An empirical study on the complexity, security and maintainability of Ethereum-based decentralized applications (DApps)

Abstract

The Ethereum blockchain’s smart contract is a programmable transaction that performs general-purpose computations and can be executed automatically on the blockchain. Leveraging this component, blockchain technology (BT) has grown beyond the scope of cryptocurrencies and can now be applicable in various industries other than finance. In this paper, we investigated the current trends in Ethereum-based decentralized applications (DApps) to be able to categorize and analyze the DApps to measure the complexity of smart contracts behind them, their level of security and their correlation to the maintainability of the DApps. We leveraged the source code analysis, security analysis, and the developmental metadata of the DApps to infer this correlation. Based on our findings, we concluded that the maintainability of Ethereum DApps is proportional to the code size, number of functions, and, most importantly, the number of outgoing invocations and statements in the smart contracts.