Blockchains all solve the same high‑level problem: how to reach consensus over a constantly changing state. But anyone who has spent real time inside the data knows that this surface‑level similarity hides an enormous amount of intentional diversity. The how and what of that state, especially as it relates to financial activity, is where the real complexity lies.

At NODE40, this is the layer we live in every day.

In the early years, UTXO-based systems like Bitcoin defined what a blockchain looked like. Then Ethereum arrived and fundamentally changed the model by introducing persistent accounts, smart contracts, and a radically different way of expressing intent and value transfer. Since then, we’ve seen an explosion of new designs. Solana, for example, looks nothing like either Bitcoin or Ethereum once you dig into how transactions are composed.

Cosmos-based chains represent yet another evolutionary branch. They are particularly useful to study – not because they are uniquely complex, but because they expose assumptions that many systems quietly rely on.

Familiarity is Not Sameness

Each blockchain defines its own economic model, token semantics, execution rules, and governance. Even small configuration differences can materially change how financial activity should be interpreted.

For a human user, many of these differences are abstracted away by wallets and explorers. For a financial system tasked with reconstruction, attribution, and auditability they are everything. Intent is important, but mechanics matter too.

The table below highlights a small sample of where familiar concepts diverge across four major blockchain families.

Every chain shown supports transactions, fees, and rewards. But the meaning of those concepts, such as when value is earned, how it is realized, how it is ordered, and who is economically responsible, differs in ways that cannot be smoothed over with a single global model.

Economic Models: Accrual, Realization, and Intent

This becomes especially clear when looking at proof-of-stake systems.

In Cosmos-based chains, rewards do not simply “appear” when a transaction executes. They accrue continuously over time and only become explicit on-chain events when withdrawn. Validator commission, delegation rewards, and redelegations, all affect who earned what, when, and under which role.

On the surface, this feels familiar to anyone who has worked with other staking systems. In practice, it forces an important distinction: accrual may not be the same thing as realization.

At NODE40, we separate these flows intentionally. Validator earnings, operator activity, and delegator rewards are distinct economic roles, even when they are controlled by the same entity. When a validator commission is withdrawn, for example, the on-chain transaction may send funds to an operator account. But the economic reality is that the validator earned that value over time. Reconstructing that reality requires unwinding history, not just reading transactions.

This pattern is not unique to Cosmos. It exists across many blockchains. Cosmos simply makes it impossible to ignore.

Chain IDs, Forks, and the Myth of a Global Timeline

One of the most subtle design choices appears when blockchains fork.

In Cosmos-based chains, a fork creates a new chain ID and resets block height back to zero. From a protocol perspective, this is clean and explicit. From a data and accounting perspective, it breaks the assumption that block height is globally monotonic.

At NODE40, block height is one component of transaction ordering. We prefer timestamps, but block time alone is often insufficient. When multiple transactions occur in the same second, ordering by block height and then by transaction index within the block becomes important. Solana is even more interesting because transaction timestamps are expressed in seconds, but blocks are written every 400ms. Moreover, a single transaction often contains multiple operations, so ordering includes date, block, instruction index, inner instruction index!

What happens when block heights reset?

Today block height is no longer globally monotonic. Ordering algorithms that work fine on single‑chain histories suddenly need context: Which chain ID? Which era? What came before the fork?

We’ve encountered similar problems elsewhere. Early Solana, for example, did not expose timestamps for roughly the first 38 million slots. There, ordering requires slot‑based sequencing and date interpolation. Cosmos forks present a different problem, but the lesson is the same.

There is no universal notion of time on blockchains.

Why Generic Blockchain Accounting Doesn’t Exist

Every generation of blockchains has forced us to abandon assumptions that once felt foundational.

UTXO systems define value in terms of spendable outputs. Ethereum introduced persistent accounts and internal state changes. Solana challenged assumptions about atomicity, ordering, and time itself. Cosmos formalized multi-chain identity and introduced explicit timeline resets.

Large systems like NODE40 Balance evolve alongside this diversity. They cannot be built generically from the inception, because the next blockchain will always find a new way to violate yesterday’s assumptions.

This is not a flaw in blockchain design. It is intentional and well understood by our in-house experts.

The Real Work: Turning Data Into a Financial Narrative

Blockchains are not just ledgers. They are historical records of intent.

The real work lies in retrieving that history, unwinding it correctly, and reconstructing a coherent financial narrative. Any one of those steps can be deceptively difficult and fail independently if the underlying assumptions are wrong. Since the objective is to understand intent, the final narrative must be defensible to CFOs, auditors, regulators, and sometimes juries.

As users move across chains, protocols, and economic models, this work becomes more important. Innovation moves quickly. Accountability does not.

Blockchains may be wildly different by design, but the need to understand them precisely, explain them clearly, and trust their histories is universal.

Sean Ryan, Co-founder and CTO, NODE40