A First Analytics Approach to Cardano

Many variants of (delegated) Proof-of-Stake blockchains have been introduced since 2016, among which Cardano, Algorand, and Tezos have been more widely adopted. Each of these blockchains has attempted to address the scalability and consumption issues of Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains from different angles. However, the economic incentives of these blockchains have raised the concern about the decentralisation level of key players, such as validators, and stakeholders, in those “expected to be decentralised” networks. In this work, we conduct an analysis of Cardano's activity and wealth concentration. For the first time, we perform a clustering of the addresses that belong to the same wallet based on existing heuristics for UTXO-like blockchains. Moreover, an analysis of reward distribution on Cardano is presented. The analysis results of this work disclose objective insights into the Cardano blockchain, including the rewards distribution, stake balance distribution, and wealth concentration.

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