Under-Optimized Smart Contracts Devour Your Money

Understand

Smart contracts are full-fledged programs that run on blockchains (e.g., Ethereum, one of the most popular blockchains).

• In Ethereum, gas (in Ether, a cryptographic currency like Bitcoin) is the execution fee compensating the computing resources of miners for running smart contracts.
• However, we find that under-optimized smart contracts cost more gas than necessary, and therefore the creators or users will be overcharged.
• In this work, we conduct the first investigation on Solidity, the recommended compiler, and reveal that it fails to optimize gas-costly programming patterns.