Our vision

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Why we created the EDI

The field of decentralisation metrics is new. There is currently no universally accepted measurement for how decentralised blockchain systems are - either within the industry, academia or the regulatory community. The EDI will collect primary data and conduct conceptual work to create net metrics for decentralised systems in blockchain, distributed ledger technology and cryptocurrencies.

How the EDI will work

The EDI will take numerous metrics from different disciplines – such as economics, information theory and network science – and measure them across different dimensions of blockchain systems, assigning weights to them. These will then be merged into a single index that will represent the overall decentralisation of a system.

Our vision for the future

We want anyone to be able to conduct an easy and systematic comparison of how decentralised each blockchain system is. So, each blockchain will have an easy-to-understand quantitative assessment, based on the academic research outlined above, which can be accessed by anyone interested in making informed decisions.

Regulators will be able to use it to help decide whether a cryptocurrency constitutes a financial instrument, blockchain users can decide which chain is safer for their transactions, and researchers can review and build upon the EDI’s methodology. The metrics can also be used to influence regulatory policies impacting adoption of future decentralised systems. 

Plus, the research that supports the EDI and the software that collects and parses the data will be made freely available under an open source license, so that anyone can understand the theoretical foundations and reproduce the EDI's results.