Methodology

The Edinburgh Decentralization Index (EDI) is a methodology framework for defining, analyzing, and evaluating the decentralization level of blockchain systems across multiple layers. These layers are: Hardware, Software, Network, Consensus, Tokenomics, Client API, Governance, and Geography.

This dashboard offers visualizations of the Software layer results. This layer is evaluated by looking at the open source repositories that are associated with different blockchain clients, and specifically looking at their commit history. The dashboard currently provides results for the following projects:

• Bitcoin Core (Bitcoin)
• Bitcoin Cash Node (Bitcoin Cash)
• Cardano Node (Cardano)
• Go Ethereum (Ethereum)
• Nethermind (Ethereum)
• Litecoin Core (Litecoin)
• Polkadot SDK (Polkadot)
• Solana (Solana)
• Tezos (Tezos)
• Zcash (Zcash)

A user can choose which options will be taken into account when generating the graphs. These include:

• Sample Window, i.e. how many consecutive commits to group together before applying a metric. It can be one of: 100, 250, 500, 1000.
• Contribution Type, i.e. what counts as a contribution. The options are:
  • Number of commits: each commit is counted as a single contribution.
  • Number of merge commits: only merge commits are counted as contributions.
  • Lines of code changed: each line of code changed (added or removed) counts as a contribution. In this case, all commits are counted, but each is assigned a different contribution weight, based on the number of updated lines associated with it.
• Contributor Type, i.e. who is seen as responsible for the contribution. Author: the person who wrote the code of the commit. Committer: the person who committed the code on behalf of the original author (can be the same or different from the author).