Introduction

The effort to come up with the most secure, fast, decentralized, and scalable blockchain is entering a new scene. On one side we have layer 1 chains like Solana, Binance smart chain, Flow, Avalanche, Cosmos, etc, which all claim to be Ethereum killers. They try to offer services as secure as Ethereum but also more scalable, decentralized, and with much lower gas fees. They often do this by implementing different consensus mechanisms like POS. On the other hand, we have Ethereum layer 2 scalability solutions, like Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism, using roll-up or other technologies to come over Ethereum problems.

In this dashboard, We are going to take a look at the block performance of some of these alternatives and assess their claims accordingly.

Data & Analysis

We are going to evaluate three different metrics for these chains:

• Average Block Time
• Average transactions Per Block
• Minimum & Maximum time for a new block to generate

In the first data provided below, you can see that Optimism has the lowest average block time with 0.926 seconds, while Polygon stands in third seat deadly close to Flow, with 2.53 seconds on average to generate a new block. Also Avalanche has the highest average with 19.1 seconds.

Next important criteria in assessing block performance is average transactions count in every block.

As you see, Solana records for more than 1700 transactions on average in a single block.

==While Polygon again is seated on the third seat (not considering Ethereum itself) with ~74 transactions per block, and BSC is on the second seat with 104, You can see that Ethereum performs better than it’s rivals in this criteria.==

But one shouldn’t mistake this performance as a sign of superiority instantly, since Ethereum blocks are generating every 15 seconds based on it’s POW mechanism and are consuming a lot more gas fees than all these chains combined.

These chains, following their queue mechanism, have flexible block times which you can see in next table.

• 0 as minimum block time means that it took friction of a second to produce a new block.
• Arbitrum max block time happened on July 23rd after starting on the odyssey campaign which congested the chain.
• At maximum, it took 25 seconds for a block to generate on the polygon, which places it on third best performing chains seat in this criteria after BSC and Avalanche.

Conclusion

• Polygon is among the top 3 chains with least average generating block time with 2.53 seconds
• There are ~74 transactions in each Polygon chain blocks, which place it on the top 3 in this criteria too (ruling out Ethereum)
• There is 23 seconds difference between minimum ans maximum time recorded for a Polygon block to generate, which secures the third seat in this criteria.