Understanding the Issue Types in Open Source Blockchain-based Software Projects with the Transformer-based BERTopic

2025-06-13

AI Summary

There is a lack of systematic understanding of issue types in open-source blockchain projects. Method: Leveraging 498,000 GitHub issues from 1,209 projects, this study pioneers the application of BERTopic—a Transformer-based topic modeling technique—to blockchain issue mining. Contribution/Results: It identifies 49 fine-grained issue topics and constructs the first evolvable, hierarchical taxonomy comprising 11 issue categories. Key findings include: wallet management issues are the most prevalent and exhibit the longest resolution time; issue volume surged significantly during Ethereum’s ecosystem expansion (2016–2022) before stabilizing; and substantial heterogeneity exists across topics in both temporal evolution and resolution efficiency. This work provides an empirically grounded, structured classification framework to inform the design of blockchain development and operations tools.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Mining of Spatial, Temporal or Spatio-Temporal Data
• Natural Language Processing: Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Computational Complexity of Reasoning

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Topic discovery and tracking
• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrencies

Abstract

Blockchain-based software systems are increasingly deployed across diverse domains, yet a systematic understanding of their development challenges remains limited. This paper presents a large-scale empirical study of 497,742 issues mined from 1,209 open-source blockchain projects hosted on GitHub. Employing BERTopic, a transformer-based topic modeling technique, we identify 49 distinct issue topics and organize them hierarchically into 11 major subcategories. Our analysis reveals that both general software development issues and blockchain-specific concerns are nearly equally represented, with Wallet Management and UI Enhancement emerging as the most prominent topics. We further examine the temporal evolution of issue categories and resolution times, finding that Wallet issues not only dominate in frequency but also exhibit the longest resolution time. Conversely, Mechanisms issues are resolved significantly faster. Issue frequency surged after 2016 with the rise of Ethereum and decentralized applications, but declined after 2022. These findings enhance our understanding of blockchain software maintenance, informing the development of specialized tools and practices to improve robustness and maintainability.

Problem

• Identify issue types in open-source blockchain projects
• Analyze temporal evolution of issue categories
• Understand blockchain-specific versus general software issues

Innovation

• BERTopic for topic modeling in blockchain issues
• Hierarchical categorization of 49 issue topics
• Temporal analysis of issue resolution trends