Decentralization

The degree of decentralization (DoD) of a blockchain measures how far control and decision-making have been transferred from a central authority to a distributed network of nodes. It varies with the architecture (public versus private), the consensus mechanism, and the distribution of mining or staking power. A higher degree of decentralization increases both resilience and security.

Decentralization is the first of the three trilemma axes. In BlockchainBench it is measured through several metrics at once — how randomly block proposals are distributed among validation nodes, how geographically dispersed those nodes are, and, depending on the consensus protocol, how concentrated hashing power or stake is. The individual formulas are documented in Metrics.