Introduction and Glossary

What is Polygon?

Polygon is a layer two that is also used to help scale the Ethereum blockchain by increasing the tps and lowering the fees per transaction. MATIC is the native currency on Polygon and that is used for fees, staking, governance, and securing the Polygon network The goal of Polygon is to grow Ethereum compatible projects and blockchains.

What is Flow?

Flow is a blockchain that is specifically created for making NFT's, crypto video games, and other apps as well. It is a proof of ` blockchain that is designed to be the foundation of Web3. This included the metaverse, decentralized apps, DAOs and much more! Flow is made specifically to scale for the hope that possibly billions of people can participate on this blockchain.

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What is Layer 1?

The term Layer 1 refers to the base level of a blockchain architecture. It's the main structure of a blockchain network. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and BNB Chain are examples of Layer 1 blockchains. Layer 2 refers to networks built on top of other blockchains.

What is Layer 2?

layer 2 is a collective term used to describe blockchain scaling solutions. These solutions are built on top of the layer 1 blockchain and help improve the network's scalability and transaction processing speed. They are merely an extension of the base layer.

Metrics and Methodology

In this dashboard we are going to compare Polygon, a layer 2, and Flow, a layer 1 between the speed between blocks. We will be looking into the transactions per block, the avg, max, and min times along with visualizing them over time

Polygon Analysis

Here we are going to be analyzing Polygons block performance and see how they have done with times between their blocks. As we can see they times are fairly consistent and never go anywhere outside of the range of 2-3 seconds, when looking at the averages. This makes sense because the minimum that has ever been recorded has been 2 seconds. This being said the maximum difference between blocks that we have seen is 1.5 minutes, which is 25 seconds. This seems like a long time for no additional blocks to be added to the chain. As of more recently there have been spikes where it has taken a little longer for the blocks to be added to the chain, but there is no difference of more than a second on average meaning the likelihood is nearly every block is added within seconds so the maximum is just an outlier that happened on one or two occasions.

Flow Blocks Analysis

Here we are going to analyze the same information, however this time on a layer 1 known as Flow. The first interesting note that I have is that the average time between blocks is far less than on Polygon. The average is 1.4 seconds compared to Polygon’s 2.25. What is most interesting to note for me is how drastic these different times between blocks are. We can see that the smallest time between blocks was 0 seconds and the maximum amount of time was 90 seconds. This would indicate that there is a high likelihood that there is a very variable time between blocks. It would also probably mean that there are many times of high performance and block recording followed by shorts times with very minimal. A 90 second pause between recording blocks would mean that there was nothing added to the blockchain for 1.5 minutes, which is a very long time especially considering speed in blockchains are normally looked at by TPS.

Conclusion

1. Flow has faster times on average than Polygon in terms of blocks being recorded, however the variability between the blocks is far higher
2. The range of flow between block times is 90 seconds and the range between polygons block times was 23 seconds, which means the range of flow is nearly 4x as large as polygons when coming to block times being recorded
3. The average time for seconds between blocks being recorded in one day has never exceeded 2.5 on Polygon, but has reached 2.74 seconds on FLOW
4. Flow may be faster on average, but is not as consistent as polygon.
5. Polygon has more transactions per block than Polygon