Large-scale empirical study of inline assembly on 7.6 million ethereum smart contracts

Abstract

Being the most popular programming language for developing Ethereum smart contracts, Solidity allows using inline assembly to gain fine-grained control. Although many empirical studies on smart contracts have been conducted, to the best of our knowledge, none has examined inline assembly in smart contracts. To fill the gap, in this paper, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study of inline assembly on more than 7.6 million open-source Ethereum smart contracts from three aspects, namely, source code, bytecode, and transactions after designing new approaches to tackle several technical challenges. Through a thorough quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collected data, we obtain many new observations and insights. Moreover, by conducting a questionnaire survey on using inline assembly in smart contracts, we draw new insights from the valuable feedback. This work sheds light on the development of smart contracts as well as the evolution of Solidity and its compilers.