The Tree of Block-Chain

Abstract

This study covers the evolutionary development of block-chain technologies over the last 11 years (2009 — 2019) and sheds lights on potential areas of innovation in heretofore unexplored sub-components. For this purpose, we collected and analysed detailed data on 107 different block-chain technologies and studied their component-wise technological evolution. The diversity of their designs was captured by deconstructing the block-chains using the Tasca-Tessone taxonomy (2019) to build what we call the "tree of block-chain" composed of block-chain main and sub-components. With the support of information theory and phylogenetics, we found that most design explorations have been conducted within the components in the areas of consensus mechanisms and cryptographic primitives. We also show that some sub-components like {Consensus Immutability and Failure Tolerance}, {Access and Control layer} and {Access Supply Management} have predictive power over other sub-components. We finally found that few dominant design models - the genetic driving clusters of Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP - influenced the evolutionary paths of most of the succeeding block-chains.