Near Protocol: Network Performance Analysis

In this dashboard we will analyse the NEAR Blockchain for it's speed and performance. We will compare it to other L1 chains to see if it is better. Key Metrics to support our analysis: - Transactions per minute (TPM) - Time to Finality (TTF) - Transaction Success Rate - Average transactions in a block - Average Gas Prices

NEAR Gas prices:

Like other programmable blockchains, NEAR compensates the nodes by charging transaction fees on transactions they confirm, also called gas fees.
Gas units: internally, transaction fees are not calculated directly in NEAR tokens, but instead go through an in-between phase of "gas units". The benefit of gas units is that they are deterministic – the same transaction will always cost the same number of gas units.
Gas price: gas units are then multiplied by a gas price to determine how much to charge users. This price is automatically recalculated each block depending on network demand (if previous block is more than half full the price goes up, otherwise it goes down, and it won't change by more than 1% each block), and bottoms out at a price that's configured by the network, currently 100 million yoctoNEAR.

The key to determine the speed of a blockchain we need to analyse how fast are transactions completing and how is the success rate of these transactions. Below charts will display

Transactions per Minute (TPM)
Count of daily transactions
Transaction Success Rate over time
Count of Successful and Failed transactions each day

Below are some key Block statistics for NEAR Blockchain

Time-to-finality (TTF) is an alternative and more accurate gauge of speed since it measures the time from transaction submission to confirmation with a guarantee of irreversibility. We have calculated TTF by assuming 1 block confirmation is sufficient for irreversibility.

Average time between blocks has been approximated to TTF in the below chart.

Summary:

NEAR Protocol averages for about 600k-700k transactions per day.
Success rate of these transactions is 86.7%.
NEAR protocol averages about 400 TPM since September 2021.
Highest number of transactions observed on NEAR was 1.77M on Jan 16th, 2022 with a TPM of 1230.
Nearly 20.7M since September 1, 2021 were failed transactions contributing to 13.3% of all transactions.
Maximum number of transactions in a block achieved in NEAR blockchain was 623.
NEAR averages 6.65 transactions per block.
NEAR protocols boasts of a fairly low Time to finality (TTF) of 1 second - The average time between two blocks.
Gas prices are fairly stable with very few fluctuations in NEAR protocol. So that makes it consistent transaction fees for users.
Solana has the highest TPS and transaction count in all the L1 chains compared. However it fares lower in terms of transaction success rate.

Check out Solana Network performance stats here
Comparing the transaction count and TPS for layer 1 blockchains with NEAR, we can see that NEAR lags behind among major L1 chains. It records the lowest transaction count and TPS.

> To Conclude, we can see that NEAR Protocol is still in its infancy in terms of number of transactions performed on chain. Has fewer users compared to major L1 chains. Despite that, NEAR token has reached top 30 by market cap for all cryptocurrencies which is promising. > > It looks like NEAR could potentially be massively scalable when they have claimed a 10000+ TPS by using an industry leading sharding architecture. > > It has a healthy success rate of 86.7%, but as more users use NEAR, we’ll get a better picture in terms of it’s performance. The development of NEAR protocol will depend upon the quality of dapps on it’s network.

To get an insight over NEAR protocol users refer this dashboard Citizens of NEAR