Measurement and Analysis of Blockchain Peers

Abstract

Blockchain’s promise of an immutable distributed ledger, fully fault tolerant with no centralized control deployed in an untrusted decentralized peer-to-peer network has disrupted the financial and technical industry. Blockchains may vary in terms of their design goals and algorithms, but they all rely on one common premise: the blockchain network is a decentralized peer-to-peer system and the ledger is stored on these untrusted peers. In this paper, we measure the characteristics of blockchain peers in the top four blockchains with dominant market share, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, and Solana. All four blockchains have a common trend that they have moved away from the idealistic decentralized peer-to-peer systems in their original design, and have become more server-like, more centralized, and more vulnerable to certain attacks. Using our measurements, we quantify the amount of effort required to delay, disrupt, and attack these blockchains.