Visualization of Ethereum P2P network topology and peer properties

Summary Ethereum is arguably the second most popular cryptocurrency‐based network after Bitcoin. Both use the distributed ledger technology known as the blockchain, which is considered secure. However, the provided security level is proportional to the number of connected nodes, the number of influential nodes, and the supported amount of hash power. Thus, the knowledge of the network properties and nodes' behavior is helpful to protect the network from possible attacks such as double‐spending attacks, DDoS attacks, 51% attacks, and Sybil attacks. This paper proposes a node discovery mechanism, which performs a P2P link discovery on the Ethereum main network. For that, we develop Search‐node, a modified version of Ethereum client that searches for all participating nodes in the blockchain network, stores the node information in the Bucket, and then processes the peer discovery method. Based on the collected data, we first visualize the Ethereum network topology and analyze the attributes of the network such as node degree, path length, diameter, and clustering coefficient. We then analyze the node properties and provide analytical results regarding the relationship between nodes, heavily connected nodes, node geo‐distribution, security issues, and possible attacks over the influential nodes. As a result, we have identified 68,406 nodes with a total of 642,034 edges. By analyzing the collected data, we have found that the diameter in the Ethereum network is equal to 8. The node degree is over 19, which is two times higher than the default configuration.