Try Quests to earn MATICPolygon Block Performance
Dashboard breaks down the performance of Polygon's blocks by looking at the number of transactions per second, time difference between blocks, and other metrics
Polygon Block Performance Analysis
As Chris Dixon puts it, “Blockspace is exactly what it sounds like. It is space on the blockchain that can be used to store information and run code.” Various different L1s and L2s have designed their networks to configure blockspaces that have certain advantages and disadvantages. In this dashboard, Polygon’s block space is analyzed to determine the space between blocks, the number of transactions per block, and various other metrics
Comparing Blocks on Various Chains - 30 Days
The first section focuses on an aggregate view of blockchain performance. By aggregating for the past 30 days across various chains, a few interesting insights emerge:
- There is an inverse correlation with the number of blocks produced and the average number of transactions. Only Ethereum is further towards the left than Polygon. Arbitrum, Avalanche, and Optimism all appear to produce many blocks but few transactions on them.
2)The more blocks a network can produce, the more transactions per second it can potentially have. At the same time, blockspace can become less desirable due to the classic supply vs demand structure.
-
Each network has a fairly high success rate aggregate over 30 days. Sometimes bad hours or days may affect the network
-
Similiar to the block time difference is correlated to the number of blocks produced. Polygon has a slightly higher time between each block than the other chains compared except for Ethereum which has a much higher time difference due to ETH’s validation and security configurations
Last 1000 Blocks’ performance
To give a more granular view of what’s happening at the block level, the last 1000 blocks of the network are compared (time dependent on data) Polygon produces around 1000 blocks in 40 minutes. What’s interesting is that a majority of the difference between blocks is 2 seconds but there are some blocks that have times of up to nine seconds in difference. One interesting call out is that by looking at Ethereum (user parameter filter to compare) there is a lot more diversification of the time between blocks
Transaction Comparison
Polygon’s average number of transactions per blocks is around 100. However, there are noticeable spikes of over 500+ transactions in a single block. Polygon can obviously handle many more transactions per block shown by this (thus also scale the network) as it becomes more popular.
Success Rate for Blocks
One thing I did not realize was how volatile the success rate per block could be. As seen there are spikes that occur potientially due to validators or bots spamming the network. Its interesting to note this as such a granular level as it shows for the most part blocks are able to successfully be executed, but one bad block may occur every now and then.
Daily Block Analytics
The following section compares Polygon against another network (use parameter filter to change) by averaging blocks daily. As mentioned earlier, Polygon offers reliable transactions, but not at the speed as some other chains as Avalanche. One interesting to note is that the data is not very volatile for Polygon showing that the network is quite reliable day over day.
Conclusion
In this dashboard, Polygon’s block performance is analyze. While not as fast as some chains, Polygon handles more transaction in a given block, but is also not as slow (or computationally expensive) as Ethereum. In addition, Polygon’s blocks for the most part are quite reliable and behave as they are designed (Most blocks have a 2 second time difference, 90%+ success rate). Polygon is currently averaging around 100 transactions in a block, but some block’s have over 500 transactions in a given block. Through this analysis, it is seen that the Polygon network has quite great performance, the ability to scale, and reliability through the design of its blocks.