A Comparison Between Avalanche and Ethereum
A Comparison Between Avalanche and Ethereum
Introduction to Avalanche
- Avalanche is a Layer 1 network like Ethereum, Solana and Algorand, that was launched in September 2020.
- Layer 1 network is a blockchain in the decentralised ecosystem, whereas a Layer 2 protocol is a third-party integration that may be used in conjunction with a Layer 1 blockchain.
- The mainnet of Avalanche is made up of 3 blockchains: Exchange Chain (X-Chain), Platform Chain (P-Chain), and Contract Chain (C-Chain).
Introduction to this dashboard
- In this dashboard, we will compare Avalanche as an L1 blockchain to Ethereum.
- We will compare the following metrics between the two L1 blockchains:
- Number of transactions by block
- Time between blocks
- Daily active users (DAU)
- Number of swappers and swaps per day
- Wallets transacting USDC and USDC volume transacted per day
- Number of USDC swappers and USDC volume swapped per day
- Average USDC swap size
- Transaction and Gas Fee on Avalanche
- Distribution of average swap size of swappers.
Approach
- Data comparison between Avalanche and Ethereum starts from June 2022.
- Swaps are defined as
tx_id
with event_name =Swap
on thefact_event_logs
tables on Flipside. Transactions in this dashboard are defined as all transactions excluding swaps. - USDC on Avalanche in this dashboard accounts for USDC (contract_address =
0xb97ef9ef8734c71904d8002f8b6bc66dd9c48a6e
) and USDC.e (contract_address =0xa7d7079b0fead91f3e65f86e8915cb59c1a4c664
).
- The scatter plots above show the minimum, average, and maximum number of transactions per block on Avalanche and Ethereum, respectively.
- The average transaction per Avalanche block is around 4.41, while the average transaction per Ethereum block is around 170.1. The average transaction per block on Ethereum is approximately 38.5 times that of Avalanche.
- Both Avalanche and Ethereum have minimum TX of 1.
- The maximum transaction per block on Ethereum is 1418, which is approximately 9.33 times greater than the maximum transaction per block on Avalanche, which is 360.
- The scatter plots above depict the minimum, average, and maximum time between Avalanche and Ethereum blocks.
- The average time between blocks on Avalanche appears to be consistent at around 2.086 seconds. This is appropriate given that the current target rate of block production is one block every 2 seconds, according to Avalanche Doc.
- The average time between Ethereum blocks is approximately 12.98 seconds, which is approximately 7.5X that of Avalanche.
- We can infer that Ethereum blockchain currently has better block and transaction performance than Avalanche because it has 38.5X more transactions per block than Avalanche with only a 7.5X longer time lag between blocks.
- Daily active users (DAU) are wallets that have performed on-chain transactions on Ethereum and Avalanche and represent the ecosystem's strength.
- DAU on Ethereum has averaged around 200k, whereas DAU on Avalanche has averaged around 30-40k for the majority of the days.
- On most days, the number of daily users on Ethereum is more than 5 times that of Avalanche.
- Number of transactions per day on Ethereum averaged around 600-700k, while DAU on Avalanche averaged around 300k per day since November 2022. This translate to a 2.5X difference in number of transactions between the 2 L1 blockchains.
- It appears that the gap between number of TX per day on Ethereum and Avalanche has been closing over time.
- This is appropriate because Avalanche is still in its early and growing stages, requiring more time to mature.
- The area chart above shows the number of swappers and number of swaps per day on Ethereum vs Avalanche since June 15th.
- It appears that the number of swappers on Ethereum (at around 30k) per day is approximately 4X that of Avalanche (at around 7k). The number of swaps on Ethereum (at around 100k), on the other hand, is about 3X of Avalanche's (at around 30k) for majority of the days.
- This demonstrates that the average number of swaps completed by Avalanche wallets is greater than Ethereum. This is fitting given the lower Avalanche gas fee in relative to Ethereum's.
- The bar charts above show the wallets transacting USDC and USDC volume transacted per day.
- In this dashboard, transactions are defined as all transactions on-chain excluding swaps.
- We can see that on Ethereum, the average number of wallets transacting USDC per day is around 20k, whereas on Avalanche, the average number of wallets transacting USDC per day is around 3k.
- This translate to the fact that the number of wallets transacting USC on Ethereum per day is around 6.5X larger than Avalanche.
- However, in comparison to Ethereum, Avalanche's USDC transaction volume remains extremely low. This demonstrates that Ethereum still has significantly more transactional activity than Avalanche and that Avalanche wallets have smaller transaction sizes on average.
