Properties of the Tangle for Uniform Random and Random Walk Tip Selection

Abstract: The growing number of applications for distributed ledger technologies is driving both industry and academia to solve the limitations of blockchain, particularly its scalability issues. Recent distributed ledger technologies have replaced the blockchain linear structure with a more flexible directed acyclic graph in an attempt to accommodate a higher throughput. Despite the fast-growing diffusion of directed acyclic graph based distributed ledger technologies, researchers lack a basic understanding of their behavior. In this paper we analyze the Tangle, a directed acyclic graph that is used (with certain modifications) in various protocols such as IOTA, Byteball, Avalanche or SPECTRE. Our contribution is threefold. First, we run simulations in a continuous-time model to examine tip count stability and cumulative weight evolution while varying the rate of incoming transactions. In particular we confirm analytical predictions on the number of tips with uniform random tip selection strategy. Second, we show how different tip selection algorithms affect the growth of the Tangle. Moreover, we explain these differences by analyzing the spread of exit probabilities of random walks. Our findings confirm analytically derived predictions and provide novel insights on the different phases of growth of cumulative weight as well as on the average time difference for a transaction to receive its first approval when using distinct tip selection algorithms. Lastly, we analyze simulation overhead and performance as a function of Tangle size and compare results for different tip selection algorithms.