New kids on the block: an analysis of modern blockchains
Luke Anderson, Ralph Holz, Alexander Ponomarev, Paul Rimba, Ingo Weber

TL;DR
This paper analyzes modern blockchains like Ethereum, Namecoin, and Peercoin, focusing on their unique features, usage patterns, and network characteristics, highlighting differences from Bitcoin and exploring smart contracts and consensus mechanisms.
Contribution
It provides a comparative analysis of three modern blockchains, introduces a crawler for Ethereum, and examines issues related to smart contract design and network size.
Findings
Ethereum has extensive smart contract functionality.
Namecoin's name registration usage has evolved over time.
Peercoin's proof-of-stake network is relatively small and weakly bootstrapped.
Abstract
Half a decade after Bitcoin became the first widely used cryptocurrency, blockchains are receiving considerable interest from industry and the research community. Modern blockchains feature services such as name registration and smart contracts. Some employ new forms of consensus, such as proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work. However, these blockchains are so far relatively poorly investigated, despite the fact that they move considerable assets. In this paper, we explore three representative, modern blockchains---Ethereum, Namecoin, and Peercoin. Our focus is on the features that set them apart from the pure currency use case of Bitcoin. We investigate the blockchains' activity in terms of transactions and usage patterns, identifying some curiosities in the process. For Ethereum, we are mostly interested in the smart contract functionality it offers. We also carry out a brief…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsBlockchain Technology Applications and Security · Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques · Auction Theory and Applications
