Observatory documentation

Summary

The objective of the Observatory is to provide an overview of the current state of the blockchain health and offer potential paths to further improvement. We want to help all blockchains to be healthy!

The Observatory is a service that tracks and summarizes blockchain observations, especially focusing on governance, performance, decentralization and public infrastructure. These domains relate to the health of the overall blockchain ecosystem.

The Observatory also implements an integrated scoring system for both validators and entire blockchains. The scoring system is not just descriptive but also actionable: it is possible to determine the effect of each validator on the score of the entire blockchain and thus understand which validators are leading or lagging the blockchain score. The scoring system weighs different aspects of blockchain health, such as signing performance, governance engagement or decentralization.

Dashboard

Scoring

Observatory first computes the score each individual validator and then computes the blockchain score as a stake-weighted average of individual validator scores.

In the full version of the Observatory, the dimensions affecting score are:

• Governance (does the validator vote when eligible to vote)

• Performance (what is the proportion of signed blocks in the last X days)

• Internet Service Providers score (based on voting power concentration in the ISP)

• Country score (based on voting power concentration in the country)

• Autonomous system (based on voting power concentration in the autonomous system)

If too much voting power is concentrated in any one country, ISP or Autonomous system, we reduce the score of all validators that reside within this entity.

In particular we want to emphasize that we do NOT determine whether any particular data center is of sufficient quality or not or whether any particular country has a more or less favorable attitude toward blockchain technology.

To dive deeper into the scoring system, read the detailed scoring documentation.