- The above bar graph depicts the number of USDC swappers and USDC volume swapped per day.
- It has been observed that the number of USDC swappers on Ethereum (at around 5k) is higher than Avalanche’s (at around 2k) on most days. Ethereum’s number of swapper per day is about 2.5X of Avalanche.
- Similar to transaction volume found in previous part of this dashboard, the USDC swap volume on Avalanche remains extremely low in comparison to Ethereum. This implies that Avalanche's swap volume per wallet is significantly lower than Ethereum's.
- The above bar chart shows the average USDC swap size on Ethereum and Avalanche (in USDC).
- The average Ethereum swap size is approximately 70.9k USDC, whereas the average Avalanche swap size is approximately 1.056k USDC.
- Ethereum has a significantly larger average swap size than Avalanche. This is appropriate given that Avalanche has a much lower gas fee than Ethereum.
- Due to the fact that Ethereum has a higher gas fee than Avalanche, swappers would try to make their Ethereum swaps in one lump sum to save on gas fees, ensuring that the swap is worth the gas fee paid.
- The bar charts above show the the distribution of average USDC swap size of Ethereum and Avalanche swappers.
- We can see that the distribution of average USDC swap size of Ethereum wallets is skewed more to the left than the distribution of average USDC swap size of Avalanche wallets.
- The majority of Avalanche wallets that swapped USDC had an average swap size of 0 to 100 USDC, falling into the Fish category.
- The majority of Ethereum wallets fall into the Shrimp category, with an average swap size of 100 to 1k USDC.
- This demonstrates that, besides the fact that there are larger wallets on Ethereum, Avalanche wallets also tend to swap even with small USDC sizes (< 100 USDC). This is not always feasible on Ethereum, as wallets will want to complete swaps large enough to not lose on gas fees.
Conclusion
Block and Transaction performance
- Ethereum blockchain currently outperforms Avalanche in terms of block and transaction performance.
- Ethereum has 38.5X more transactions per block with only an 7.5X longer time lag between blocks.
Daily active users (DAU) and daily number of transactions
- On most days, the number of daily users and transactions on Ethereum is more than 5 times and 2.5 times that of Avalanche respectively.
Number of swappers and swaps per day
- Ethereum has roughly 4X the number of swappers per day as Avalanche.
- However, the number of swaps on Ethereum is around 3X to Avalanche's.
-
Wallets transacting USDC and USDC volume transacted per day
-
Avalanche's USDC transaction volume remains extremely low in comparison to Ethereum.
-
Number of USDC swappers and USDC volume swapped per day
- The number of USDC swappers on Ethereum is higher than Avalanche’s on most days.
- Avalanche's USDC swap volume remains extremely low in comparison to Ethereum.
Average USDC swap size and distribution of average swap size of swappers.
- The average Ethereum swap size is approximately 70.9k USDC, whereas the average Avalanche swap size is approximately 1.056k USDC.
- The majority of Avalanche wallets that swapped USDC had an average swap size of 0 to 100 USDC, falling into the Fish category, whereas the majority of Ethereum wallets fall into the Shrimp category, with an average swap size of 100 to 1k USDC.
This dashboard was created by banbannard on November 30th.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope you learned something new about Avalanche and Ethereum!
Avalanche is represented in RED and Ethereum is represented in ==BLUE== in the following sections of this dashboard.
- The bar charts above show the average transaction fee per hour and transaction fee on Avalanche by days in a week.
- Average transaction fee on Avalanche is around 0.006 AVAX for majority of the hours/days.
- At the price of AVAX of 12.5 USD (as at the time of writing), this equates to 0.075 USD per transaction on Avalanche, which is considered low in comparison to transaction fee on Ethereum.
Number of transactions by block



- According to SeekingAlpha, Avalanche is potentially cheaper, faster and better than almost any other chains and is more superior in terms of transactional throughput, block finality, energy efficiency and a variety of other metrics.
- It is also claimed that Ethereum will face network cost and speed issues until a network upgrade in late 2022. During that time, Avalanche will have the opportunity to continue growing rapidly.
- Is this supported by on-chain analysis? We will try to figure it out in this dashboard.
Time between blocks
Daily Active Users
Number of swappers and swaps per day
Wallets transacting USDC and USDC volume transacted per day
Number of USDC swappers and USDC volume swapped per day
Average USDC swap size in USDC
Transaction and Gas Fee on Avalanche
Distribution of average swap size of swappers
