Decrypting Distributed Ledger Design - Taxonomy, Classification and Blockchain Community Evaluation

More than 1000 distributed ledger projects raising \$600 billion in investments in 2016 feature the unprecedented and disruptive potential of the blockchain technology. A systematic analysis, comparison and rigorous evaluation of the different design features of distributed ledgers and their implications in performance and applications is a challenge. The fast evolving blockchain landscape creates an increasing gap in a common and comprehensive understanding of the techno-socio-economic design space of distributed ledgers and their supported cryptoeconomies. This paper contributes a conceptual architecture, a taxonomy and a classification of 29 distributed ledger systems. Compared to related work, the proposed taxonomy and classification is highly comprehensive and robust as defined in earlier taxonomy theory and validated in a crowd-sourced study using blockchain community feedback to harvest the wisdom of the crowd.$