Ethereum is one of the most popular blockchain systems that supports more than half a million transactions every day and fosters miscellaneous decentralized applications with its Turing-complete smart contract machine. Whereas it remains mysterious what the transaction pattern of Ethereum is and how it evolves over time. In this paper, we study the evolutionary behavior of Ethereum transactions from a temporal graph point of view. We first develop a data analytics platform to collect external transactions associated with users as well as internal transactions initiated by smart contracts. Three types of temporal graphs, user-to-user, contract-to-contract and user-contract graphs, are constructed according to trading relationship and are segmented with an appropriate time window. We observe a strong correlation between the size of user-to-user transaction graph and the average Ether price in a time window, while no evidence of such linkage is shown at the average degree, average edge weights and average triplet closure duration. The macroscopic and microscopic burstiness of Ethereum transactions is validated. We analyze the Gini indexes of the transaction graphs and the user wealth in which Ethereum is found to be very unfair since the very beginning, in a sense, "the rich is already very rich".

中文翻译：

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以太坊的演变：时间图透视

以太坊是最受欢迎的区块链系统之一，每天支持超过 50 万笔交易，并通过其图灵完备的智能合约机培育各种去中心化应用程序。然而，以太坊的交易模式是什么以及它如何随着时间的推移而演变仍然是个谜。在本文中，我们从时间图的角度研究以太坊交易的演化行为。我们首先开发一个数据分析平台来收集与用户相关的外部交易以及由智能合约发起的内部交易。根据交易关系构建三种类型的时间图，用户到用户，合约到合约和用户 - 合约图，并用适当的时间窗口进行分割。我们观察到用户到用户交易图的大小与时间窗口中的平均以太价格之间存在很强的相关性，而在平均度数、平均边权重和平均三元组关闭持续时间上没有显示这种联系的证据。验证了以太坊交易的宏观和微观突发性。我们分析交易图的基尼指数和用户财富，发现以太坊从一开始就很不公平，从某种意义上说，“富人已经很富有了”。