Understanding the Adoption and Impact of GasTokens on Ethereum

Google Drive Link

GasTokens are created by smart contracts executing in the Ethereum blockchain to support a form of transaction fee pre-payment. Even though GasTokens had a period of significant activity on Ethereum (regularly surpassing half of the overall weekly smart contract creation and destruction activity), few systematic studies have been conducted on GasToken usage and its effect on the blockchain network. This thesis focuses on understanding the adoption and impact of GasTokens on Ethereum from 2020-5-25 to 2022-5-31. We analyze the usage patterns, including the creation, destruction, and holding of GasTokens. We report several price findings related to GasTokens, and compare the fees paid by users submitting transactions that create and destroy GasTokens to the fees paid by all the transactions in the network over different time periods. We also report on the impact of GasToken creations and destructions on the major mining pools.