Evaluating cryptonote-style blockchains

Abstract

To hide user identity, blockchain-based cryptocurrencies utilize public key based coin addresses to represent users. However, the user identity can still be identified by linking the coin addresses to the IP address of a user, through network traffic analysis. Ring Signature based protocols, such as CryptoNote and RingCT, have been designed to anonymize the payers of a transaction, and deployed in leading cryptocurrencies like Bytecoin and Monero. This paper provides a comprehensive evaluation on the performance of Bytecoin and Monero, at both the protocol level and the system level. In particular, our evaluation includes theoretical complexity analysis of the protocols and practical performance analysis of the Bytecoin and Monero implementation. In addition, we also provide an analysis on the existing Bytecoin and Monero transactions, based on the public blockchain data. Our results identify the execution bottleneck and space overhead of generating and verifying transactions, which may encourage the design of more efficient protocols. We also provide insights based on our analysis on the performance of specific cryptographic algorithms, static analysis of the ring size distribution, of the input size distribution and output size distribution, and of the transaction size distribution.