by Prof. Aggelos Kiayias Posted 6 March, 2024 The EDI team is officially launching today the alpha version of the index. The EDI is not a number or a graph! It is a framework, set of tools and graphical interface for the blockchain community to collaboratively and transparently measure and compare the decentralisation of different blockchain systems. Ultimately, we want EDI to become an open-source community-maintained project.  EDI works as follows. Each blockchain system is dissected into 8 layers. In each layer, we identify the resources of interest and the relevant parties, as laid ..read more

by Christina Ovezik Posted 25 October, 2023 The Edinburgh Decentralisation Index (EDI) project aims to define and measure blockchain decentralisation in a systematic way. As a first step, the EDI team identified 8 dimensions of blockchain systems that can exhibit different degrees of (de)centralisation and are therefore interesting to evaluate. These layers include : 1) Hardware, 2) Software, 3) Network , 4) Consensus, 5) Tokenomics, 6) API Clients, 7) Governance and 8) Geography, and they can be seen in the sketch below. Note that Geography and Governance are positioned in this manner beca ..read more

Congratulations to Amirreza Sarencheh on winning the “Best Fintech Student of the Year” award at the 2022 Scottish Financial Technology Awards held by DIGIT, “Scotland’s leading technology, media, and events company.” Amirreza is a PhD student at the Blockchain Technology Lab, University of Edinburgh, working at the intersection of computer science and financial technology, supervised by Prof. Aggelos Kiayias. Amirreza Sarencheh (centre) at the Scottish Financial Technology Awards The SFT awards were hosted live at Edinburgh’s Sheraton Grand Hotel and gathered over 250 participants from the ..read more

by Christina Ovezik & Aggelos Kiayias Posted 9 Sept, 2022 In a previous blog post, we analysed Pool Splitting Behaviour and Equilibrium Properties in Cardano’s Rewards Scheme, demonstrating results from experiments that were carried out using a simulation engine that we developed. This time, we are here to explain in detail how this tool works and go over the design choices and assumptions that were made while modelling the pooling process of Cardano. We also make the code available on Github for others to inspect as well as extend it to perform additional experiments and capture a ..read more

by Christina Ovezik & Aggelos Kiayias Posted 21 July, 2022 The reward sharing scheme used in the current deployment of Cardano has some favourable properties that were analysed theoretically in an academic paper and through simulation experiments in our previous blog post.  Specifically, we examined the reward scheme in terms of the level of decentralisation it induces and concluded that – when parametrised appropriately — the mechanism can yield satisfactory results in our simulation engine. However, it is possible that similar or completely different schemes could bring about equ ..read more

by Christina Ovezik & Aggelos Kiayias Posted 19 April, 2022 Since the introduction of blockchain systems more than a decade ago, groups and individuals from both academia and industry have strived to refine the underlying protocols, improving their scalability, stability or decentralisation properties, to name a few. In this blog post, we will focus on the aspect of decentralisation and particularly on its dependence to system incentives. We examine the case of Cardano, a Proof-of-Stake blockchain whose design followed a first-principles approach, guided by research performed jointly ..read more

Crypto firms based in China have been forced to relocate to other countries due to a crackdown on the crypto industry by Chinese authorities reacting to concerns about excessive energy consumption and financial risk. The Scotsman published an article recently highlighting the rising issue of migrating crypto miners’ adverse effect on the environment, for which Prof. Aggelos Kiayias shared his views.  If you are interested in reading the article, please follow the link below. The Scotsman: “How the great migration of cryptocurrency mining is playing a rising role in the global energy cris ..read more

Prof. Aggelos Kiayias gave a webinar at the Crypto and Blockchain Economics Research Forum (CBER) last Thursday, 2nd December, on the topic, “Rethinking Information Technology from a Decentralisation Perspective.”  His talk (abstract below) was based upon research compiled in the following paper: Decentralizing Information Technology: The Advent of Resource Based Systems Abstract:  With the introduction of blockchain technology a little more than a decade ago, we witnessed a first instance of an information technology service deployed via open and incentive driven collaboration that ..read more

NewScientist have published an article about a new cryptocurrency Chia and the impact it is having on the global supply chain of hard disk drives. The proof-of-space (aka proof-of-capacity) technology adopted by Chia is intended to be more environmentally friendly than the energy-intensive proof-of-work system used by Bitcoin.  However, since miners of Chia are incentivised to compete for new coins by owning large amounts of free storage space , there has been a global surge in demand for hard disk drives and other storage components across the globe. The physical drives require energy to ..read more

By Prof. Aggelos Kiayias Posted 29 March, 2021 The advent of the Bitcoin system in 2009 brought forth the promise of blockchain technology in Information Technology (IT) services.  Sir Mark Walport’s report “Distributed ledger technology: beyond block chain” in early 2016 was among the first extensive governmental reports world-wide documenting the disruptive nature of this technology.  Nevertheless, the reality of Bitcoin and its numerous spin-off systems using the same underlying technology was and continues to be fraught with problems in multiple domains including energy effici ..read more