Under-Optimized Smart Contracts Devour Your Money
This addresses a financial inefficiency for smart contract developers and users on blockchains like Ethereum, though it is incremental as it builds on existing compiler analysis.
The study tackled the problem of under-optimized smart contracts on Ethereum, which lead to excessive gas fees, by identifying 7 gas-costly patterns and developing GASPER, a tool that found these patterns in up to 93.5% of 4,240 real contracts.
Smart contracts are full-fledged programs that run on blockchains (e.g., Ethereum, one of the most popular blockchains). In Ethereum, gas (in Ether, a cryptographic currency like Bitcoin) is the execution fee compensating the computing resources of miners for running smart contracts. However, we find that under-optimized smart contracts cost more gas than necessary, and therefore the creators or users will be overcharged. In this work, we conduct the first investigation on Solidity, the recommended compiler, and reveal that it fails to optimize gas-costly programming patterns. In particular, we identify 7 gas-costly patterns and group them to 2 categories. Then, we propose and develop GASPER, a new tool for automatically locating gas-costly patterns by analyzing smart contracts' bytecodes. The preliminary results on discovering 3 representative patterns from 4,240 real smart contracts show that 93.5%, 90.1% and 80% contracts suffer from these 3 patterns, respectively.