Introduction

For this bounty we are going to see how is Polygon performing regarding the recorded maximum, minimum and average time between two blocks and the average number of transactions per block, besides this we are also going to compare the Polygon performance to L1 and L2 chains in the same criteria, L1 means basically the base level of the blockchain and which their natives tokens are used (Ethereum blockchain and ETH token for example) meanwhile L2 chains are protocols built on top of L1 blockchains, this is done to solve the scaling difficultes of L1 chains and prevent them from growing too large, Polygon is an L2 chain built on top of Ethereum, they have their own token called MATIC, the L1 and L2 chains that we are going to use for this bounty are the following:

L1

• Solana
• Flow
• Near

L2

• Polygon
• Optimism
• Arbitrum

Methodology

• Get the average, maximum, minimum recorded time between two blocks and average transactions per block for Polygon, Flow, Solana, Near, Optimism and Arbitrum
• Get the average transactions per block for Polygon, Flow, Solana, Near, Optimism and Arbitrum
• Discuss the results

Time between blocks - Polygon v L2

There is not much to say here, overall Polygon performs the best out of the three, having no major issue regarding the maximum recorded time like Arbitrum had, and the minimum recorded time being 2 seconds is practically a non-issue even if the other 2 have 0 seconds of minimum recorded time because the difference is marginal.

Time between blocks - Polygon v L1

As we can see Flow, Solana and Near have a minimum recorded time of 0, these three chains are known for being pretty fast so this is not surprising, on the other hand Polygon has minimum recorded time of 2 seconds, it is important to mention that Polygon is a L2 protocol of Ethereum, L2 chains help with the scaling and transaction speed of L1 chains and 2 seconds is already pretty fast but considering Ethereum is already a slow blockchain, Polygon is most likely physically impossible to reach less than 2 seconds and is probably locked for this to be the minimum block chain creation speed. \n \n As for maximum recorded time it is the opposite, with Polygon being the blockchain with the least maximum time with 25 seconds, this metric can also tell us when these chains have had an outage or something that made them unable to create new blocks, so for Polygon to have a maximum recorded time of only 25 seconds means that there hasn’t been anything out of the ordinary for Polygon, For Flow and Solana however, we get 52k and 16k respectively, these are approximately 14 and 1.5 hours, now I’m not sure if this data is correct since as for Flow 14 hours is quite a lot, however I could not find any news about an outage for Flow, as for Solana the problem is the opposite, Solana is known for having some issues with outages, Solana had2 outages recently and one of them lasted 4.5 hours so the data does not quite match.

As for average time, we see that the 4 blockchains are quite equal, with Solana taking the least time between blocks and Polygon the most, still the difference is minimal.

Conclusion

The block time race

We have to question ourselves why does the block time between two blocks matter? first off having a low average block speed creation means basically that the blocks get filled up faster, which translates into transactions getting confirmed and completed faster, personally I believe that this does not make or break a chain but some people would like to have their transactions getting completed faster, this comes most of the time paired with a low fee rates, which is more important than the transaction speed in my opinion, in any case newer blockchains think very highly about having more transactions per second so they already seem to have a low block speed creation time, this is not always a good thing since we can see with Solana for example that being too fast also comes with some issues.

Now block size also plays a big role in this, in a perfect world transactions would get confirmed after 0 seconds and blocks could hold up to one million transactions, however this is not possible because developers need to find a good balance between block size and transaction confirmation speed for the blockchain to function as smooth as possible.

Polygon

As for Polygon, we saw that it is doing more than good; it is a fast L2 chain, faster than the other two L2 we saw in this dashboard, having a good balance between average, minimum and maximum time between two blocks and managing to overperform L1 chains like Flow and Near. When it comes to average transactions per block, we saw that it is slightly better than Ethereum, which was not featued in this dashboard but just for context Ethereum can hold up around 70 transactions per block, Polygon manages to have 75 while being way faster with its confirmation on top of that.

Average transaction per block - Polygon v L2

Now Polygon when compared to L2 chains we see it has way more average transactions per block than Arbitrum and Optimism, these three L2 are built on top of Ethereum and Polygon is way ahead of them, this is assuming the data is correct because Optimism being 1 transaction on average per block is misleading to say the least.

Average transaction per block - Polygon v L1

As for average transactions per block, Solana has an enormous number of transactions per block and just how we saw in the previous chart, it has the lowest time between blocks, which is expected considering how fast Solana is however, this is not always a good thing since Solana is known for its botting issues not to mention it has a high failed transactions rate.

Polygon manages to be on top of Flow and Near in terms of average transactions per block; it’s clearly no match for Solana. but 75 transactions per block is solid considering that when combined with the previous chart we can deduce Polygon is fast network when it comes to transaction speed.