TY - JOUR
T1 - Saving deployment costs of smart contracts by eliminating gas-wasteful patterns
AU - Park, Jaeyong
AU - Lee, Daegeon
AU - In, Hoh Peter
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by the MIST(Ministry of Science and ICT), Korea, under the National Program for Excellence in SW(2015-0-00936) supervised by the IITP(Institute for Information & communications Technology Promotion).
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - Smart contracts are blockchain-based programs that have developed with the emergence of Ethereum, one of the most well-known blockchains. Gas, paid in Ethers (i.e., the cryptocurrency in Ethereum), is required for the costs to upload and run smart contracts on Ethereum. As cost-inefficiently designed smart contracts result in unnecessary costs, it is vital to eliminate any gas-wasteful code fragments to optimize the deployment costs. In this study, we define five gas-wasteful patterns: ‘Over-public variables’, ‘Redundant initial values’, ‘Loose packing’, ‘Non-base unit types’, and ‘Non-constant variables’, based on the state variables in Solidity, the most commonly used implementation language for smart contracts in Ethereum. We also propose improvement methods related to these patterns and a solution to identify and eliminate the patterns. Furthermore, we analyze 143 real-world contracts deployed on Ethereum and find that 56% of them include the above-mentioned patterns. We also upgrade 43 of the pattern-matched contracts and demonstrate that their deployment costs are decreased on an average by 13.47%, and the most-reduced rate is 64%.
AB - Smart contracts are blockchain-based programs that have developed with the emergence of Ethereum, one of the most well-known blockchains. Gas, paid in Ethers (i.e., the cryptocurrency in Ethereum), is required for the costs to upload and run smart contracts on Ethereum. As cost-inefficiently designed smart contracts result in unnecessary costs, it is vital to eliminate any gas-wasteful code fragments to optimize the deployment costs. In this study, we define five gas-wasteful patterns: ‘Over-public variables’, ‘Redundant initial values’, ‘Loose packing’, ‘Non-base unit types’, and ‘Non-constant variables’, based on the state variables in Solidity, the most commonly used implementation language for smart contracts in Ethereum. We also propose improvement methods related to these patterns and a solution to identify and eliminate the patterns. Furthermore, we analyze 143 real-world contracts deployed on Ethereum and find that 56% of them include the above-mentioned patterns. We also upgrade 43 of the pattern-matched contracts and demonstrate that their deployment costs are decreased on an average by 13.47%, and the most-reduced rate is 64%.
KW - Cost
KW - Ethereum
KW - Gas
KW - Pattern
KW - Smart contract
KW - Solidity
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U2 - 10.14257/ijgdc.2017.10.12.06
DO - 10.14257/ijgdc.2017.10.12.06
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85050586481
VL - 10
SP - 53
EP - 64
JO - International Journal of Grid and Distributed Computing
JF - International Journal of Grid and Distributed Computing
SN - 2005-4262
IS - 12
ER -