecosystem in which fewer than half of all nodes contribute to the Ethereum Mainnet. Through a comparison with other previously studied P2P networks including BitTorrent, Gnutella, and Bitcoin, we find that Ethereum differs in both network size and geographical distribution.
AB - Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency valued at a peak of $138 billion in 2018, is a decentralized, Turing-complete computing platform. Although the stability and security of Ethereum-and blockchain systems in general-have been widely-studied, most analysis has focused on application level features of these systems such as cryptographic mining challenges, smart contract semantics, or block mining operators. Little attention has been paid to the underlying peer-to-peer (P2P) networks that are responsible for information propagation and that enable blockchain consensus. In this work, we develop NodeFinder to measure this previously opaque network at scale and illuminate the properties of its nodes. We analyze the Ethereum network from two vantage points: a three-month long view of nodes on the P2P network, and a single day snapshot of the Ethereum Mainnet peers. We uncover a noisy DEVp2p ecosystem in which fewer than half of all nodes contribute to the Ethereum Mainnet. Through a comparison with other previously studied P2P networks including BitTorrent, Gnutella, and Bitcoin, we find that Ethereum differs in both network size and geographical distribution.
KW - DEVp2p
KW - Ethereum
KW - Network measurement
KW - Peer-to-peer computing
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85058151308&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85058151308&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3278532.3278542
DO - 10.1145/3278532.3278542
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85058151308
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC
SP - 91
EP - 104
BT - IMC 2018 - Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 2018 Internet Measurement Conference, IMC 2018
Y2 - 31 October 2018 through 2 November 2018
ER -