How Similar Are Smart Contracts on the Ethereum?
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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