Questions

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?

Introduction

About Polygon

Polygon, formerly known as Matic Network, is a protocol and framework for building and connecting blockchain networks compatible with Ethereum. This protocol tries to solve some of Ethereum's major limitations, including its throughput, poor user experience, and lack of community governance, using a new on-chain solution.

How is a block made in blockchain?

Blocks are created by miners. Transactions in the blockchain are not done as quickly and at the same time as they are published in the network. They are stored in the memory pool (Memory Pool) and wait for the confirmation of the nodes (blockchain network users).

Method

To get the necessary information, I used the transaction table of each blockchain. To calculate the elapsed time between two blocks, I used the LAG function as follows. And I calculated the time difference between the next and previous blocks in seconds.

TIMESTAMPDIFF(SECONDS, LAG(block_start_time, 1) OVER (ORDER BY block_start_time), block_start_time) as diffrence_time

Block start time is the time of the first transaction of each block.

Every two seconds a new block is created in Polygon. Polygon is PoS type blockchain that serves as a Commit Chain to the Ethereum mainchain.

Unlike PoW, blocks are not created by miners in this type of blockchain. Rather, blocks are created over a certain period of time. Polygon using a ​Block Producer layer to produce the blocks.

The minimum, maximum and average time between two blocks in this graph is also in seconds.

In the Polygon blockchain, the maximum time between two blogs is 27 seconds, which is the lowest compared to all Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains.

Considering that the time between two blocks is in seconds, the minimum time between two blogs is not much different in almost all blockchains. But in terms of average time and average number of transactions per block, Solana seems to have performed better than other blockchains, including Polygon.

Polygan has relatively better performance than other L2 networks except Solana, such as Flow. Polygon has a good performance in terms of the average number of transactions in each block compared to the L2s. But the layers 2 are better than Polygon in terms of average time between two blocks. Although the difference is small.