Introduction

Polygon, formerly known as Matic Network, is a scalable solution that aims to provide multiple tools to improve the speed and reduce the cost and the complexity of transactions on blockchain networks. Polygon's primary goal is to create an Internet of Things for the Ethereum blockchain. The project aims to grow Ethereum to a billion users without sacrificing decentralization or security.

In this dashboard, we are going to look at the average time between blocks of Polygon blockchain and compare them with other L1 such as Flow or Solana, or other L2 such as Arbitrum or Optimism. We are also looking for the the number of transactions done in each block in the mentioned blockchains.

Daily Transaction Count Per Block

The following charts are the daily transaction count per block.

• For all the blockchains the average number of transactions have stayed the same.
• Polygon’s number of daily transaction have been fluctuating between 1200 and 600.
• Optimism’s minimum and maximum and average transaction have always been 1.
• Arbitrum transaction count has been very low before June 21, It can be due to very bad performance of the chain during odyssey, which lead to its halt.
• Flow daily transaction count per block has declined.
• Solana has been stable during study period.

Daily Time Difference Between Blocks

The following charts show the daily min, max and average time difference between blocks.

• Polygon chart, shows that it has been mostly stable and kept its average time almost the same every day.
• Optimism’s chart also shows signs of stability.
• Arbitrum’s chart is actually in logarithmic scale, it shows a very unstable blockchain just before June 23. It could be due to the Odyssey campaign, which during its time the transaction fees were more than Ethereum chain fees.
• Flow chart is mostly stable but there are days, like July 26th, which is a very unstable day.
• Solana has been very stable during study period.

Transaction Count Per Block

The grid below shows the minimum, maximum and average number of transactions in blocks in each blockchain. The name of the corresponding blockchain is reflected in the name of each cell. Each row belongs to an specific chain.

It can be Inferred that:

• Polygon had a minimum of 0 transactions per block, a maximum of 1250 transactions and an average of 74.5 transactions per block.
• Optimism has processed least number of transaction per block, 87x less than Polygon.
• Solana has processed the most number of transaction per block, 28x more than Polygon.
• Solana has processed up to 6.9K transactions on a single block, 5.5x more than Polygon.
• All blockchains studied, except for Optimism, had at least 0 transactions.
• Optimism’s minimum and maximum number of transactions per each block has been always 1.

Time Difference Between Blocks

The grid below shows the minimum, maximum and average time between two consecutive blocks in each blockchain. The name of the corresponding blockchain is reflected in the name of each cell. Each row belongs to an specific chain.

It can be seen that : (Using the default value of the StartDate parameter, it is obvious that the results may vary by changing the parameter.)

• The minimum time between blocks of the polygon chain is 2 seconds, the maximum is 25 seconds, and the average is 2.27 seconds.
• Other chains have had blocks that took 0 seconds to mine, this could be a very small number that cannot be reflected.
• Arbitrum and Flow show very large numbers for maximum time difference between blocks, in the next section, we will examine this issue further.
• Polygon has the longest average time between blocks (2.27 seconds) and Solana has the least average time between blocks (0.728 sec).

Approach

In this study, the following tables are used, which are used to access the block data for the respective blockchains.

• polygon.core.fact_blocks
• optimism.core.fact_blocks
• arbitrum.core.fact_blocks
• flow.core.fact_blocks
• solana.core.fact_blocks

When to start the analysis?

The table below shows the date of the first recorded transaction of each chain in the Flipside Crypto database. It can be seen that the first common date is ‘==2022-06-15==’. This date is selected in this study as the starting date for our analysis.

You can easily change the first date of the analysis by changing the StartDate parameter.