Understanding the Decentralization of DPoS: Perspectives From Data-Driven Analysis on EOSIO

Recently, many Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS)-based blockchains have been widely used in decentralized applications, such as EOSIO, Tron, and Binance Smart Chain. Compared with traditional PoW-based blockchain systems, these systems achieve a higher transaction throughput and are well adapted to large-scale scenes in daily applications. Decentralization is a key element in blockchain networks. However, little is known about the evolution of decentralization in DPoS-based blockchain networks. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis on the decentralization of DPoS with data from up to 135,000,000 blocks in EOSIO, the first successful DPoS-based blockchain system. We characterize the decentralization evolution of the two phases in DPoS, namely block producer election and block production. Moreover, we study the voters with similar voting behaviors and propose methods to discover abnormal mutual voting behaviors in EOSIO. The analytical results show that our methods can effectively capture the decentralization evolution and abnormal voting phenomena in the system, which also have reference significance for other DPoS-based blockchains.