Today’s blockchains are not as decentralized as they claim to be, with the Nakamoto coefficient metric, we are going to see the differences between the most popular blockchains and the Massa blockchain.
What is the Nakamoto coefficient ?
As the wave of adoption in decentralized blockchains continues, it is important we pay attention to how decentralized these blockchains are. One metric to gauge the decentralized nature of a blockchain would be the Nakamoto Coefficient. The Nakamoto Coefficient represents the number of validators (nodes) that would have to collude together to successfully slow down or block any respective blockchain from functioning properly. The higher the Nakamoto Coefficient relative to the total number of validators, the lower the risk of collusion disrupting a decentralized blockchain.
Popular Blockchains
Let’s take a look at the Nakamoto Coefficient for some of the most popular blockchains.
A visual is below. In this example, the Nakamoto coefficient of the Avalanche blockchain is 26, as it would require 26 entities to get to 51% control.
| Blockchain | Nakamoto Coefficient | Total # of Validators |
| Bitcoin | 7,349 | 14,409 |
| Avalanche | 26 | 1,188 |
| Binance Smart Chain | 7 | 44 |
| Cosmos | 6 | 150 |
| Fantom | 3 | 66 |
| Polygon | 2 | 100 |
| Solana | 19 | 1,249 |
| Terra | 7 | 130 |
| THORChain | 29 | 76 |
Massa Nakamoto coefficient 1000+
At Massa, the decentralization is non-negotiable. That’s why the team spent several years of research on a new consensus protocol. Massa blockchain multithreaded technology allows thousands of transactions per second in a network with thousands of nodes.
Moreover, they ensure that the network will be fully decentralized from the start at several levels:
Coin distribution: First, one of the most important things in a Proof-of-Stake system is coin distribution.Massa ensure that the system is decentralized from the start by doing a fair initial distribution. No entity, including ourselves, will own more than a small fraction of the coins. This is exemplified by our private sale, which is, to our knowledge, one of the most decentralized private sale, with a large number of entities and no whale. Our public sale will follow the same design, with a limited amount available per person. Our goal is to have a Nakamoto coefficient above 1000.
Entry price: In Massa we target low hardware (standard desktop computer) and staking requirements in order to lower the barrier for entry. This is a necessary condition to ensure that people can run a node on their home computer and to have a healthy and resilient network. Our low hardware requirements already allows more than 6 500+ nodes to run on our testnet.
Decentralization. Why should I care? | by Massa Labs | Jul, 2022 | Medium
stay tuned for massa !
