Avalanche is a layer 1 blockchain that was launched in September 2020. Like many other L1 protocols trying to resolve the Scalability Trilemma, Avalanche has its own vision and an idea of how to solve it. Avalanche’s mainnet is made up of 3 separate blockchains: Exchange Chain (X-Chain), Platform Chain (P-Chain), and Contract Chain (C-Chain). Each of these chains serves a different purpose in order to improve scalability.
Avalanche is an EVM compatible blockchain which means that many of the dApps running on Ethereum can be migrated to Avalanche with minimal code-changes. In addition, in real world Avalanche blockchain performs much faster than Ethereum when it comes to transactions processed per second, time to finality and gas fees. This has been key for the adoption that Avalanche saw in 2021 and thus reflected in the price of AVAX token which reached nearly $140.
Avalanche currently sits at #3 on DefiLLama’s TVL rankings. At it’s peak, Avalanche TVL reached as high as $22.5 Billion! A lot of this liquidity was attracted due to the $180M Avalanche rush program.
## Subnets
In addition to traditional method of scaling performance through increasing TPS (transactions per second) which is also known as vertical scaling, Avalanche architecture also allows horizontal scaling through the use of something called subnets.
Rado Minchev explains subnets the best:
Subnets are highly customizable verticals that allow anyone to run their independent blockchain: using any VM, defining any economic primitives, choosing any set of features, gas token, validator requirements, and security models. They can be anything ranging from privacy-focused L1 with smart contracts to L2 payments settlement layer, a permissioned institutional blockchain, or a single popular PvP Tetris game.
See AlsoStaking FAQ | Avalanche SupportFor example, USDC could create an L1 subnet, appoint validators, use USDC as gas tokens, and enable smart contracts. That would translate to the fastest USD stable coin settlement layer that requires no additional tokens to pay for tx fees.
We’re starting to see subnets being deployed in real world and the most high-profile of these was the DeFi Kingdoms Crystalvale subnet expansion to the base Defi Kingdoms dApp on Harmony blockchain.
In addition to the DFK subnet, more subnets have also popped up on Avalanche as Avalanche has deployed a $290M incentive program to incentivize creation of more subnets.
Flipside Crypto recently announced support for Avalanche data so I thought it was the perfect time to dive into this data and explore Avalanche’s blockchain performance.
Metrics: In this analysis, I’m going to be evaluating the performance of Avalanche blockchain around how many transactions per second it’s processing, how much gas is being spent, block times etc.
Analysis time-frame: Since the data from Flipside is still being back-filled beyond June, the time-frame for this analysis will be after June 18th.
Aggregations: For metrics like TPS (transactions per second), looking at per second data and plotting in the chart is next to impossible as it becomes too much data. Therefore, I’ll be looking at 1-hr chunks and calculating the following statistics—average, minimum and maximum which should give us a good representation of the blockchains performance in that hour.
## Transactions per second
AVA Labs (entity behind the Avalanche blockchain) have benchmarked the Avalanche architecture to be capable of delivering around 6500 TPS (Transactions Per Second). Here are other systems for comparison.
- Bitcoin — 7 transactions per second
- Ethereum — 15 transactions per second
- Ripple — 1500 transactions per second
- VISA — 1700 transactions per second
- PayPal — 193 transactions per second
One thing to understand about the blockchain is that unless we see the load and usage, we likely won’t get up to the 6500 TPS number in real life. Now, let’s see how much usage the blockchain is getting real life.
- So far, we seem to be hovering between 5 and 7 TPS on average with the maximum going as high as high as 265 TPS.
- Both the average and maximum TPS seem to have come down in the last few days.
- This could likely be because of the fear in the market leading to the reduction in the amount of transactions we’re seeing on the blockchain.
Next, we look at how the average TPS per day shapes up and if some days are busier than others.
### TPS by Day
We can see that Fridays and Saturday are the busiest times which makes sense as Friday is when weekend starts in the eastern time zones and on Saturday it’s a weekend day in almost all time-zones.
### TPS by Day and Hour
Next, we can split the Day into an hour as well to find hotspots and look at the average and maximum (use the buttons on the chart) TPS. We find that:
- Looking at averages, Friday 1500 (3 PM) UTC and 0200 (2AM) UTC are the busiest times with close to13 TPS.
- Looking at maximums, Saturday tends to be busier than Friday with TPS reaching more than 100 in most slots and as high as 265 TPS in the 1900 (7 pm) UTC slot.
## Block Performance
Now looking at the block performance, we see that on average Avalanche is processing around 6 transactions per block with 5 being the median and 10 being the 90th percentile.
### Block Times
Avalanche prides itself on being the fastest smart contracts platform in the industry, as measured by time-to-finality. Avalanche achieves transactions finality in less than 2s.
Looking at on-chain data, this plays out as on average we’re at less than 2s block finality!
### Gas Usage
Looking at the gas stats for each block we can see that on average we’re using around 1M gas but the maximum gas used very often reaches the 8M gas limit.
## Transaction gas stats
### Gas price
Now we’re looking at how much gas each transaction is using. This is represented in nAVAX aka nano-AVAX or AVAX / 10⁹ and is similar to the Gwei unit on Ethereum.
For the most part, on average the gas price has remained less than 50 nAVAX with few spikes beyond 100 nAVAX.
The maximum values on the other hand, we’ve seen reach as high as 232K nAVAX!
Looking at the gas prices by hour and day, we can see that:
- On average, Saturday is the day where the gas costs the most.
- Looking at the maximums, Saturday stands out considerably with the highest spikes on this day especially around the 0200 and 1900 UTC slots we saw in the TPS by day and hour chart as well. Surprisingly, the 1600 UTC slot on Monday is also considerably quite expensive. This could likely be because we’re looking at one week’s worth of data atm.
### Gas used
The gas used on the other hand seems a lot more stable when comparing the averages and maximum. The average gas used hovers around 200K while the maximum gas used hovers around 7M.
### Gas fee
The product of gas price and gas used defines how much gas fees are paid by the user. This is actually the current achilles heel of Ethereum which has led to the popularity of alt-EVM compatible L1 chains. This problem was most visible during the recent BAYC metaverse land sale with fees reaching as high as $4K-5K!
Let’s see how Avalanche is doing in comparison. Not bad!
On average uses are spending around 0.01 AVAX which at current prices is around $0.2! And the best part is the average has reduced slightly over the last week.
The maximums are reaching more than 1 AVAX and as high as 8–10 AVAX on occasion but these are anomalies and not the norm.
Looking at the gas fee by hour and day, the average gas fee are pretty evenly spread out through the week with Saturday being more expensive on average.
When we look at maximums, Saturday again stands out as the day where users are paying the most gas fee (and by quite a lot!). We see the maximum gas fees reach as high as 10 AVAX in the wee hours of morning i.e. before 0700 UTC.
Avalanche is one of the most exciting blockchains in the industry with an opinionated approach for scaling. So far, it’s ecosystem has seen great adoption and it’s now the clear favorite when it comes to EVM-compatible L1s competing with Ethereum. In this analysis from on-chain data we found that:
- On average, Avalanche achieves block finality in less than 2s.
- Friday and Saturday are the busiest days for the chain when comparing using the TPS, Gas fee and Gas price metrics.
- On average, the block size is around 6 transactions.
- Based on the current load, Avalanche is processing around 7–10 transactions per second on average with the maximum reaching as high as 265 TPS!
