Revisiting Transactional Statistics of High-scalability Blockchains
This work addresses the problem of understanding real-world transaction usage for blockchain developers and researchers, revealing inefficiencies and attacks, but it is incremental as it applies existing analysis methods to new data.
The paper analyzed network traffic of three high-scalability blockchains (EOSIO, Tezos, XRP Ledger) over seven months, finding that only a small fraction of transactions were used for value transfer, with 96% on EOSIO from a valueless token airdrop, 76% on Tezos for consensus, and over 94% on XRPL carrying no economic value.
Scalability has been a bottleneck for major blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Despite the significantly improved scalability claimed by several high--profile blockchain projects, there has been little effort to understand how their transactional throughput is being used. In this paper, we examine recent network traffic of three major high-scalability blockchains--EOSIO, Tezos and XRP Ledger (XRPL)--over a period of seven months. Our analysis reveals that only a small fraction of the transactions are used for value transfer purposes. In particular, 96% of the transactions on EOSIO were triggered by the airdrop of a currently valueless token; on Tezos, 76% of throughput was used for maintaining consensus; and over 94% of transactions on XRPL carried no economic value. We also identify a persisting airdrop on EOSIO as a DoS attack and detect a two-month-long spam attack on XRPL. The paper explores the different designs of the three blockchains and sheds light on how they could shape user behavior.