PoS Public Chain Competition: On-chain Data Analysis of ETH2.0, Tezos, and Cosmos

In 2020, PoS inflationary public chains became one of the hot topics in the market. This article will analyze and compare the on-chain data of three well-known PoS projects: ETH2.0, Tezos, and Cosmos, exploring their performance in terms of the number of holding addresses and the amount of holdings.

ETH2.0 is a major upgrade of Ethereum, transitioning from a PoW consensus mechanism to a PoS consensus mechanism. This means the issuance rate of ETH will decrease from nearly 10% to less than 2%, lower than the inflation rate of traditional currencies, highlighting the scarcity of ETH.

Tezos is a high-performance underlying public chain, characterized by its self-amendment feature. XTZ holders can either stake to become nodes or delegate to "bakers" to participate in governance, allowing for technical upgrades and iterations, thus minimizing the possibility of forks.

Cosmos provides a decentralized network with scalability and interoperability, built on the Tendermint consensus algorithm, achieving interoperability between public blockchains through an inter-blockchain communication protocol.

The PoS mechanism has become the mainstream trend of the new generation of public chains. Compared to PoW mining, Staking participates in network security management by staking tokens, preventing inflation dilution. However, PoS also has some issues, such as some projects causing users to "earn tokens but lose money" due to falling coin prices.

As of June 17, 2020, there are 101 million accounts for ETH, 546,000 accounts for Tezos, and 31,000 accounts for ATOM.

From the perspective of token concentration, the top 10 addresses of ETH hold 15.93% of the tokens, the top 100 addresses hold 35.32%, and the top 1000 addresses hold 64.87%. The top 10 addresses of ATOM hold 88.82% of the tokens, the top 100 addresses hold 98.62%, and the top 1000 addresses hold 99.94%. The top 10 addresses of Tezos hold 20.71% of the tokens, the top 100 addresses hold 53.24%, and the top 1000 addresses hold 81.23%.

Data shows that ETH performs best in terms of decentralization. As a newer public chain, Tezos has a token distribution in its top 10 and top 100 addresses that is similar to ETH, indicating good decentralization potential.

In terms of staking rate and yield, the dynamic staking rate of ATOM is 93.88%, with an annualized yield of 9.26%. The dynamic staking rate of XTZ is 79.93%, with an annualized yield of 6.94%. The annual issuance of ATOM is 1.42 times that of non-staked circulating tokens, while for XTZ it is 27%, which is relatively more reasonable.

From the perspective of address activity, 38% of ETH addresses have been active in the past year, involving 76.01% of circulating tokens. Tezos has 56.2% of addresses active in the past year, involving 95.17% of circulating tokens. Cosmos has 44.25% of addresses active in the past month, with 95.5% of addresses active in the first five months of 2020.

The overall address activity of Tezos and Cosmos is relatively high, especially with more than 60% of Tezos addresses remaining active in the past month. This is related to the shorter launch time of the two projects and the active participation of early supporters. At the same time, the support for Staking by exchanges and wallets has also promoted token activity.

Overall, ETH leads in decentralization, but Tezos performs excellently in several metrics and is expected to become a dark horse in the PoS race. The competitiveness of future PoS public chains will depend on decentralized governance, ecological improvement, developer community building, and the creation of unique advantages.