Ethereum: the Messaging App
By: Harith Kamarul
Tags: Ethereum, Messaging, Etherscan, Blockchain, Messaging Apps

Input Data Messages (IDM)

IDM is the term we’re coining to describe messages sent via the Input Data field in an Ethereum transaction. The input data field is widely used to inform the blockchain on what contract calls are made as part of a transaction. Data is written in hexadecimal form which can be decoded to show the exact function being called.

Original hexadecimal input for a Uniswap V2 swap.

Same input decoded to show function parameters.

However, the same field could be used to enter hexademical data that — when converted to UTF-8 encoding — is represented as text.

Vitalik’s message on burning 90% of his SHIBA tokens.

Identifying which out of all the transactions done on Ethereum are IDMs is a challenge, as contract-interaction transactions could be converted to UTF-8 (appearing as gibberish) while those meant to be messages could have some characters incorrectly formatted (thus showing up as part-gibberish).

From the messages we could identify, their use could be categorized into:

Transaction receipts/notes Description of properties (in JSON) Crypto begging Advertising Conversations

Transaction receipts/notes

The most predominant use of these messages appear to be in the form of receipts/notes. When attempting to look for common words used in IDMs involving a subset of addresses, one such example completely dwarfed every other word.

The Bitfinex 3 address has sent more than 117,000 transactions (presumably withdrawals) with this note.

Another example of receipts are from the Anyswap: BSC Bridge address. In this case, Anyswap includes the transaction hash of a user’s deposit on BSC as an IDM in the Ethereum transaction they send to the user. Users can simply copy and paste the hash into BscScan.com to double check their BSC deposit.

View more Anyswap transaction receipts in this dashboard.

Verification

Some addresses use IDMs to do verification. In one example, an address religiously sends itself an IDM on a daily basis.

Transactions from address 0x37d…669.

Inspecting the IDMs shows that they follow a standard JSON format. We don’t know for sure, but we can speculate that it is a daily verification of smart contracts added to a registry.

More of these JSON-embedded transactions here.

Crypto Begging

Wherever there is a popular or newly rich address, you can bet that another address will be messaging them to “help muh famili”. A sample of messages sent to Vitalik (Vb address):

Read through Vitalik’s messages here.

For those looking to ask for money, remember that your chances of success is higher if you first add value to the other party (although in this case, whether or not the funds are legitimate is a separate story).

A short story starring hanashiro.eth and PolyNetwork Exploiter 1.

Advertising

In contrast to the begging messages, some entrepreneurial folks instead send IDMs to popular addresses to promote their wares. This address spammed more than 150 addresses with an IDM promoting a campaign to raise funds for “TROLL HUNTERS — the First tokenized 3D animated movie”. Unfortunately, it seems that the fundraise was not completed successfully.

Full list of promoting transactions here.

Another kind of ‘advertising’ is an address regularly posting links to their product in IDMs such that it gets picked up by crawlers like us. Folkspaper, a self-dubbed “fast-growing newspaper curated by the online community”, consistently posts links to their articles in IDMs sent to themselves.

Scroll through their list of articles.

Conversations

Finally, the kind of IDMs most interesting to online busybodies like ourselves are the on-chain conversations. A ‘heart-warming’ exchange between two MEV bot operators is the best example of a productive use of two-party IDMs.

Full recap of the entire conversation.

In the space of 30 messages, the two hitherto online strangers and arbitrage competitors set up a partnership to ensure better profits for both parties and became friends!

By far the most active and interesting conversation we could find remains the one involving PolyNetwork Exploiter 1. Rewarding advice with 13.37 ETH, nurses and refugees requesting for money, encrypted messages, calling out scammer emails & the media, negotiations with the hacked project and Q&As, this conversation has it all.