How we searched for miners for Robonomics token airdrop

by Sergey Nedashkovsky

“Since summer Airalab team has launched Robonomics network in the Ethereum infrastructure. By the end of 2018, our team will launch the economy of the XRT token in order to create an incentive to support Robonomics by independent providers. Since it will be necessary for providers to spend gas on the execution of the Robonomics program in the decentralized Ethereum computer (read more in Robonomics whitepaper, chapter 6 “Robonomics Token, XRT”), we believe that the first people to offer to become providers of our network are mining pools and miners. But we do not intend to offer “knocking on their doors”, together with the cyber•Drop team we decided to distribute up to 1% of XRT tokens, which can be obtained by automatically signing the message with your address, unless, of course, your address is found on the cyber•Drop’s list :) About the process of getting XRT will be written later in the Robonomics blog. For now, read the cyber•Drop analysis report”, — Sergei Lonshakov, Robonomics network architect.

In the analysis, we considered the period from 4,404,374 to 6,558,806 blocks (from 2017–10–22 to 2018–10–21). All values and conclusions are given for this period, unless otherwise specified.

The mining pool is an address that receives a reward from the system.

The miner is the person performing mining and receiving reward from the mining pool.

Data on the addresses of miners and the amount of reward received by them is not directly contained in the chain. We set ourselves the task to identify the most active addresses of miners.

The distribution of rewards among mining pools is uneven, TOP 20 of mining pools get 95% of rewards:

When analyzing the transactions of the mining pools, we found that they are divided into two classes according to the average size of the outgoing transaction:

1. less than 10 ETH — 91% from the volume of rewards and 12 from TOP 20
2. more than 100 ETH — 8% from the volume of rewards and 8 from TOP 20

We decided to analyze the first group, from now on all the data are given for it.

The typical structure of the mining pool from the first group is as follows:

The problem is that other transactions are also present:

• Operations with cold wallets of pools;
• Operations with exchanges.

In our work, we tried to isolate only transactions specific to miners.

We analyzed 756 mining pools, 1M addresses and more than 30M transactions.

The results we got:

1. Throughout all of the blockchain:

• Rewards — 7.8M ETH
  (7.5M ETH static and uncle rewards, 0.3M ETH fees)

2. Throughout the first group:

• Rewards — 7.1M ETH or 91% from general volume of the reward;
• Incoming transactions — 183K ETH;
• Outgoing transactions — 7.2M ETH.

When analyzing the incoming transactions of the first group, it was found that from 183K ETH:

• 113K ETH transferred by addresses that received funds from mining pools;
• 40K ETH received from other mining pools;
• 30K ETH other.

We took into account these revenues and did not consider them in determining the amounts transferred to miners.

Among the addresses that received funds from mining pools, we left addresses with a share of incoming funds from mining pools more than 50%.

After this cleaning, the volume of transactions amounted to 6.6M ETH or 85% of the volume of rewards for mining.

The number of miner addresses was 708K.

For the purpose of airdrop, it is desirable to identify addresses that have a long lifetime, since otherwise it is likely to send funds to an address that no one else will use and track.

By the lifetime of an address, we mean the difference between the time of the first and the last transaction.

The amount of reward received by addresses with a lifetime of up to one month is 2.9%. However, the number of these addresses is 26%.

The addresses with the last transaction made less than 1 month ago account for 64% of the total reward received, and they constitute 32% of the number of miner addresses.

The number of addresses with a lifetime of more than 1 month and with the date of the last transaction less than 1 month ago is 209K addresses and corresponds to 4M ETH of reward.

For the purpose of airdrop, it is advisable to avoid sending tokens to addresses that are smart contracts. Otherwise, there is a possibility that the recipient of the tokens will not be able to use them.

The number of wallets was 836K, the volume of funds sent from mining pools was 6.7M ETH or 93%.

The number of smart contracts was 59K, the volume of funds sent from the mining pools was 0.5M ETH or 7%.

All mining pools and selected miner addresses were included in the airdrop list.

We selected the addresses of miners based on the following conditions:

• Miner reward from mining pools with an average outgoing transaction value of less than 10 ETH was considered.
• The amount of the miner’s reward is reduced by the amount of transactions sent by the miner to the mining pool.
• The share of incoming transactions from mining pools must be at least 50% of all incoming transactions.
• The difference between the time of the first and the last transaction must be at least 30 days.
• The last transaction must be made later than 30 days before the end of the period in question (later than 09/21/2018).
• The address has to be a wallet.

Conditions are met by 226K addresses of miners who received 3.9M ETH rewards.

The list of addresses and the number of tokens you can see here.

Originally published at blog.aira.life on November 1, 2018.