Polygon Block Performance

    Polygon, formerly known as the Matic Network, is a scaling solution that aims to provide multiple tools to improve the speed and reduce the cost and complexities of transactions on blockchain networks. At the center of Polygon’s vision is Ethereum, a platform that is home to a range of decentralized applications, ones where you can join virtual worlds, play games, buy art, and participate in a range of financial services. However, this much activity on its blockchain has rendered Ethereum almost unusable, as the cost of transmission is rising and traffic is becoming clogged.

    In a nutshell, Polygon bills itself as a layer-2 network, meaning it acts as an add-on layer to Ethereum that does not seek to change the original blockchain layer. Like its geometric namesake, Polygon has many sides, shapes, and uses and promises a simpler framework for building interconnected networks.

    in this dashboard we look into polygon blockchain and find the answer to questions below:

    • 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?
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    the numbers above were obtained by querying the polygon.core.fact_blocks table. we can see that the smallest block was only 2 seconds and the largest one was 25 seconds. the average length of the blocks in polygon is 2.25 seconds. average number of transactions per block is 75 transactions. there are 1.92 M blocks and the total number of transactions for all these blocks is 143.7 M transactions. the highest number of transactions in a block has been 1332 and the lowest number has been zero.

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    in this section we can see different length a block has had in polygon and we can see the number of blocks in each range. we can see there are blocks with the length of 2 seconds to 25 seconds with the exception of 19, 21, 22, 23, 24 second blocks.

    we can also see that in the case of 15, 17, 20 and 25 second long blocks, there has only been one block per each of them whilst the majority of the blocks have had the length of an even number of seconds below 10. that is 2, 4, 6 and 8.

    next we compare every thing we’ve found out about polygon with Flow and Solana.

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    in the charts above, we compare the block length and transaction counts of the blocks of Polygon, Flow and Solana. to obtain the data needed for these charts, we used fact_blocks in each blockchain’s respected schema. the minimum time stamp for polygon is 2022-06-06 15:14:51.000 which is the largest than the minimum time stamp of the other blockchains so the entire queries were limited to the data after this point so that the time frame would be the same for all blockchains. the chart regarding the lowest number of transactions in a block has NOT been shown in this section because the results was the same for all blockchains and which was Zero.

    the longest block in polygon as we saw earlier is only 25 seconds and in solana, it’s 88 seconds. however in the case of flow, we have a much bigger number which is over 17 thousand seconds. the shortest block in polyon is 2 seconds while this number for solana and flow is zero. the average length of the blocks has also been shown for all three blockchains. in the case of polygon the average length is 2.248524 seconds and for flow is 1.529316 seconds and for solana, it is 0.751616 seconds.

    in the last charts we can see the largest number of transactions that has occurred in a block for all blockchains and the average number of transactions per block. the largest number of transactions in a block for polygon is 1332 transactions and for flow is 435 transactions and for solana, it is 6912 transactions. the average number of transactions per block for polygon is 74.96802 transactions and for flow is 17.13021 transactions and in the case of solana, it is 2062.974 transactions per block.

    next we compare polygon with L2 networks (Arbitrum and Optimism)

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    in this section we compared Polygon to Optimism and Arbitrum. we have used fact_blocks table in each blockchain’s respected schema to obtain the data used to create the visualizations above. also in order for the data of all the blockchains to be in the same time frame, we limited the queries to the data that was recorded after the largest minimum time stamp which is 2022-06-15 17:54:11.000 and belongs to Arbitrum.

    the shortest length for the blocks has been shown in the first chart and for both Arbitrum and Optimism, it is Zero and the longest block length recorded for Arbitrum is above 23.4 thousand seconds while for Optimism, it is 58 seconds. the average length of the blocks for Arbitrum is 1.106318 seconds and for Optimism is 0.897355 seconds. the average length of the blocks for Polygon is 2.272627 seconds which is a little higher than what was shown previously. this is caused by filtering the query and only considering the data of june 15th and later. the increase in average length of a block also tells us that the shorter blocks were mostly placed before june 15th.

    the highest number of transactions done in a block for Arbitrum is 128 and for Polygon is 1250. this number for Optimism is one. the lowest number of transactions done in a single block is zero for all the blockchains except for Optimism which is one. this means that in the case of Optimism we have only one transaction per block. the average number of transactions per block has been shown in the last chart and it shows us that the average number of transaction per block for Arbitrum is 1.163643 transactions and for Polygon in the chosen time period is 74.18218 transactions.

    next we can see a summary of all the data used for these charts in the table below. the queries have been limited the data recorded after 2022-06-15 17:54:11.000.

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