arXiv subjects

Difan Xie

Publications and source records attributed to Difan Xie.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Demystifying Solana Bots: From GitHub Blueprints to On-Chain Fingerprints

Solana is an emerging blockchain platform designed for high throughput and low transaction fees, making it inexpensive to submit transactions at scale and, consequently, increasing exposure to bot spamming and related financial exploitation. Solana bots are typically off-chain software systems that operate in a competitive on-chain execution environment by constructing and submitting transactions, and the bot-related transactions on the decentralized exchanges exceed 250 million dollars in daily trading volume in January 2026. Prior studies on Solana have examined system performance, smart-contract security, and specific on-chain phenomena. However, we still lack a systematic understanding of what Solana bots implement in practice and how these implementations manifest as observable on-chain execution fingerprints. To address this gap, we performed a large-scale empirical study of Solana bots from two complementary views: (i) 586 bot repositories collected from GitHub, and (ii) 200 bot addresses on Solana, with over 44 million on-chain transactions. Our study derives an implementation-grounded taxonomy of Solana bots comprising 15 categories grouped into five domains (e.g., Trading Operations, MEV, and On-chain Analytics), identifies a largely shared five-stage operational pipeline manifested in bot implementations, and uncovers systematic variation in on-chain trading behaviors of Solana bots across diverse trading platforms and assets. Based on our findings, we highlight future research directions, and provide recommendations for building and operating bots on the Solana blockchain.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Why Is My Transaction Risky? Understanding Smart Contract Semantics and Interactions in the NFT Ecosystem

The NFT ecosystem represents an interconnected, decentralized environment that encompasses the creation, distribution, and trading of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), where key actors, such as marketplaces, sellers, and buyers, utilize smart contracts to facilitate secure, transparent, and trustless transactions. Scam tokens are deliberately created to mislead users and facilitate financial exploitation, posing significant risks in the NFT ecosystem. Prior work has explored the NFT ecosystem from various perspectives, including security challenges, actor behaviors, and risks from scams and wash trading, leaving a gap in understanding the semantics and interactions of smart contracts during transactions, and how the risks associated with scam tokens manifest in relation to the semantics and interactions of contracts. To bridge this gap, we conducted a large-scale empirical study on smart contract semantics and interactions in the NFT ecosystem, using a curated dataset of nearly 100 million transactions across 20 million blocks on Ethereum. We observe a limited semantic diversity among smart contracts in the NFT ecosystem, dominated by proxy, token, and DeFi contracts. Marketplace and proxy registry contracts are the most frequently involved in smart contract interactions during transactions, engaging with a broad spectrum of contracts in the ecosystem. Token contracts exhibit bytecode-level diversity, whereas scam tokens exhibit bytecode convergence. Certain interaction patterns between smart contracts are common to both risky and non-risky transactions, while others are predominantly associated with risky transactions. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations to mitigate risks in the blockchain ecosystem, and outline future research directions.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Why Does My Transaction Fail? A First Look at Failed Transactions on the Solana Blockchain

Solana is an emerging blockchain platform, recognized for its high throughput and low transaction costs, positioning it as a preferred infrastructure for Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and other Web 3.0 applications. In the Solana ecosystem, transaction initiators submit various instructions to interact with a diverse range of Solana smart contracts, among which are decentralized exchanges (DEXs) that utilize automated market makers (AMMs), allowing users to trade cryptocurrencies directly on the blockchain without the need for intermediaries. Despite the high throughput and low transaction costs of Solana, the advantages have exposed Solana to bot spamming for financial exploitation, resulting in the prevalence of failed transactions and network congestion. Prior work on Solana has mainly focused on the evaluation of the performance of the Solana blockchain, particularly scalability and transaction throughput, as well as on the improvement of smart contract security, leaving a gap in understanding the characteristics and implications of failed transactions on Solana. To address this gap, we conducted a large-scale empirical study of failed transactions on Solana, using a curated dataset of over 1.5 billion failed transactions across more than 72 million blocks. Specifically, we first characterized the failed transactions in terms of their initiators, failure-triggering programs, and temporal patterns, and compared their block positions and transaction costs with those of successful transactions. We then categorized the failed transactions by the error messages in their error logs, and investigated how specific programs and transaction initiators are associated with these errors...

cs.SE↗