Section: New Results

Blockchain Software Engineering

SmartAnvil: Open-Source Tool Suite for Smart Contract Analysis Smart contracts are new computational units with special properties: they act as classes with aspectual concerns; their memory structure is more complex than mere objects; they are obscure in the sense that once deployed it is difficult to access their internal state; they reside in an append-only chain. There is a need to support the building of new generation tools to help developers. Such support should tackle several important aspects: (1) the static structure of the contract, (2) the object nature of published contracts, and (3) the overall data chain composed of blocks and transactions. We present SmartAnvil an open platform to build software analysis tools around smart contracts. We illustrate the general components and we focus on three important aspects: support for static analysis of Solidity smart contracts, deployed smart contract binary analysis through inspection, and blockchain navigation and querying. SmartAnvil is open-source and supports a bridge to the Moose data and software analysis platform. [18]

The Influence Factors on Ethereum Transaction Fees In Ethereum blockchain, the user needs to set a Gas price to get a transaction processed and approved by Miners. To have the transaction executed, the Gas price has to be greater than or equal to the lowest Ethereum transaction fees. We present a set of data sampled every 15 seconds, from December 1st, 2018 to December 15, 2018, coming from different blockchain web APIs. The aim is to investigate whether and to what extent different variables - such as the number of pending transactions, the value of the USD/Ether pair, average electricity prices around the world, and the number of miners - influence the Ethereum transaction fees. This study is relevant from an economic perspective because more and more companies in different economic fields are adopting Ethereum blockchain. From historical data analysis, we found that only some of these variables do have an influence. For example, the number of pending transactions and the number of miners have a major influence on Ethereum transaction fees when compared to the other variables. [8]