Introduction

Polygon, previously known as MATIC, is a protocol that allows to increase the scalability of the Ethereum Blockchain and add new use cases. Polygon works through a sidechain that connects to the Ethereum network allowing for increased processing of the Blockchain. Ethereum's network has been having scalability issues since the rise of ICOs in 2017, issues that have multiplied with the advent of NFTs and Decentralized Finance (DeFi). Polygon is everything Ethereum aims to be with Ethereum 2.0. It is a project that fixes Ethereum's processing capacity problems.

The Ethereum blockchain can perform a limited number of transactions per second. The throughput rate sits at roughly 14 transactions per second for the base layer. Each transaction comes with transaction costs called gas fees on Ethereum. Polygon has the potential to handle up to 65,000 transactions per second, whereas Ethereum can process only up to roughly 17 transactions per second. 

Methods

• Daily Polygon transactions
• Daily Polygon % of transactions succeeded vs failed
• Daily users transferring and receiving
• Daily % of users transferring vs receiving
• Daily transactions vs users by average transaction fee

In these two graphs we can see the daily successful and fail transactions from July 1st to the present day. We can clearly see that almost all transactions are successful. It has a fairly stable trend, although there has been a peak in successful transactions on July 12th , as they have dropped to 1.6M when they are normally at about 2.5M. We can also see that 95% of the transactions represent successful transactions and 5% represent fail transactions. Therefore, we can see that the number of successful transactions is high.

In these two graphs we have analyzed the daily users transferring and receiving. There is a trend quite similar to the previous graphs. We can also see the peak on July 12th, which has dropped in users transferring to 187k, when the average is about 220k. There is a very clear difference between the users who make transfers and those who receive them. The maximum number of receiving users was 97k, while on the same day, there were 237k users making transfers.

In these two graphs we have analyzed the daily transactions and average transactions fee and compared it with the users. First of all, we can see that the number of transactions made during the day is very high, while the median transaction fee is very low. In addition, there is a very stable trend in fees and daily transactions.

Secondly, we see a clear correlation between users and transactions made; more transactions made, the more users there are. We also see that when these values are lower, i.e. the number of transactions and users, the average fees go up.

Key insights

• Almost all Polygon transactions are successful.
• There is a fairly stable trend between successful and fail transactions.
• The 95% represent successful transactions and the 5% represent fail transactions.
• There is a clear difference between the users who make transfers and those who receive them.
• The number of transactions made during the day is very high and the median transaction fee is very low.
• There is a correlation between users and transactions.
• When the number of users and transactions are lower, the fees go up.