Post Merge Block Production
What is Ethereum?
Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capitalization. Ethereum was conceived in 2013 by programmer Vitalik Buterin.
What is proof of stake?
Proof-of-stake protocols are a class of consensus mechanisms for blockchains that work by selecting validators in proportion to their quantity of holdings in the associated cryptocurrency. This is done to avoid the computational cost of proof-of-work schemes.
What is the merge?
The Merge refers to the original Ethereum Mainnet merging with a separate proof-of-stake blockchain called the Beacon Chain, now existing as one chain. The Merge reduced Ethereum's energy consumption by ~99.95%.
What is a large vs small validator?
In this dashboard a large validator will be a validator that has produced over 6 blocks and a small validator will be one that has produced less than 6 blocks.
Methodology
In this dashboard we are looking to see how concentrated block creation has been on Ethereum since the merge. We will split up block creators in Large and small based on how many blocks they have created and see if we can find patterns in these two groups of validators. The data for this dashboard will come from the ethereum.core.fact_blocks table of Flipsideās database.
Sections
- Block creation Overview
- Large block creators
- Small block creators
Large block creators
Observations
- Each hour out of the ~300 Blocks created only around 15 of these blocks were created by small validators
- Over 95% of all blocks created where created by large validators
- the validator that created the most blocks has created over 15K blocks
- there are more validators that have created 1 block than all the other validators combined
- Each hour there is around 60 block creators
Small block creators
Block creation Overview
Conclusion
- Block creation Overview
- Each hour out of the ~300 Blocks created only around 15 of these blocks were created by small validators
- Over 95% of all blocks created where created by large validators
- the validator that created the most blocks has created over 15K blocks
- there are more validators that have created 1 block than all the other validators combined
- Each hour there is around 60 block creators
- Large block creators
- The top 3 validators have created over 50% of all blocks created by large validators
- Most hours 2 Validators Created over 50% of all blocks
- the largest group of block creators on Ethereum are cretors that have made between 1,000 and 10,000 blocks
- Small block creators
- There are 1810 validators on Ethereum that have produce less than 6 blocks, and over 1,000 validators have produced 1 block
- Of the blocks created by small validators, validators the have created 1,2, and 3 blocks have created most of them