Analysis of Ethereum Network Properties and Behavior of Influential Nodes

Ethereum is arguably the second most popular cryptocurrency-based network after Bitcoin, both make use of the distributed ledger technology known as blockchain. The blockchain-based networks are considered to be secure, but the level of provided security is proportional to the number of connected nodes, the number of influential nodes and the supported amount of hash power. Thus, the knowledge of the network properties and nodes behavior is useful to protect the network from the possible attacks such as double spending attacks, DDoS attacks, 51% attacks, and Sybil attacks. In this paper, we propose nodes discovery mechanism, which performs a P2P links discovery on Ethereum main-network. For that, we developed the Search-node, a modified version of Ethereum Client that search for all participating nodes in the network, store the nodes identification in the Bucket, and then process the peer discovery method. We analyze the collected data to discover the relationship between nodes, heavily-connected nodes, nodes geo-distribution and provide network snapshots, as well as some data related to security issues and possible attacks over the influential nodes. Our results show that approximately 300,000 nodes are connected over Ethereum network, and among these roughly 139 nodes show a high-degree.