Partnered With:

Some interesting data comparisons between Polygon and the Ethereum mainnet

Read this article in 11 Minutes

In terms of ERC20 token smart contracts, Defi protocol usage, and stabecoin bulk trading, Polygon seems to be taking the lead.

Some interesting findings from comparing Polygon and Ethereum data through Nansen

PNG Young Loon, Nanse analyst

Original text: Perry Wang, Chainnews

There has been much debate about the merits and demerits of Ethereum, Layer 1 and Layer 2, and the best look at the triad of managing scalability, security, and decentralization. A whole new ecosystem of decentralized applications (DAPPs) is emerging around non-Ethereum chains and various L2 solutions, allowing users to enjoy the same DEFI experience at a lower gas cost.

Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and Polygon are examples of this.

Polygon's Gas bill is definitely lower. Polygon has far more daily active transactions than Ethereum, but has never paid more than $10,000 a day in total Gas fees. By comparison, Ethereum users spend as much as $7 million a day in Gas fees for transactions.

But beyond that, the odd discrepancy between Polygon and Ethereum's on-chain activity deserves further investigation. In this article, we did a brief exploratory analysis of the on-chain data in Polygon and compared it to the activity on Ethereum.

Contract Deployment Activities

Contract deployment activities can be a good barometer of the state of blockchain project development. When comparing the data between Ethereum and Polygon, some anomalies become apparent.

I noticed, on the one hand, that a much higher percentage of the total number of ERC20 token contracts are deployed on Polygon. Since April, one ERC20 token contract has been deployed on Polygon for every 220 other contracts deployed. On Ethereum, one ERC20 token is deployed for every 1430 other contracts!

In fact, Polygon often has tokens with duplicate names. This is mainly for two reasons: the deployment of fake tokens to entice people to buy; And some of the developers are in production testing. That's the "miracle" of cheap Gas bills.

Polygon 与以太坊主网一些有趣的数据对比

Number of tokens with the same name

If you've spent enough time on the Ethereum tracker dashboard on Nansen, you'll know that as many as 60% of the Ethereum contracts deployed each month are Chitoken contracts. These tokens are deployed as a way to save on Gas bills and are then destroyed along with the transaction. Polygon doesn't seem to have any of these contracts -- they're not needed.

Polygon 与以太坊主网一些有趣的数据对比

Number of Ethereum contract deployments per month

Addresses that span both Ethereum and Polygon

We also tracked the number of active addresses across both Ethereum and Polygon. As of June 9, that's about 34% of all Polygon addresses.

I decided to parse the transactions that have straddled Ethereum and Polygon since April 2021 to quickly understand the role of these addresses on both chains. The most used project contracts on Polygon by this user group are QuickSwap and Polycat.finance. Uniswap V2 routers are the most frequently used on Ethereum.

What's more interesting is that out of those overlapping addresses, nearly 17,000 people are joining AVE on Polygon -- but have never used AVE on Ethereum. In the case of Curve.Fi, the number is about 3,000.

Polygon 与以太坊主网一些有趣的数据对比

Aave and Curve users on the Ethereum mainnet and Polygon

Stablecoin adoption

On Ethereum, USDT dominates stecoin circulation by a huge margin -- the daily transaction volume of USDT is almost twice that of USDC and DAI combined! On Polygon, however, USDC seems to be the stecoin of choice -- consistently accounting for more than 50% of stecoin transfers.

Several Polygon native stablecoin protocols are under development, with Iron and Mimatic being two notable projects.

Polygon 与以太坊主网一些有趣的数据对比 )

Transfer amount per day on Stablecoin on Polygon

Polygon 与以太坊主网一些有趣的数据对比

Average daily users of stablecoin on Polygon

The first-mover advantage is likely to work here. The earliest QuickSWAP pool had a USDC token pair instead of a USDT, and the earliest project on Polygon had a bigger incentive for USDC pool. In fact, QuickSwap has more tokens that are paired with USDC than WETH.

Polygon 与以太坊主网一些有趣的数据对比

Ratio of trade pairs on QuickSwap

Token pairs on Uniswap are different, with as many as 74% created for Wrapped Ether, compared to just 3.5% for USDT.

The trading value of the stablecoin in dollars

The average stablecoin transfer in dollars is a good indicator of the general capital size of Polygon users. A useful chart from Nansen is the distribution of value over time by transaction size, which can be found on our Ethereum Stable Coin main dashboard.

I ran the same analysis using on-chain data from Polygon, and to my surprise, over $1 million transactions have accounted for 65% of Stabecoin's daily trading volume over the past few days. The chart looks very similar to the one on Ethereum, and Big Whale is clearly making its way into Polygon.

Polygon 与以太坊主网一些有趣的数据对比 )

Single Stablecoin transaction distribution on Polygon

It's worth noting that stablecoin trades in the $10,000 to $100,000 range account for about 10-15% of total stablecoin trading volume on Polygon, but only about 6-10% of total stablecoin trading volume on Ethereum, at least in the last few weeks.

The same characteristics were seen in transactions between $1,000 and $10,000. This may confirm that higher Gas charges on Ethereum discourage transactions with a lower dollar value.

Below is a visualization of the average percentage of total trading volume per trading band for Ethereum and Polygon, taken from June 1, 2021, BBB 0, 7.

Polygon 与以太坊主网一些有趣的数据对比