Understanding the Evolution of Blockchain Ecosystems: A Longitudinal Measurement Study of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and EOSIO

The continuing expansion of the blockchain ecosystems has attracted much attention from the research community. However, although a large number of research studies have been proposed to understand the diverse characteristics of individual blockchain systems (e.g., Bitcoin or Ethereum), little is known at a comprehensive level on the evolution of blockchain ecosystems at scale, longitudinally, and across multiple blockchains. We argue that understanding the dynamics of blockchain ecosystems could provide unique insights that cannot be achieved through studying a single static snapshot or a single blockchain network alone. Based on billions of transaction records collected from three representative and popular blockchain systems (Bitcoin, Ethereum and EOSIO) over 10 years, we conduct the first study on the evolution of multiple blockchain ecosystems from different perspectives. Our exploration suggests that, although the overall blockchain ecosystem shows promising growth over the last decade, a number of worrying outliers exist that have disrupted its evolution.