Try Quests to earn FLOWPolygon Block Performance
Average transaction volume done in a block
- On Polygon, a block contains 74 transactions on average.
- Polygon’s number is the second highest (only lower than Solana) among smart contract platforms including: Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Flow, and Solana.
- Solana’s number is 23 times, and 136 times higher than Polygon, and Flow.
- L2s like Optimism or Arbitrum’s number is roughly 1 transaction per block.
Introduction
Polygon is a platform design to support infrastructure development and help Ethereum scale. Its core component is a modular, flexible framework (Polygon SDK) that allows developers to build and connect Layer-2 infrastructures like Plasma, Optimistic Rollups, zkRollups, and Validium and standalone sidechains like the project's flagship product, Matic POS (Proof-of-Stake). Polygon rebranded from Matic Network in February 2021 and pivoted towards supporting multiple Layer-2 infrastructure. It will continue to support the Matic POS sidechain and Plasma-based payment system, which currently hosts over 90 applications.
Block Performance
Why should we care about block time (time between 2 consecutive blocks) and block size (transaction volume in a block) of a blockchain (smart contract platform)? Because:
- Block time indicates how fast transactions are.
- Block size indicates how much data can be done in a block.
→ The shorter block time + the larger block size, the better a blockchain is.
Let’s evaluate Polygon’s block performance by answering some questions below.
Questions
- What is the average time between blocks on Polygon?
- What was the maximum and minimum recorded time between two blocks?
- How many transactions are done in a block on average?
- How do these numbers compare to L1 such as Flow or Solana, or other L2 such as Arbitrum or Optimism?
Method
Use lag and timediff fuction to extract time between blocks from fact_blocks tables.
Chart below comment
Conclusion
Among smart contract platforms including Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Flow, and Solana:
- Polygon has the highest average time between 2 consecutive blocks.
- On average, it takes longer for Polygon to finalizing blocks than other platforms.
- However, Polygon is the most stable platform when finalizing block.
- Polygon has 74 transactions per block on average, which is much higher than most L2s. Among L1s, only Solana is better than Polygon at the number of transaction volume per block.
Thanks for reading!
Though the average numbers are quite similar, maximum and minimum numbers are much more different. I suspect that, beside Polygon, other platforms have larger ranges of time between 2 consecutive blocks. To verify this, let’s look at standard deviation of time between 2 consecutive blocks of each platform.
> In statistics, the standard deviation is a measure of the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of values.[1] A low standard deviation indicates that the values tend to be close to the mean (also called the expected value) of the set, while a high standard deviation indicates that the values are spread out over a wider range.
- Standard deviation of time between 2 consecutive blocks is 0.79 second on Polygon.
- Polygon’s number is the lowest.
- Arbitrum’s number is the highest.
→ Polygon is the most stable platform in term of finalizing and producing block.