Ethereum Ecosystem Under Threat Due To Lack Of Diversity Of The Ethereum Smart Contracts

According to research conducted by a group of analysts from the University of Maryland and the Northeastern University, the entire ethereum ecosystem is under threat because of the lack of diversity of the ETH smart contracts. The information instantly made headlines at DC Forecasts crypto news site today.

According to the paper titled ‘’Analyzing Ethereum’s Contract Topology,’’ most of the ethereum smart contracts are a near copy of other contracts or are exactly the same. This is a huge risk to other contracts if the previous one where it was originally copied from, contains a bug or a vulnerable code.

The study goes on analyzing the smart contracts’ bytecodes during the first 5 million blocks which cover a time-frame of almost three years.

To continue, today’s ethereum smart contracts are almost three times more likely to be created by other contracts than by users. Less than 10 percent of the user-backed contracts are unique. This means that there’s a huge reuse of code that can have a major impact on the entire Ethereum user population.

This means that smart contracts in this form pose a risk to the entire blockchain ecosystem since Ethereum has been a subject of high-profile bugs multiple times.

Ethereum is an open-sourced blockchain platform that features smart contracts, launched in 2015 by Vitalik Buterin. It’s the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap at the time of writing. Ethereum received multiple security breaches in 2018 many of which were smart contract breaches that caused a loss of around $38,000.