The Hottest Minute

We can only assess the capacity of a blockchain in terms of transaction volume by seeing how it behaves when there is the most demand for blockchain. Only when observing the transactions going on when the blockchain is at its busiest can we really assess is capacity. Therefore, below we show the transactions that each blockchain processed during their hottest minute (i.e., the minute in which they processed the most transactions) in the last 90 days.

0. What is NEAR?

NEAR Protocol is a Proof-of-Stake blockchain with support for smart contracts. The blockchain’s native token is $NEAR, and it’s used to pay for transaction fees. In pursuit of developing a user-friendly platform, NEAR allows for human-readable account names. NEAR was created to tackle the scalability problem that all blockchains face. It does so through the implementation of sharding, which lessens the computational load of the network.

1. Dashboard Objectives

On this dashboard, we will compare NEAR’s performance to three other major blockchains. We have chosen Ethereum and Solana, since they are the largest Smart Contract Layer 1 Blockchains, and Polygon, the largest Layer 2 to Ethereum. They are compared in terms of performance, which we have defined in terms of their usage, transaction success rate, and transaction volume capacity.

2. Analysis

Am I gonna lose my gas?

Ethereum and Polygon are by far the best performing and most steady blockchains in terms of transaction successrate, the first never going below 90% and the second only 5 of the 90 days.

The other L1 blockchains have higher swings in performance, both NEAR and Solana dropping below 50% during the Luna Fiasco.

NEAR hovers around 80%, while Solana’s success rate has been increasing in the past weeks.

Last 90 days, an overview

The time frame allows us to compare the resilience of a blockchain to outliers in behavior, since we include the May 8th Luna Meltdown and the posterior market negativity.

• NEAR was on an up-trend until said event, after which we see a spike only in failed transactions shortly after, followed by a seady decrease.
• Ethereum didn’t even break a sweat. We even see an increase in transactions on May 12th, likely due to users adjusting their DeFi positions.
• Solana has seen a steady increase in daily number of transactions for the past 90 days, consistently reaching 50M daily transactions in total.
• In the case of Polygon, the behavior is similar to that of Ethereum until the second week of May, after which transactions seem to steadily decline. Gas is cheap now in Ethereum, which may be causing this downtrend in Polygon. The data for some of the days is missing.

3. Takeaways

• NEAR was doing good, but it is not doing as well during a bear market.
• Ethereum didn’t flinch at the change in market sentiment in terms of daily transactions.
• Solana has been growing these past months
• Polygon is losing transaction volume.
• The Ethereum based chains have the best success rate, followed by NEAR and Solana, which has been improving lately.
• Solana and Polygon can process the most transactions in a minute.

Contact data

Thank you for reading!

For any questions or feedback, feel free to contact me on Discord at CarlOwOs#4288 or Twitter at @CarlOwOs1

July 15th, 2022.

The blockchain that handled the most transactions in a minute is Solana, followed by Polygon. Both were born as scaling solutions to Ethereum, and they seem to do their job.

NEAR is not among the highest performing blockchains. It is not clear whether this is because of the chain itself or because it has never been pushed to its limits.

As expected, Ethereum is the worst performing chain in terms of transactions in a minute.