Polygon: An Ultimate Comparison
Introduction
Here it is - a cohesive comparison of the Polygon network. Polygon is known for its low fees in contrast to Ethereum, but is it also a ==winner== in other categories?
This dashboard consists of an initial comparison of Polygon’s performance juxtaposed to other blockchains: Avalanche
, Binance
, Optimism
, Algorand
and Ethereum
.
I will investigate whether Polygon is the best chain when it comes to the following metrics:
-
The number of unique wallets that transact on each chain
-
The daily number of transactions on each chain.
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After ruling out some smaller blockchains, I will focus the comparison between Polygon and Ethereum:
- I will also investigate the growth of Polygon compared to Ethereum, and look at the number of new contracts being deployed hourly/daily, as well as the top token transfers being executed on both networks.
- In the final section, I will investigate the fees paid on Polygon and Ethereum in order to see which blockchain is cheaper to interact with.
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Note: The data is set to refresh every 24 hours.
There seems to be a very close competition between Ethereum and Polygon when it comes to unique users. On average, Ethereum dominated Polygon with around 100k more users, yet what is interesting is that by looking at the percentage comparison, we can see a slow but steady increase in Polygon’s users.
Note: It seems that the data for other blockchains might be missing, as it seems very counter-intuitive to see Binance with only between 10k-30k daily users!
When it comes to the number of daily transactions executed, Polygon is definitely a ==winner== in this category. By looking at the percentage chart, we can see that Polygon takes about half of all of the transactions, with the number ranging between 2M and 2.8M. This result is what we would expect, given the low fees that Polygon offers, in contrast to Ethereum. Furthermore, this also implies that there are more transactions executed per each unique user - as even though Ethereum has more unique wallets transacting daily, Polygon still wins with the number of transactions.
We can see that Polygon and Ethereum take the biggest part of these percentages - one could claim that there is the most competition between these two blockchains. The rest of this dashboard will focus only on these two networks, and we will see which one can be crowned the ==winner==!
The next step is to look at the contracts deployed on each network - to see if Polygon’s growth has yet overtaken Ethereum’s growth.
The growth of a network can be analysed by looking at how many new contracts come into existence on a daily or hourly basis. We can see that Polygon was going hand in hand with Ethereum for most days - and on July 6th Polygon skyrocketed, with over 30k of new contracts being deployed on that day!
This graph clearly shows how much Polygon has overtaken Ethereum in terms of network growth!
The total number of contracts deployed on Polygon this past week is over three times higher than the total number of contracts deployed on Ethereum this week!
By looking at the cumulative graph, we can see how quickly the growth of Polygon has changed, with the cumulative sum being almost exponential - way to go Polygon! 😎
The next step is to investigate how many times these contracts have been called in the past week and what kind of contracts they are.
Hop Protocol is the contract that has been called the most on Polygon in the past week. You may ask, why does it have such a huge dominance over the other contracts? Hop is a platform that allows users to transfer tokens quickly and easily between layer-2s, side chains, and layer-1 Ethereum with fairly low fees. In other words, Hop gained its popularity by allowing users to bridge assets while avoiding the high Ethereum fees!
Let’s next compare which contracts have been interacted with the most on the Ethereum side. We can see that Hop is in second place here, and the ==winner== - WETH!
The next section will investigate which tokens (together with the label) have been transferred the most. Again, we will look into both sides of the picture, Polygon’s and Ethereum’s perspective.
USDC has been bridged the most on Hop in the past week, followed by ETH and MATIC. Hop has been very convenient for Polygon users - but what else has been popular? We can see that Polygon users have also been interacting with NFTs quite a lot - the contract provided by Cool Cats NFT has been called over 110k times this week.
The next step is to look how these compare to the most transferred tokens using contracts deployed on Ethereum.
Ethereum’s top token transfers are almost the same as Polygon’s - we can see that Hop is the ==winner== on both networks. We can also find the SHIB token with its contract being called almost 40k times this past week!
Finally, as the last part of this comparison, let’s have a look at the transaction fees that users have paid on both networks.
Both of these charts show us that for all of the data points, Polygon’s fees were lower than Ethereum’s - by a huge amount! For example, we can see days where the total amount spent on fees on Ethereum was in the order of hundreds of thousands, whereas for Polygon, the fees are kept under $10k each day. In order to see how much Ethereum is more expensive on average, the chart on the left answers our question. We can see that users pay between $1.5 to almost $12 per transaction on Ethereum! In contrast, Polygon’s average fees are usually in the range of $0.00… - I think it is clear who the ==winner== is!
Conclusion
The initial comparison of unique users and the total number of transactions per each blockchain allowed us to see that the biggest competitor to Polygon is Ethereum. After filtering out the rest of the networks, I have focused the analysis only on these two blockchains, and we have looked into more insightful metrics. I have investigated the number of new contracts being deployed on each network, as well as how often they are being interacted with. We have seen that users are attracted to Hop the most lately and bridge their USDC, ETH and MATIC the most. In the last part of this dashboard, we have seen that Polygon offers much cheaper transaction fees, the orders of magnitude of the difference is so huge that Polygon has no competition from Ethereum in this category!
Closing remarks
There is not much more to say rather than to congratulate Polygon on its growth and on what it is offering as a network. Extremely low fees, constant deployment of new contracts and a constant increase in terms of active users - Polygon has it all 💜!
This dashboard has been written in collaboration of -nat-#4310 @CrewHodl and Konstantinos#3659 @KowalskiDefi. 💜