Dissecting Ponzi schemes on Ethereum: identification, analysis, and impact

By Massimo Bartoletti, Salvatore M. Carta, Tiziana Cimoli, Roberto Saia. Future generations computer systems, 2017

358 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ponzi schemes are financial frauds which lure users under the promise of high profits. Actually, users are repaid only with the investments of new users joining the scheme: consequently, a Ponzi scheme implodes soon after users stop joining it. Originated in the offline world 150 years ago, Ponzi schemes have since then migrated to the digital world, approaching first the Web, and more recently hanging over cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Smart contract platforms like Ethereum have provided a new opportunity for scammers, who have now the possibility of creating "trustworthy" frauds that still make users lose money, but at least are guaranteed to execute "correctly". We present a comprehensive survey of Ponzi schemes on Ethereum, analysing their behaviour and their impact from various viewpoints.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/207dac494a9492b85d0cf6dd3fb08fd02747d1e2

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Citations in the corpus

Vandal: A Scalable Security Analysis Framework for Smart Contracts (2018, background): “It can also detect coding patterns such as time constraint and authorization issues [55].”
An Overview on Smart Contracts: Challenges, Advances and Platforms (2019, unknown): “The recent work of [77] conducted a systematic study over the Ponzi schemes on Ethereum.”
A systematic literature review of blockchain-based applications: Current status, classification and open issues (2019, unknown): “These could range from the relatively blunt implementation of a Ponzi scam (Bartoletti et al., 2017) disguised as some sort of investment opportunity yielding incredibly high returns, to more subtle schemes that compromise private keys or do not guarantee the return of funds to investors when fundin”
Securify: Practical Security Analysis of Smart Contracts (2018, unknown): “This property can detect Ponzi schemes [21].”
Who Are the Phishers? Phishing Scam Detection on Ethereum via Network Embedding (2019, background): “[19] reported the first comprehensive investigation of the Ethereum Ponzi scheme.”
Finding The Greedy, Prodigal, and Suicidal Contracts at Scale (2018, background): “Later works on contract security identify potential bugs, related to the concurrent transactions [39], mishandled exceptions [25], overly extensive gas consumption [7] and implementations of fraudulent financial schemes [5].”