Ethereum has Turing completeness and can be used outside of DeFi or NFT, such as using it as an instant messaging application.
Original title: “Ethereum: The Development of Messaging Applications”
Written by: ChinaDeFi
On August 11th, we saw the largest cryptocurrency hacking in history. Poly Network’s $611 million was stolen. The huge number of hacker attacks is not the only characteristic of this hacker attack. Unlike most hacking attacks, this attack has a continuous narrative that accompanies it, provided by messages sent to and from the hacker’s address. It even has a self-published question and answer series!
In this article, let’s take a look at the various ways that Ethereum users use their wallets to communicate with the world and each other, take a look:
Input data message (IDM)
Non-standard IDM
Verify signature
Input data message (IDM)
IDM is a term we coined to describe messages sent through input data fields in Ethereum transactions. Input data fields are widely used to inform the blockchain which contract calls are made as part of a transaction. The data is written in hexadecimal form, which can be decoded to show the exact function being called.
Raw hexadecimal input for Uniswap V2 transactions
The same input is decoded to show the function parameters
However, the same fields can also be used to enter hexadecimal data—when converted to UTF-8 encoding—that is represented as text.
Vitalik’s news is burning 90% of his SHIBA tokens
Identifying which of all transactions completed on Ethereum are IDM is a challenge, because contract interaction transactions may be converted to UTF-8, and those transactions that should be messages may have some character format errors.
From the information we can identify, their uses can be divided into:
Transaction Receipt/Note
The main purpose of these messages seems to be in the form of receipts/tickets. When trying to find common words used in IDM that contain a subset of addresses, such an example completely dwarfs other words.
The Bitfinex 3 address has sent more than 117,000 transactions (presumably a withdrawal)
Another example of a receipt is from Anyswap: BSC bridge address. In this case, Anyswap uses the transaction hash of the user’s deposit on the BSC as the IDM in the Ethereum transaction they send to the user. Users can simply copy and paste the hash to BscScan.com to check their BSC deposit again.
View more Anyswap transaction receipts in this dashboard
verify
Some addresses use IDM for verification. In one example, an address sends itself an IDM every day.
Check IDM and find that they follow the standard JSON format. We are not sure, but we can speculate that this is the daily verification of smart contracts added to the registry.
Encrypted begging
As long as there is a popular or newly rich address, you can bet that another address will send them a message and ask them to help muh famili. Examples of messages sent to Vitalik (Vb address):
Read through Vitalik’s news here
For those who want money, remember that if you add value to the other party first, your chances of success will be higher.
advertise
Unlike begging messages, some entrepreneurs will send IDM to popular addresses to promote their products. The address sent spam to more than 150 addresses, and IDM is advertising a campaign to raise funds for “Troll Hunter-the first tokenized 3D animated film.” However, this fundraising did not seem to be completed successfully.
Facilitate the transaction list
Another type of “advertisement” is an IDM link that is regularly posted to their product so that it will be crawled by crawlers like ours. Folkspaper claims to be a “fast-growing newspaper curated by an online community,” and it always publishes links to its articles in the IDM that it sends to itself.
dialogue
Finally, for people who are busy online like us, the most interesting IDM is the conversation on the chain. The “heart-warming” communication between two MEV robot operators is the best example of the effective use of two-party IDM.
In the space of these 30 messages, two former online strangers and arbitrage competitors have established a partnership to ensure better profits for both parties and become friends!
So far, the most active and interesting conversation we can find is still on Poly Network Exploiter 1. Use 13.37 ETH to reward suggestions, nurses and refugees to ask for money, encrypt messages, call scammers’ emails and media, negotiate and Q&A with hacked projects, this conversation has everything you need.
Non-standard IDM
Although most IDMs are only sent as text, some require additional work to decode the message.
Encrypted message
These messages combine the publicity of the blockchain with the relative privacy of encrypted messages. People who want to understand the content of the message need to decrypt it.
Encrypted message sent to PolyNetwork Exploiter 1 in this transaction
Event log
The second THORChain user uses the message as the message sent to the target. The message needs to be parsed through the event logs of 6 transactions, and the line-by-line input data view is changed from Hex to Text. Future DeFi developers, please stick to the standard IDM method!
Messages sent through six transactions in the same block: 1 2 3 4 5 6
byte
Another non-standard form of IDM is to display the data (when converted to UTF-8) in byte format. For these situations, readers need to use such a tool to convert the text from byte format to string format.
The IDM in the form of a long string of numbers magically becomes human readable.
Convert the message from this transaction to a Vb address
Verify signature
Another type of message uses Ethereum, but is not stored on the chain. The wallet owner can use their private key to sign the message to prove that the message came from the signed address. Then, anyone can use tools such as Etherscan and MyCrypto to verify the signed message.
Example of a message with a verification signature
Etherscan keeps a record of messages signed using our tool. Although this tool is mainly for contract creators to verify the ownership of their contracts, it has been used by thousands of people in the community for various use cases.
Why do users choose to use verified signed messages instead of IDM? First, these messages are not bound to the receiving address. Anyone who logs into the verify signature page on Etherscan can see the list of these messages without having to navigate to a specific address. The UX for reading these messages is also simpler—the user does not need to convert from hexadecimal to UTF-8. Perhaps most importantly, they do not incur transaction costs like IDM.
By looking at these messages, we can see that their uses are different from those in IDM.
30% of the messages are used to verify their social media accounts.
29% of messages use formats other than Etherscan to prove address ownership.
Only 9% of the messages actually follow the Etherscan template.
Interestingly, as much as 1% of these messages are used to indicate the delivery of express services!
In addition to these uses, some interesting highlights include:
Determine the account used for transaction support
License for issuing smart contracts
Apply for P2P loan on Bitcointalk
Announce the correct Twitter account for the DeFi project
Voting on Uniswap governance
Financial audit verification
Correct the USDT sent by mistake
Due to its Turing completeness, Ethereum can be used for everything except DeFi or NFT. Using it as an instant messaging application is an example. The space for this use case is extensive and has not been fully explored. We look forward to seeing more in this area!
