  We investigate the relationship between underlying blockchain mechanism of
cryptocurrencies and its distributional characteristics. In addition to price,
we emphasise on using actual block size and block time as the operational
features of cryptos. We use distributional characteristics such as fourier
power spectrum, moments, quantiles, global we optimums, as well as the measures
for long term dependencies, risk and noise to summarise the information from
crypto time series. With the hypothesis that the blockchain structure explains
the distributional characteristics of cryptos, we use characteristic based
spectral clustering to cluster the selected cryptos into five groups. We
scrutinise these clusters and find that indeed, the clusters of cryptos share
similar mechanism such as origin of fork, difficulty adjustment frequency, and
the nature of block size. This paper provides crypto creators and users with a
better understanding toward the connection between the blockchain protocol
design and distributional characteristics of cryptos.
