Comparison Criteria

In order to compare NEAR’s performance to other blockchains, we should keep in mind that there’s a large variety of L1 protocols each providing solutions differently to blockchain’s decentralization, security and scalability problems. Our focus is on the scalability of L1 blockchain which partly includes the speed and success/fail rate of transactions.

Our Picks & Reasons

1. Ethereum: Ultimately NEAR’s competition as well as every other chain’s.
2. Harmony: An Effective Proof of Stake (EPoS) L1 network with sharding.
3. Solana : An L1 network known for its high speed processing.

Dashboard Flow

• In the first part, the speed of network in transactions per minute is compared an in the second part the fail rate of each network over time is considered.
• In each part the NEAR Network’s performance charts is placed in the middle, surrounded by the competition stats.

Sharding What Is It Good For?

Both NEAR and Harmony are L1 networks that have implemented sharding as their scalability solution. Although different sharding architectures are used but the concept is the same. Sharding is ultimately parallel processing of actions in the network to make it faster and lowers the overhead for actions that put a strain on the speed of network.

• Harmony started the year strong and fast with high TPM and over the months the network has been seeing constant monthly drops in the transactions per minute.
• NEAR has also been seeing ups and downs in TPM, but there is no clear down or up trend.
• Two networks have both been experiencing TPM drops in the last 3 months. This could be due to the market’s slowed traffic since the crash in May,
• In the last month (July 2022), both network have been performing very closely in terms of speed to each other. But as we’ll see later Harmony does better in terms of Failure rate.

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Transactions Failure Rate

In our Comparison in terms of daily failure rate, NEAR holds the second rank in the overall average in ascending order of failure rate.

Failure Rate is calculated on a daily basis by the following formula:

• 100 * (Number of Failed TXs in a day) / (Total Number of TXs in a day) = Fail Rate %

As we’ll see, Ethereum is the winner of this rate with a very low and steady failure rate of 3.5% overall.

Conclusion

One important point that is necessary to take, is that the speed of the network on its own is not a good parameter to judge its performance. Thus the success rate or complementarily fail rate, should also be considered. The reason for this can be clearly observed in the calculations made in the comparison of NEAR vs Harmony (Chap.2).

• We saw that what a 10% more fail rate does in terms of transactions count in the networks operations.
• We can also conclude that steady and reliable L1 chain wins the race and thus the Huge Transaction Fees :smile:

NEAR vs ETH and Solana

• Solana is known for its high speed network and as the numbers show it is extremely fast and not even comparable to the rest of L1s in terms of speed. However frequent outages in the network, and high failure rate, sometimes makes it unreliable.
• Ethereum is and has been the dominant network in terms of usability, and it is NEAR’s goal to be a strong competitor to Ethereum. We can see that since 2022, on average Ethereum validates 800 transaction per minute and NEAR does about 400 transactions.
• There are days in charts that the daily TPM average for NEAR is over 1000! It seems that the network is capable of such speeds when the traffic is high enough.
• Ethereum has a very steady rate of TPM compared to NEAR and other networks, this is due to fact that there is a constant usage of this network via different protocols.

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The Good , The Bads And The Ugly

• Starting with Ethereum, this network holds the lowest average for the least amount of failed transactions.
• NEAR and Harmony, both sharded networks, have very close failed percentage, with NEAR having lower rate for now and Harmony closing in and performing much better in the past few months.
• Solana has a very high failed percentage that is twice that of NEAR and 8x higher than Ethereum’s.
• Considering that Solana’s TPM is almost 300x the NEARs and other networks in this comparison, the failure rate is not that much in terms of the number of transactions.

NEAR vs Harmony (Chap.2 Failed Tx Percentage)

For now it looks that NEAR because of its steady rate of failures, is the winner. However as can be clearly seen from the charts, Fail rate in Harmony transactions has dropped significantly since the beginning of April 2022 and has not changed by much so far.

Thus in near future the overall fail rate of Harmony, if the trend continues, will be lower than NEAR’s.

• It is worth Comparing both network at their highest TPM days which also corresponds to their highest Fail rates:

• NEAR on May 10th, with TPM over 1000, had a fail rate of ~54%. This corresponds to failed transaction number of : 0.54 x 1000 x 60 x 24 = 777600 TXs for that day.

• Harmony on March 4th, with TPM over 2600, had a fail rate of ~66%. Corresponds to failed Tx number of : 0.66 x 2600 x 60 x 24 = 2471040.

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