Abstract
Interest in cryptocurrencies has skyrocketed since their introduction a decade ago, with hundreds of billions of dollars now invested across a landscape of thousands of different cryptocurrencies. While there is significant diversity, there is also a significant number of scams as people seek to exploit the current popularity. In this paper, we seek to identify the extent of innovation in the cryptocurrency landscape using the open-source repositories associated with each one. Among other findings, we observe that while many cryptocurrencies are largely unchanged copies of Bitcoin, the use of Ethereum as a platform has enabled the deployment of cryptocurrencies with more diverse functionalities.
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Interestingly, these sets were non-intersecting; i.e., there was no contract in a repository that was identical to a deployed one.
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Acknowledgements
The authors were supported in part by EPSRC Grant EP/N028104/1 and in part by the EU H2020 TITANIUM project under grant agreement number 740558.
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Reibel, P., Yousaf, H., Meiklejohn, S. (2019). Short Paper: An Exploration of Code Diversity in the Cryptocurrency Landscape. In: Goldberg, I., Moore, T. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11598. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32101-7_5
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