Polygon - Polygon Block Performance
Question
What is the average time between blocks on Polygon? What was the maximum and minimum recorded time between two blocks? How many transactions are done in a block on average? How do these numbers compare to L1 such as Flow or Solana, or other L2 such as Arbitrum or Optimism?
Creation date: 2022-07-24
Created by piper
Thanks for reading!
This analysis was created on 2022–07–24 for a bounty at Flipside Crypto by piper to answer the following questions:
Polygon - Polygon Block Performance: What is the average time between blocks on Polygon? What was the maximum and minimum recorded time between two blocks? How many transactions are done in a block on average? How do these numbers compare to L1 such as Flow or Solana, or other L2 such as Arbitrum or Optimism?
All data used are from Flipside Crypto.
Conclusion
- Time Between Blocks: With an average of 2.3 seconds TBB, seems Polygon compared to Solana and the other L2s, Optmism and Arbitrum, very slow.
- Transactions per Block: Processing 73.58 transactions per block sounds compared to the other L2s very good. Only Ethereum and Solana proceeds more.
- Transactions per Second: Polygon is in this comparison the second fastest blockchain with an average TPS of 31 transactions. Only Solana, the turbo blockchain, is faster.
All in all is Polygon a very stable and fast blockchain compared to the others. Only Solana is faster, as we all know from the numbers and its good reputation, but not so stable. Polygon absolutely does justice as a fast alternative to Ethereum, unlike the other two L2s.
To answer the initial question, i put together the numbers above. An average time of 2.3 seconds between blocks seem not too high, especially because the minimum is 2 seconds.
What really surprises me is that each block contains an average of 73.6 transactions. That sounds very high. Let's see how Polygon generally compares to other blockchains.
Compared to the other blockchains (Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum and Optimism) Polygon is on the second place behind Solana. Polygon's TBB is very solid over the period under consideration, outliers upwards (maximum TBB of 26) are not really visible in the chart. I.e. this happens very very rarely and the value is usually always just around 2 seconds (between blocks). Other L2s like Optimism and above all Arbitrum has much higher TBBs. Also Polygons L1 (Ethereum) is way higher with a TBB of around 13.8 in the past days. Only Solana seems to be faster with less then a second between blocks!
Last but not least, let’s compare the transactions per second of this five blockchains to understand better if the time between blocks and the number of transactions has an influence on the performance of a blockchain. It's no surprise that Solana is the best performer here with a TPS of 538.5, but it's exciting to see that Polygon already follows in second place with a TPS of 31. Ethereum is with a TPS of 13 on place 3. That means, Polygon is more than two times faster than Ethereum! Optimism and Arbitrum are both last with a TPS of just 1. We can also see that all blockchains run very stable, only Solana shows some volatility in the chart.
How many transactions are proceeded in one block? On Polygon (3rd place in this comparison) one block proceeds an average of 73.58 transactions. This looks quite good compared to the other blockchains. Only Ethereum and Solana have higher values here and process more transactions per block. Optimism and Arbitrum seem very inefficient, both only proceed around one transaction per block. Ethereum proceeds more than double and Solana proceeds almost six times the transactions of Polygon.