Crypto change Coinbase has unveiled a brand new metric dubbed the h-index to deal with distortions in monitoring onchain adoption brought on by airdrop-related actions.
Coinbase, a publicly traded U.S.-based cryptocurrency change, recognized for its growth of Base, a layer-2 resolution for Ethereum, has launched a brand new metric to supply a extra correct measure of blockchain community adoption. This new metric goals to mitigate distortions brought on by airdrop-related actions and Sybil assaults.
In a analysis report on Friday, Coinbase famous that investments in blockchain infrastructure have led to an extra of blockspace, making onchain transactions cheaper and fueling networks with a brand new wave of decentralized functions. Nonetheless, this alteration additionally made it difficult for analysts to trace ecosystem adoption as extra functions launch.
Conventional community metrics resembling complete transactions or every day energetic addresses will be skewed by Sybil assaults and airdrop actions, Coinbase says. To deal with this difficulty, Coinbase proposes a brand new metric known as the h-index, which balances the depth and breadth of onchain adoption. The h-index counts the variety of addresses receiving transactions from not less than that very same variety of distinctive sending addresses.
“In other words, an h-index of 100 means that 100 different receiving addresses had received transactions from at least 100 unique sending addresses over a given time frame.”
Coinbase
In accordance with Coinbase’s findings, when h-index utilized, Ethereum and Base networks exhibited probably the most widespread person exercise for the week ending Jun 6, adopted by Arbitrum and Polygon.
Whereas acknowledging the metric’s imperfections, Coinbase believes the h-index can shed “new perspectives on comparative chain adoption by mitigating the outsized influences of Sybils and measuring growth more broadly.”
The crypto change famous although that challenges nonetheless stay, together with variations in blockchain execution environments, which may have an effect on transaction codecs and knowledge interpretation. Moreover, the affect of change or different good contract wallets “could also distort numbers,” Coinbase admits.
Sybil assaults are a widely known kind of community assault within the crypto trade the place a single entity creates a number of pretend identities or nodes to realize management over a community or affect its operation. This form of exercise can manipulate community metrics and knowledge by creating quite a few false accounts or addresses to inflate transaction volumes or person exercise artificially to distort the notion of community utilization and adoption.