Analysis and Characterization of ERC-20 Token Network Topologies

The transparent nature of public blockchain systems allows for unprecedented access to economic community data. Examples of such communities are the fungible token networks created by the ERC-20 standard on the Ethereum protocol. In this paper we study ERC-20 token networks, where nodes represent users and edges represent fungible token transfers between them. We focus our analysis on the top 100 largest networks, including a total of about 160 million edges and 60 million nodes. After a global analysis of the size and temporal evolution of such networks, we define and study seven features describing their main topological properties. In an attempt to characterize the networks by their topologies, we use the introduced features to cluster the networks together. To evaluate our results, we manually classify each network depending on the application domain of the corresponding contract and measure the homogeneity of the obtained clusterings. Overall, the results appear to indicate a lack of relationship between the scope of a contract and the topological features of the induced networks.