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arXiv · 2503.19548

On-Chain Analysis of Smart Contract Dependency Risks on Ethereum

Monica Jin·Raphina Liu·Martin Monperrus
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Abstract

In this paper, we present the first large-scale empirical study of smart contract dependencies, analyzing over 41 million contracts and 11 billion interactions on Ethereum up to December 2024. Our results yield four key insights: (1) 59% of contract transactions involve multiple contracts (median of 4 per transaction in 2024) indicating potential smart contract dependency risks; (2) the ecosystem exhibits extreme centralization, with just 11 (0.001%) deployers controlling 20.5 million (50%) of alive contracts, with major risks related to factory contracts and deployer privileges; (3) three most depended-upon contracts are mutable, meaning large parts of the ecosystem rely on contracts that can be altered at any time, which is a significant risk, (4) actual smart contract protocol dependencies are significantly more complex than officially documented, undermining Ethereum's transparency ethos, and creating unnecessary attack surface. Our work provides the first large-scale empirical foundation for understanding smart contract dependency risks, offering crucial insights for developers, users, and security researchers in the blockchain space.

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Monica Jin, Raphina Liu, Martin Monperrus. 2025-03-25. On-Chain Analysis of Smart Contract Dependency Risks on Ethereum. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19548

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