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A smart contract (SC) is a programme stored in the Ethereum blockchain by a contract‐creation transaction. SC developers deploy an instance of the SC and attempt to execute it in exchange for a fee, paid in Ethereum coins (Ether). If the computation needed for their execution turns out to be larger than the effort proposed by the developer (i.e., the gasLimit), their client instantiation will not be completed successfully.

In this paper, we examine SCs from 11 Ethereum blockchain‐oriented software projects hosted on GitHub.com, and we evaluate the resources needed for their deployment (i.e., the gasUsed). For each of these contracts, we also extract a suite of object‐oriented metrics, to evaluate their structural characteristics.

Our results show a statistically significant correlation between some of the object‐oriented (OO) metrics and the resources consumed on the Ethereum blockchain network when deploying SCs …