Analysis of Address Lifespans in Bitcoin and Ethereum

Abstract

Bitcoin and Ethereum are the two most used decentralized blockchains. These platforms use a notion of addresses to represent identities in the network. These addresses are publicly visible entities that tell where funds are sent and received on a blockchain. Each user can have multiple addresses in a cryptocurrency network. In this paper, we investigate the lifespan of addresses in these networks, in particular, the lifespan distribution and its relationship with the other features such as turnover, turnover in USD, and transaction count. Our results show that addresses' lifespans follow a Double Pareto-Lognormal (DPLN) distribution. We also showed the relationship between lifespan and turnover, turnover in USD, and transaction count follows a power-law distribution.