Unravelling Token Ecosystem of EOSIO Blockchain
This addresses a gap in understanding token ecosystems for cryptocurrency researchers and practitioners, though it is incremental as it applies existing graph analysis methods to new data.
The authors tackled the lack of research on the EOSIO token ecosystem by conducting a systematic graph analysis on nearly 135 million blocks, revealing abnormal trading patterns and proposing a fake-token detection algorithm with demonstrated effectiveness.
Being the largest Initial Coin Offering project, EOSIO has attracted great interest in cryptocurrency markets. Despite its popularity and prosperity (e.g., 26,311,585,008 token transactions occurred from June 8, 2018 to Aug. 5, 2020), there is almost no work investigating the EOSIO token ecosystem. To fill this gap, we are the first to conduct a systematic investigation on the EOSIO token ecosystem by conducting a comprehensive graph analysis on the entire on-chain EOSIO data (nearly 135 million blocks). We construct token creator graphs, token-contract creator graphs, token holder graphs, and token transfer graphs to characterize token creators, holders, and transfer activities. Through graph analysis, we have obtained many insightful findings and observed some abnormal trading patterns. Moreover, we propose a fake-token detection algorithm to identify tokens generated by fake users or fake transactions and analyze their corresponding manipulation behaviors. Evaluation results also demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.