Empirical Analysis of the Proxy Pattern in Ethereum Smart Contracts
How the classic proxy design pattern is applied on the Ethereum blockchain to work around the immutability of deployed smart contracts, either interposing validation and access-control logic or enabling zero-downtime upgrades by delegating from a stable proxy address to a replaceable logic contract. Through large-scale mining of all Ethereum contracts and transactions, it characterizes how prevalent proxies are, how they are deployed and integrated, and which reference implementations (such as the minimal-clone ERC-1167) dominate, and introduces a behavioral method for detecting active proxies.
Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) A Large-Scale Exploratory Study on the Proxy
A large-scale empirical software-engineering study of how the proxy design pattern is used in Ethereum smart contracts. A proxy contract sits between clients and a target (logic) contract, letting ot…