On the Bandwidth Consumption of Blockchains

2026-01-26

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of systematic empirical comparisons of bandwidth consumption across mainstream blockchain protocols, which hinders accurate estimation of node deployment costs. For the first time, it conducts cross-chain network traffic measurements on five prominent protocols—Algorand, Aptos, Avalanche, Redbelly, and Solana—by monitoring inbound and outbound traffic to quantitatively analyze how bandwidth usage varies over time, with network scale, and across validator roles. The findings reveal that the underlying transport protocol is the primary determinant of bandwidth consumption, that decoupling node roles can substantially reduce traffic, and that protocols exhibit markedly different sensitivities to network size. This work provides crucial empirical insights for the design and resource optimization of blockchain networks.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Scalability, Parallel & Distributed Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication
• Application Domains: Transportation

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web measurements

Abstract

With the advent of blockchain technology, the number of proposals has boomed. The network traffic imposed by these blockchain proposals increases the cost of hosting nodes. Unfortunately, as of today, we are not aware of any comparative study of the bandwidth consumption of blockchains. In this paper, we propose the first empirical comparison of blockchain bandwidth consumption. To this end, we measure the network traffic of blockchain network nodes of five blockchain protocols: Algorand, Aptos, Avalanche, Redbelly and Solana. We study the variation over time, differentiate the receiving and sending traffic and analyze how this traffic varies with the number of nodes and validators. We conclude that the transport protocol is the main factor impacting the network traffic, segregating node roles helps reduce traffic and different blockchains are differently impacted by the network size.

Problem

• blockchain
• bandwidth consumption
• network traffic
• empirical comparison

Innovation

• blockchain bandwidth
• empirical comparison
• network traffic analysis
• transport protocol
• node role segregation