Abstract
Blockchain protocols’ primary security goal is consensus: one version of the global ledger that everyone in the network agrees on. Their proofs of security depend on assumptions on how well their peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks operate. Yet, surprisingly, little is understood about what factors influence the P2P network properties. In this work, we extensively study the Ethereum P2P network’s connectivity and its block propagation mechanism. We gather data on the Ethereum network by running the official Ethereum client, geth, modified to run as a “super peer” with many neighbors. We run this client in North America for over seven months, as well as shorter runs with multiple vantages around the world. Our results expose an incredible amount of churn, and a surprisingly small number of peers who are actually useful (that is, who propagate new blocks). We also find that a node’s location has a significant impact on when it hears about blocks, and that the precise behavior of this has changed over time (e.g., nodes in the US have become less likely to hear about new blocks first). Finally, we find prune blocks propagate faster than uncles.
We thank the anonymous reviewers and Arthur Gervais for their helpful comments. This research was supported in part by NSF grants CNS-1816802 and CNS-1900879, a Ripple unrestricted gift, and Facebook Fellowship. We also thank the Ethereum Foundation for a gift of AWS credit used toward the collection of our data.
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Notes
- 1.
The Ethereum protocol uses their own memory-hard hash function, Ethhash [1].
- 2.
In geth this subset is composed of a square root of their peers who have not heard about the block.
- 3.
Find a median and mean delay of 6.5 and 12.6 s (from 2013).
- 4.
We are unable to avoid forwarding information on all blocks/transactions, as doing so would cause other peers to decide to stop peering with our client.
- 5.
Gencer et al. [15] compared Bitcoin prunes to all blocks mined, but for Ethereum just used uncle counts. They found that at the time Bitcoin had a larger standard deviation in mining fairness than Ethereum.
- 6.
When prunes are first announced to us via a NewBlockHashesMsg, it generally correspond to times we hear about odd blocks that do not follow the mainchain (i.e. the block number is much smaller or larger than the current height).
- 7.
The bomb was delayed with the Muir Glacier hardfork in early January 2020.
- 8.
Mostly Coinbase nodes who appear to be routinely generating a fresh ENODEID.
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Kiffer, L., Salman, A., Levin, D., Mislove, A., Nita-Rotaru, C. (2021). Under the Hood of the Ethereum Gossip Protocol. In: Borisov, N., Diaz, C. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12675. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64331-0_23
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