PhD thesis XXXVIII cycle 2026

Comparing Blockchains: Performance, Energy, and Economic Efficiencies

This doctoral dissertation develops a multidimensional and context-aware approach to comparing blockchain systems. It studies how protocol design, network topology, workloads, deployment conditions, and economic structure shape performance, energy use, experimental stability, and economic efficiency.

Author

Vincenzo P. Di Perna

Institution

Università degli Studi di Camerino

School of Advanced Studies

Doctoral course

Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology

Curriculum: Economics and Finance

Public defense

23 June 2026

Scientific field: INF/01

Open thesis PDF Download thesis View in UNICAM Research Repository

The dissertation is also archived in the institutional research repository of the University of Camerino.

blockchain systems

network topologies

workload profiles

evaluation dimensions

Research problem

Blockchain efficiency cannot be represented by a single headline metric. Results depend on the interaction between protocol design, network conditions, workload semantics, infrastructure, and the economic ecosystem. Comparisons based only on average transactions per second can therefore hide variability, deployment assumptions, energy trade-offs, and structural differences between crypto-assets.

The dissertation addresses this evidence gap through controlled benchmarking, repeated measurements, energy instrumentation, openly documented artifacts, and an entropy-based aggregation of economic indicators.

Four dimensions of efficiency

Performance efficiency

Topology-aware measurements of throughput, commit ratio, and confirmation latency under controlled workloads and deployment conditions.

Energy efficiency

Node- and system-level energy measurements, including energy per committed transaction and the effect of network structure and workload intensity.

Repeatability and predictability

Multi-run analysis of dispersion, worst-case deviations, variance sources, and the stability of performance expectations across configurations.

Economic efficiency

An entropy-based approach that aggregates heterogeneous on-chain indicators into an interpretable measure of ecosystem balance.

Experimental scope

The technical studies compare Algorand, Diem, Ethereum Clique, Quorum IBFT, and Solana under five logical network topologies: fat-tree, full mesh, hypercube, scale-free, and torus. The systems are exercised with transfer and smart-contract workloads inspired by DDoS, FIFA, GAFAM, gaming, PayPal, and VISA scenarios, using both 10-node and 40-node configurations.

Algorand Diem Ethereum Clique Quorum IBFT Solana Network emulation Multi-run analysis Energy measurement

Main contributions

Lilith, a system-agnostic benchmarking framework that combines workload generation, deterministic orchestration, resource control, and network emulation.
A topology-controlled comparison of five blockchain systems under realistic transfer and smart-contract workloads.
An energy evaluation that relates network topology and workload conditions to total energy use and energy per committed transaction.
A network-controlled, multi-run methodology and public dataset for studying experimental repeatability and performance predictability.
The Entropy Balance index (EB-index), which combines heterogeneous on-chain indicators into a single economic-efficiency score.