Introduction

Avalanche is a proof-of-stake ecosystem, known for its optimized Consensus Protocol that offers near-instant transaction finality.

Methodology

This analysis uses new Avalanche data by Flipside Crypto! The data ingestion period started during June 2022, and therefore some June data is already available to analyze. Currently in Lite Mode, Flipside announced plans to backfill the data to get it to full mode. In the meantime, this analysis covers the time period from 20 to 27 June, 2022.

We explore:

• Avalanche average transaction speed fluctuations per hour, measured in TPS (transactions per second),

• how many transactions are in a block (average, min, and max),

• how quickly blocks get added (average # of seconds pause between blocks),

• and how much this quick-finality protocol's transactions cost in gas fees (in AVAX).

Data Results

Average TPS (transactions per second) by hour

Between ~ 2-6 transactions get recorded on Avalanche per second (excluding an outlier on June 24 at 3pm UTC, when Flipside data shows 1 block for that hour):

What's the average number of transactions per block? What's the max number of transactions we've seen in a block and the minimum?

There are ~1,800 blocks in an hour most hours, with the hourly average between 3.7 - 11.5 transactions per block (excluding the 24 June outlier):

Average time between blocks over time

Blocks get added quickly one after another, with an average ~half a second pause between block confirmations:

Transaction gas price over time

Transaction gas fees are quite low. The highest hourly average was 0.02 AVAX (~ 40 US cents), and most of the time average gas fees are below 0.01 AVAX (under ~$0.20).

Additional analysis: Did block production nearly halt on 24 June at 3pm UTC? Or might some data be missing?

According to blocks-per-hour data earlier in this analysis, on 24 June 2022 in the time period between 15:00-15:59 hours UTC, there was only one block produced (# 16459789), with 13 transactions in it. This is anomalous for Avalanche compared to the past week, with ~1,800 blocks during most hours. So why does this "slow hour" appear in the data?

According to the Avalanche status page (see screenshot below), there were no reported outages after 21 June:

According to the block explorer, it has blocks with nonzero number of transactions both preceding it and following it, and these other blocks had happened at and after 3pm, during what appears in Flipside data as this "slow hour".

It is not likely that the discrepancy is owed to some blocks' reversals, because of Avalanche's high finality of blocks, meaning that once a block is accepted, it is final and irreversible (see docs for a more detailed explanation).

Therefore, the "slow hour" on 24 June might possibly be a data ingestion error, because it is not replicated in the block explorer. For instance, the next block (# 16459790) does not appear in the avalanche.core.fact_transactions, avalanche.core.fact_blocks, avalanche.core.fact_event_logs, or the avalanche.core.fact_traces tables at the time of this analysis.

About

This analysis was created by catscatscode (Flipside, Twitter, catscatscode#3578 on Discord) on 27 June 2022 for Flipside Crypto's "Avalanche Block and Transaction Performance" bounty. This analysis represents the author's best effort at interpreting available data, but it is not financial advice.

Looking at the Avalanche block explorer (see screenshot below), I located block # 16459789:

On average, 5.5 transactions make it into a block, with a low of 1, and a high of 144: