Smart-Graph: Graphical Representations for Smart Contract on the Ethereum Blockchain

Abstract

The Ethereum blockchain enables executing and recording smart contracts. The smart contracts can facilitate, verify, and implement the negotiation between multiple parties, also guaranteeing transactions without a traditional legal entity. Many tools supporting the smart contracts development in different areas are flourishing because in Ethereum blockchain valuable assets are often involved. Some of the tools help the developer to find security vulnerabilities via static and/or dynamic analysis or to reduce the Gas fees consumption. Despite the plethora of such tools, there is no tool supporting smart contracts evaluation and analysis via a graphical representation for expert developers.The paper embraces this way to facilitate the developers’ analysis activity, by proposing a graphical representation model to visualize smart contract source code. The paper makes available a tool via a web interface, which accepts the smart contract address as an input and produces a graphical representation of the smart contract as an output. The graphical representation can help developers to better understand the structure of smart contracts and share it with other developers. Moreover, some metrics, such as the relations among smart contracts, are easier to be understood via "spatial" than "tabular" representation. Indeed, representing smart contracts’ metrics via visual representation facilitates the developers, who are used to analyse the source code by directly inspecting it or using other tools that provide the metrics in a table format. Finally, the paper provides detailed data regarding a smart contract to the developers and proposes a graphical representation of the smart contracts without obscuration of details, also highlighting areas of the code that are possibly too big in size and/or too complex via a diagram displaying their connections.