The state of smart contracts
The utility of Ethereum is largely dependent on the success of smart contracts. I wanted to dig deep and learn about the smart contract eco system. Let’s answer some basic questions.
How many smart contracts are on the Ethereum blockchain? How many unique smart contracts are there? How many authors are there?
I spent some time writing code to answer these sorts of questions and learn more about what is going on with what I consider to be the most important part of blockchain technology.
323 days ago the first smart contract was registered to the block chain. It was simply a blank page. Very Zen. You can find it here: 0x9a049f5d18c239efaa258af9f3e7002949a977a0
Since then 45,088 other contracts have been registered. Of these, only 4,503 are unique binary codes. Two different compilers can generate different binary codes of the same source, but we are able to get some upper bounds by working with the this binary data. A more sophisticated technique would involve installing many compilers.
22 contracts have been created over 100 times. The empty contract is the most often created contract. Over 10,000 have been created. The second most commonly created contract at 4,826 instances is the current wallet contract. These contract contains 1,430,569.1622111644 Ether. A small portion of the total ether is in wallets.
The greeter tutorial (hello world of Ethereum) has been created 157 times. The infamous Dao has been created at least 14 times.
7,446 accounts have instantiated contracts. 5,324 have instantiated just 1 contract.
You can find the account that’s created the most contracts here:0x42da8a05cb7ed9a43572b5ba1b8f82a0a6e263dc
This account holds about 1 million USD in Ether and created 5,445 contracts (identical?). It’s has something to do with the Chinese site yunbi.com. Interesting. Maybe a post for another time.
Another important question: How many accounts have created a unique contract that the blockchain has never seen before? This would give us an upper bound on how many people have authored unique contracts and placed them on the live block chain.
I found 984 accounts have authored unique contracts. 487 of those only have authored one. Below I’ve published the top 10.
TLDR:
- Etherums major contribution to the blockchain world is focused on smart contracts with a market cap of ~1 billion USD.
- We have experienced 323 days of smart contract publishing on the blockchain.
- No more then 984 smart contract authors on the public blockchain.
- Ethereum Wallet contract is very popular but features are minimally utilized.
- 4,826 unique contracts have been authored.
creator account, number of uniquely authored contracts
0x0047a8033cc6d6ca2ed5044674fd421f44884de8 395
0x4962f6533141e9e12b9e1846ab549c7042a40098 153
0x8674c218f0351a62c3ba78c34fd2182a93da94e2 121
0xee291517c6290faf94dee71647c27b9737b2a2d2 89
0x39afc3556daa4d11a0a8f16ec1a490cd84aa6945 82
0x5de92686587b10cd47e03b71f2e2350606fcaf14 78
0xe9eeaec75883f0e389a78e2260bfac1776df2f1d 74
0xd3cda913deb6f67967b99d67acdfa1712c293601 66
