Ethereum smart contracts are Turing complete programs that operate on
money and derived assets. With a market capitalization in the three
digit billions, there is an interest in quantifying their usage. Despite
blockchain data being public by design, large scale analysis of smart
contracts is technically challenging to do on a large scale. We
summarize methods to analyze contract usage on the Ethereum blockchain
and categorize the most popular contracts by their application domain
and behavior. Especially, changes in behavior before and after removing
gas refunds on the Ethereum blockchain are analyzed. Furthermore, we
quantify the adoption of final Ethereum Requests for Comments (ERCs),
that standardize smart contracts for certain applications. According to
the used metrics, trading related smart contracts, are the most popular.
In that context, we explain, why using just a single metric can be
misleading. The removal of gas refunds lead to significant changes in
contract lifetime and state cleanup.