We Know What They've Been Put Through: Revisiting High-scalability Blockchain Transactions

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-EOS, Tezos and XRP-over a period of three months.Our analysis reveals that only a small fraction of the transactions are used for value transfer purposes. In particular, 95% of the transactions on EOS were triggered by the airdrop of a currently valueless token; on Tezos, 82% of throughput was used for maintaining consensus; and only 2% of transactions on the XRP ledger lead to value transfers. The paper explores the different designs of the three blockchains and sheds light on how they could shape user behavior.