Introduction

In this investigation, we'll be going over the number of transactions and average transaction fee (in gwei) per (hour and day) between the two networks and comparing how they match up to one another.

NOTE: Both Polygon and Harmony seem to be missing some data points, so the results are not fully complete.

1. Polygon is missing at least May 1st data (from transactions table)
2. Harmony is missing the first few weeks/months

Average Transaction Fee (gwei)

In this case, I am comparing apples to apples, as I was not able to get on-chain data for Harmonys price feed (from velocity tables) in order to compare the $ equivalent.

Hourly

What the following graph shows us is the average gas (gwei) on an hourly timeframe for both networks since inception. It seems that Harmony is the winner in terms of the most massive gas spike on the hourly timeframe. Followed by the most recent spike in Polygon gas (gwei) hourly.

Daily

On the daily timeframe, we can see things in a much smoother way and what is seen is the massive spike that Polygon has around the dates of the collapse of UST (Terra stablecoin) where there was massive fear in the markets surrounding stablecoins and a lot of people probably exited their positions and re-balanced their portfolios accordingly around that event. We can also see a similar spike took place around the same time for Harmony but the spike was much smaller compared to Polygons. The biggest spike for Harmony comes in around April the 10th, although I am not sure what event cause this spike.

Ebs and flows of gas

Difference between the gas (gwei), between the two networks Polygon - Harmony. This should give us an idea of which network had the "biggest" spike and when, when comparing the two. When the difference between them is +ve then Polygon had a bigger spike than Harmony in terms of gwei and when -ve Harmony one had the bigger spike in gas (gwei).

This is not representative in terms of what network was most expensive in terms of $ and should not be interpreted as such. Both tokens have their own prices and also their own transactions/day which are very different (see later on), so this is just a creative measure to compare the spike magnitude (if you will).

THIS IS A CREATIVE METRIC, the y-axis is not meant to say much in terms of the value displayed.

Hourly & Daily

They both convey what was seen earlier in the Average Gas Price (gwei) charts but help us understand the "ebs and flows" of their differences. The daily one for example reveals that there was a lot of "congestion" (probably) for Polygon around January (2 spikes back to back) and later on the one, we identified earlier around the dates of the collapse of UST (May 8th - May 12th).

On the other hand, we can see that Harmony has a massive potential-congestion spike on the 10th of April.

Number of transactions

By the hour and day for each of the networks.

Hourly

Daily

Personally, I prefer the daily view as it's much cleaner and tells us pretty much the same information. Although the hourly view reveals that there was a massive (relatively speaking) spike in transactions on the Harmony network on the 24th of January.

When looking at the daily transactions we can see that Polygon had an incredible run since launch which is slowly slowing down whereas on the other hand Harmony had a, relatively speaking, slower growth curve (from when data is available until now), and has slowed down ever since that initial spike on Dec 6th 2021, with the exception of the more recent Mar 31st spike.

BONUS: Unique Addresses

Let's look at the two chains' unique addresses for hourly and daily timeframes.

Hourly

Daily

In both cases what we can see is that there were a lot more unique users for Harmony around the period of Nov 24th to Apr 7th but ever since has slowed down significantly, similarly to Polygons daily unique addresses.

BONUS: Transaction Count coloured by Unique Addresses size by Unique Addresses

This creative metric should give us an idea of how vibrant each ecosystem is at each point in time.

Daily

What we can see in the following graphs is when the network was the most vibrant, in other words when most transactions per user were taking place in each network. What we can see is that Polygon has been growing to have a pretty strong user base vs Harmony which has faded away post that spike we identified earlier.

BONUS 2: How "full" of fees is each transaction?

Here we are seeing how much MATIC or ONE exists on average, daily per transaction.

What we can get a feeling for (proxy) here is network revenue spikes in the native tokens. What can be seen is that Harmony had a few spikes around the days/weeks where the unique users daily have spiked, whereas Polygon has had multiple of those spikes at different times with increasing frequency lately.

Summary

Harmony, with the launch of DeFi Kingdoms has created a vibrant ecosystem, the likes of which are slowly fading away. Either that is due to the bear market or otherwise. On the other hand, Polygon which has a lot of different big dapps launched on it has continued to do well in terms of a few of the metrics we've explored.

Evaluation

There are more metrics that are needed here for a proper comparison, such as the number of contracts deployed in each network & how many unique developers are still in each network. Both of which could be their own bounty.