Recently, Aggelos Kiayias, Chair in Cyber Security and Privacy at University of Edinburgh and the Chief Scientist at Input Output Global (“IOG”), the blockchain technology firm behind Cardano’s R&D, introduced the Edinburgh Decentralisation Index (EDI) project.
IOG CTO Romain Pellerin called EDI, which is designed to measure “decentralization of blockchain networks beyond counting the number of validators and their power (weight) over the system (consensus protocol)”, a “major leap” for the crypto industry:
On 18 November 2022, IOG’s Ivan Irakoze published a blog post about this research project, which said:
“The EDI will provide a standard of measurable decentralization for the blockchain industry. Adopting the EDI could educate governments’ opinion of cryptocurrencies. The EDI has many possible use cases. It could be adopted by governments as part of a wider crypto regulatory framework, allowing users and organizations to determine a chain’s decentralization with more certainty…
“The index is being designed by a collaborative, interdisciplinary team of senior researchers and developers. The team works within the UoE’s Blockchain Technology Laboratory (BLT), supervised by Dr. Daniel Woods, lecturer in Cybersecurity at UoE’s School of Informatics, and Prof Aggelos Kiayias, chief scientist at IOG and UoE’s Chair in Cybersecurity and Privacy. The EDI will create a unified framework capable of evaluating degrees of decentralization, and is applicable to data extracted from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, and other chains…
“The index measures a chain’s decentralization across multiple layers, including: Hardware… Software… Network Consensus mechanism… Tokenomics… API… Governance… Validators’ geographic distribution.“
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