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After a successful launch, Frontier crossed its 100,000th milestone earlier this week. Here are some interesting stats from these first blocks.
First 50 block times (in seconds):
Immediately after formation, it took 29 seconds for the second block to appear, then 31 and 29 seconds for the next two blocks. It is not very surprising that miners scrambled with their settings when the final genesis block became known.
After these first blocks, we see the block time decrease significantly due to the attack of larger miners, reaching 1 second which is the limit imposed by the consensus protocol.
Let’s now look at the average block time (every 200 blocks from genesis to block 10,000):
We can see hashing power already attacking the network after the first few hundred blocks, with block times of 1-2 seconds as the difficulty adjustment algorithm catches up. This algorithm increases or decreases the difficulty by diff/2048 per block, depending on the block time.
After a few thousand blocks, we see the difficulty rise enough that block times get into the 4-5 second range. After 9,000 blocks, we started getting closer to our target time of 15 seconds.
Top miners in first 100k blocks (address, blocks, %):
0xef247e639d49461d25f57e9362cade3120910ce0 851 0.81% 0x790b8a3ce86e707ed0ed32bf89b3269692a23cc1 914 0.87% 0x0037ce3d4b7f8729c8607d8d0248252be68202c0 949 0.90% 0xbb12b5a9b85d4ab8cde6056e9c1b2a4a337d2261 1102 1.04% 0x580992b51e3925e23280efb93d3047c82f17e038 1129 1.07% 0xf2d2aff1320476cb8c6b607199d23175cc595693 1141 1.08% 0x47ff6576639c2e94762ea5443978d7681c0e78dc 1159 1.10% 0x1b7047b4338acf65be94c1a3e8c5c9338ad7d67c 1335 1.26% 0xeb1325c8d9d3ea8d74ac11f4b00f1b2367686319 1446 1.37% 0xbcb2e3693d246e1fc00348754334badeb88b2a11 1537 1.45% 0xa50ec0d39fa913e62f1bae7074e6f36caa71855b 1692 1.60% 0xf8e0ca3ed80bd541b94bedcf259e8cf2141a9523 2437 2.31% 0x9746c7e1ef2bd21ff3997fa467593a89cb852bd0 3586 3.39% 0x88d74a59454f6cf3b51ef6b9136afb6b9d405a88 4292 4.06% 0xbb7b8287f3f0a933474a79eae42cbca977791171 8889 8.41% 0xf927a40c8b7f6e07c5af7fa2155b4864a4112b13 9151 8.66% 0xe6a7a1d47ff21b6321162aea7c6cb457d5476bca 11912 11.28%
While no one can know for sure if a single miner is using multiple coinbase addresses, assuming they are using a single address, we have a very even distribution of hash power over the first 100k blocks. 0xe6a7a1d47ff21b6321162aea7c6cb457d5476bca with 11% hash power ethpool, the first mining pool for Ethereum. Next we have two large miners at around 8%. After these three, the distribution is quite equal, with most miners owning less than 1% of the total hashing power.
However, things are evolving rapidly in the world of Ethereum, and if we look at the last 15,000 blocks we see:
0x580992b51e3925e23280efb93d3047c82f17e038 327 2.2% 0xbb7b8287f3f0a933474a79eae42cbca977791171 496 3.3% 0xf927a40c8b7f6e07c5af7fa2155b4864a4112b13 612 4.1% 0x790b8a3ce86e707ed0ed32bf89b3269692a23cc1 674 4.5% 0xe6a7a1d47ff21b6321162aea7c6cb457d5476bca 5775 38.5%
It is clear here that ethpool currently has approximately 40% of the hashing power, while the number of second and third miners has decreased to 4%.
blocks in a row
Another interesting statistic is looking at continuous groups of blocks from the same miner. This can give insight into how hash power and response time affect large miners.
Early after launch, most of the consecutive blocks we saw were 6, for example blocks 1578, 1579, 1580, 1581, 1582 and 1583 were mined by 0x9dfc0377058b7b9eb277421769b56df1395705f0.
0xbb7b8287f3f0a933474a79eae42cbca977791171 also mined 6 blocks multiple times, for example blocks 656, 657, 658, 659, 660, 661.
This miner also mined 5, 4, 3 and 2 blocks in a row on a number of occasions, which isn’t too surprising with 21% of the total hashing power at the time.
This happened very early after launch when the difficulty was rapidly increasing and many miners had not yet joined the network. With hash power equalizing after block 5000, we haven’t seen more than 4 consecutive blocks for some time.
However, most recently consecutive blocks are 10, for example blocks 103049, 103050, 103051, 103052, 103053, 103054, 103055, 103056, 103057, 103058 by ethpool. With the exception of Ethpool, no miner had more than 6 consecutive blocks.
Stay tuned for more statistics from the Frontier Network as we observe them over the coming months!
Gustav Simonson He is a developer on the Ethereum Security and Go teams.
