Cryptocurrency Constellations Across the Three-Dimensional Space: Governance Decentralization, Security, and Scalability

In the post-Bitcoin era, many cryptocurrencies with a variety of goals and purposes have emerged in the digital arena. This article aims to map cryptocurrency protocols across three main defining dimensions, which are governance decentralization, security, and scalability. We theorize about the organizational and technological features that impact these three dimensions. Such features encompass roles permissiveness, validation network size, resource expenditure, and number of transactions per second. We map the different cryptocurrency constellations based on their consensus mechanisms, discussing the organizational and technological features of the various protocols applications and how they experience and play with the tradeoffs among governance decentralization, security, and scalability.