Title
Traveling the token world: A graph analysis of Ethereum ERC20 token ecosystem
Abstract
The birth of Bitcoin ushered in the era of cryptocurrency, which has now become a financial market attracted extensive attention worldwide. The phenomenon of startups launching Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) to raise capital led to thousands of tokens being distributed on blockchains. Many studies have analyzed this phenomenon from an economic perspective. However, little is know about the characteristics of participants in the ecosystem. To fill this gap and considering over 80% of ICOs launched based on ERC20 token on Ethereum, in this paper, we conduct a systematic investigation on the whole Ethereum ERC20 token ecosystem to characterize the token creator, holder, and transfer activity. By downloading the whole blockchain and parsing the transaction records and event logs, we construct three graphs, namely token creator graph, token holder graph, and token transfer graph. We obtain many observations and findings by analyzing these graphs. Besides, we propose an algorithm to discover potential relationships between tokens and other accounts. The reported case shows that our algorithm can effectively reveal entities and the complex relationship between various accounts in the token ecosystem.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3366423.3380215
WWW '20: The Web Conference 2020 Taipei Taiwan April, 2020
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
Blockchain, Ethereum, ERC20 token, Graph analysis
Conference
978-1-4503-7023-3
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
5
0.43
0
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Weili Chen1806.31
Tuo Zhang2393.09
Zhiguang Chen387.25
Zibin Zheng43731199.37
Yutong Lu530753.61