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A Comparative Analysis of Bitcoin Forks
Bitcoin (BTC) has had many forks over the years, most of which have faded into obscurity. But one fork in particular has separated from the pack: Bitcoin Cash (BCH). In August 2017, BCH forked from BTC with a goal of “fulfilling the [...]
An Analysis of Kin’s On-Chain Activity
In the following post, we investigate Kin’s on-chain activity compared to other blockchains. […]
An on-chain analysis of Ripple’s escrow system
Coin Metrics recently released version 3.0 of our CM Network Data Pro product. This release includes many new assets, including XRP. When Coin Metrics adds support for any new asset, we do a deep dive into its digital ledger to [...]
Evaluating Bitcoin forks with network data
Determining the success of a UTXO fork is a fraught exercise. There is no agreed-upon standard for measuring adoption. Establishing the existence of genuine activity is therefore challenging to the say the least. The list of potential proxies is long: [...]
Granular mining pool mapping with Bitcoin’s coinbase outputs
How concentrated is block formation in Bitcoin? Which mining pools are dominant, and how long have they held that position? Are major pools in a position to collude and censor transactions? Which miners should developers and key stakeholders engage with? [...]
Don’t trust, verify: A Bitcoin Private case study
Bitcoin Private (BTCP) is a fork-merge of Bitcoin and ZClassic (ZCL, a fork of ZCash that removed the founders’ reward). BTCP defined its initial supply according to the sum of the outstanding supply of Bitcoin at the time (16.8m), ZClassic [...]
Introducing Realized Capitalization
The motivation for the creation of Realized Cap was the realization that “Market Capitalization” is often an empty metric when applied to cryptocurrencies. Market Capitalization, borrowed from the world of equities, is calculated for cryptocurrencies as circulating supply * latest [...]
What should we expect from Bitcoin’s block size in the coming years?
tl;dr: under full SegWit adoption you should expect blocks in the 1.6-2 mb range, with larger outliers. How big will Bitcoin blocks get under reasonable assumptions? This investigation began with the simple realization that Bitcoin had recently hit an all [...]
Introducing our adjusted transaction volume estimates
As we have exhaustively covered, getting accurate estimates of the actual economic throughput of public blockchains is not a trivial task. Due to the existence of mixers, self-churn, privacy enhancements, spam, and change outputs (in UTXO chains), raw estimates of [...]
An analysis of batching in Bitcoin
On May 6th, 2017, Bitcoin hit an all-time high in transactions processed on the network in a single day: it moved 375,000 transactions which accounted for a nominal output of about $2.5b. Average fees on the Bitcoin network had climbed [...]