Performance analysis and comparison of PoW, PoS and DAG based blockchains

Abstract

In the blockchain, the consensus mechanism plays a key role in maintaining the security and legitimation of contents recorded in the blocks. Various blockchain consensus mechanisms have been proposed. However, there is no technical analysis and comparison as a guideline to determine which type of consensus mechanism should be adopted in a specific scenario/application. To this end, this work investigates three mainstream consensus mechanisms in the blockchain, namely, Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), and Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG), and identifies their performances in terms of the average time to generate a new block, the confirmation delay, the Transaction Per Second (TPS) and the confirmation failure probability. The results show that the consensus process is affected by both network resource (computation power/coin age, buffer size) and network load conditions. In addition, it shows that PoW and PoS are more sensitive to the change of network resource while DAG is more sensitive to network load conditions.