An Empirical Study of Proxy Contracts at the Ethereum Ecosystem Scale

The proxy design pattern separates data and code in smart contracts into proxy and logic contracts. Data resides in proxy contracts, while code is sourced from logic contracts. This pattern allows for flexible smart contract development, enabling upgradeability, extensibility, and code reuse. Despit...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inProceedings / International Conference on Software Engineering pp. 2996 - 3008
Main Authors Zhang, Mengya, Shukla, Preksha, Zhang, Wuqi, Zhang, Zhuo, Agrawal, Pranav, Lin, Zhiqiang, Zhang, Xiangyu, Zhang, Xiaokuan
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 26.04.2025
Subjects
Blockchains
Codes
Computer bugs
development
Ecosystems
ethereum
Extensibility
Logic
proxy pattern
smart contract
Smart contracts
Software engineering
Systematics
Taxonomy
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Summary:The proxy design pattern separates data and code in smart contracts into proxy and logic contracts. Data resides in proxy contracts, while code is sourced from logic contracts. This pattern allows for flexible smart contract development, enabling upgradeability, extensibility, and code reuse. Despite its popularity and importance, there is currently no systematic study to understand the prevalence, use scenarios, and development pitfalls of proxies. We present the first comprehensive study on Ethereum proxies. To gather a dataset of proxies, we introduce PROXYEX, the first framework to detect proxies from bytecode, achieving over 99% accuracy. Using PROXYEX, we collected a dataset of 2,031,422 Ethereum proxies and conducted the first large-scale empirical study. We analyzed proxy numbers and transaction traffic to understand their current status on Ethereum. We identified four proxy use patterns: upgradeability, extensibility, code-sharing, and code-hiding. We also pinpointed three common issues: proxy-logic storage collision, logic-logic storage collision, and uninitialized contracts, creating checkers for these by replaying historical transactions. Our study reveals that upgradeability isn't the sole reason for proxy adoption in DApps, and many proxies present issues like storage collisions and uninitialized contracts, which enhances the understanding of proxies and guide future smart contract research on the development, usage, quality assurance, and bug detection of proxies.
ISSN:1558-1225
DOI:10.1109/ICSE55347.2025.00083