Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Confer
Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) Year 2020 Peer-reviewed
BibTeX PDF
Blockchain Security · DeFi

Revisiting Transactional Statistics of High-scalability Blockchains

Daniel Perez Jiahua Xu Benjamin Livshits
2020
Publication year
IMC
Venue
Peer-reviewed
Type
§ Abstract

Problem

ABSTRACT 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 trans- actional throughput is being used.

Approach

In this paper, we ex- amine 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.

Results

In particular, 96% of the transactions on EOSIO were triggered by the airdrop of a currently valueless to- ken; 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. CCS CONCEPTS • Information systems →Data extraction and integration.

Cite this paper — BibTeX 
@InProceedings{perez20transactional,
  title = "Revisiting Transactional Statistics of High-scalability Blockchains",
  author = "Daniel Perez and Jiahua Xu and Benjamin Livshits",
  year = "2020",
  month = oct,
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC)",
}
Copied