Being the most popular programming language for developing Ethereum smart contracts, Solidity allows using inline assembly to gain fine-grained control. Although many empirical studies on smart contracts have been conducted, to the best of our knowledge, none has examined inline assembly in smart contracts. To fill the gap, in this paper, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study of inline assembly on more than 7.6 million open-source Ethereum smart contracts from three aspects, namely, source code, bytecode, and transactions after designing new approaches to tackle several technical challenges. Through a thorough quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collected data, we obtain many new observations and insights. Moreover, by conducting a questionnaire survey on using inline assembly in smart contracts, we draw new insights from the valuable feedback. This work sheds light on the development of smart contracts as well as the evolution of Solidity and its compilers.

Administrative punishment is one of the most important ways of enforcing administrative law in the field of market supervision in China. However, at the current stage, the abuse of data access permission and the difficulty in managing timeliness in administrative punishment still remain unresolved, which hinders the legalization and standardization of the administrative punishment system. Inspired by blockchain, which is inherently traceable, tamper-proof, and transparent, we design a system, punishment supervisor (PEATS), which is suitable for administrative punishment and technically overcomes the defects of the traditional administrative punishment procedure. To prevent the abuse of data access permission, we innovatively introduce the ACG (authorization control gateway) to verify the access permission of users based on the records in the MSD (market supervision department) contract. To ensure the timeliness of the administrative punishment procedure, we design a special case contract that has the same status as the general case processing state of administrative punishment to track case progress on the blockchain. We experiment and evaluate PEATS in terms of functionality and performance and find that PEATS provides traceability, transparency, and timeliness assurance. In addition, PEATS has 80.9% of the throughput of a traditional server with no more than an additional 3% latency and at most 60 KB additional storage space per case.

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