Graph Analysis of the Ethereum Blockchain Data: A Survey of Datasets, Methods, and Future Work

Ethereum, currently the most actively-used and the second-largest blockchain platform, consists of a heterogeneous ecosystem, cohabited by human users, smart contracts (autonomous agents), ether (native cryptocurrency), tokens (digital assets), dApps (decentralized applications), and DeFi (decentralized finance). These key actors in the Ethereum interact with each other via transactions and contract calls. Given the highly connected structure, graph-based modeling is an optimal tool to analyze the data stored in Ethereum blockchain. Recently, several research works performed graph analysis on the publicly available Ethereum blockchain data to reveal insights into its transactions and for important downstream tasks, e.g., cryptocurrency price prediction, address clustering, phishing scams and counterfeit tokens detection. In this work, we conduct an in-depth survey of the existing literature. We categorize them based on publication years, venues, core ranking, and authors' affiliations, data usage and graphs construction, graph mining and machine learning techniques employed, and the new insights derived by them. We conclude by discussing our recommendations on the future work. Our article will be useful to data scientists, researchers, financial analysts, and blockchain enthusiasts.