Over the last year, both Avalanche and Polygon have raised significant capital and gained a lot of goodwill due to their platform capabilities. Avalanche has attracted significant dev activity headed by DeFi superstar Daniele Sestagali.
On the other hand, Polygon became the first crypto unicorn out of India and has attracted investments from the likes of Mark Cuban. Today let’s compare these two and see how they match up.
Avalanche vs Polygon: The Origins
Avalanche was founded by Emin Gun Sirer, a former professor at Cornell, and Ava Labs. It aims to build an ecosystem of platforms. Each platform represents a different version of a virtual machine. Think of virtual machines as different operating systems to run smart contracts.
Polygon was previously known as “Matic Network” and was founded by Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, and Anurag Arjun. While Avalanche is an independent blockchain, Polygon is a sidechain and operates on top of Ethereum.
Also read: What is Polygon? How Does MATIC Work?
Avalanche vs Polygon: The Technology
Avalanche has a triple blockchain system that consists of –
- Exchange Chain (X-Chain): This chain is responsible for creating, transacting, and settling Avalanche assets. All transaction fees are paid in AVAX.
- Contract Chain (C-Chain): This chain is EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatible and allows developers to port over their Ethereum applications easily.
- Platform Chain (P-Chain): This chain allows developers to create custom Layer-1 (L1) or Layer-2 (L2) chains.
Polygon utilizes a bunch of scaling technologies like Plasma and zk-Rollups. Plasma is a layer-2 scalability solution wherein the base Ethereum chain can delegate complex computations to plasma sidechains. Zk-Rollups is another layer-2 technology that “rolls up” a bunch of transactions from the chain and processes it off-chain, before committing them back into the chain. Both of these techs allow Polygon to experience superfast computations.
Also read: What is Avalanche? Know More About AVAX
Avalanche vs Polygon: Consensus Mechanism
Both of these protocols use a variation of the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. In addition, Avalanche uses the Snowball mechanism, which has received a lot of positive feedback for achieving speed without compromising decentralization.
Polygon uses the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. Polygon users can participate directly by becoming network validators, or indirectly by becoming a delegator.
Avalanche vs Polygon: Tokenomics – AVAX and MATIC
AVAX is the native token of the Avalanche ecosystem. Avalanche also burns all transaction fees to ensure deflationary tokenomics. There are currently 245,278,658 AVAX in circulation with an upper cap of 377,752,194.
Despite Polygon’s rebranding – the token ticker remains MATIC. There is a total supply of 10 billion MATIC tokens, and 6.87 billion have been released into circulation. MATIC goes through annual burns, which removes 0.27% of the token’s total supply.
Avalanche vs Polygon: DeFi TVL
Both Avalanche and Polygon are highly popular DeFi platforms. Let’s take a look at the TVL (total value locked) charts from DeFi Llama for both these protocols.
Avalanche is one of the four platforms in the world, with TVL > $10 billion. While Aave and Curve are the leading platforms on Avalanche, one of the main factors behind Avalanche’s growth is the involvement of the above-mentioned Daniele Sestagali. His protocols Wonderland (TIME) and Abracadabra Money (SPELL) are hugely popular on Avalanche.
Polygon may have plateaued around $5 billion TVL, however, it’s still an imposing number. And given their advancements in recent times, this TVL will probably go up some more. Aave, Quickswap, Curve, SushiSwap, and Balancer are the top-performing protocols on this platform.
Avalanche vs Polygon: NFT Platform
While these two are leading DeFi platforms, they also happen to be robust NFT platforms.
Avalanche also happens to be one of the top 8 NFT platforms in the world, with a total volume >$18.30 million USD. Currently, the top 3 NFT projects on Avalanche are Police & Thief Game, Pizza Game Chefs, and AvaxHomes.
Polygon doesn’t have an NFT chart in DeFi Llama. However, it is one of the three blockchains available on OpenSea (along with Ethereum and Klaytn) that gives it immense exposure. As per Dune Analytics, Polygon has sold more than 2 million NFTs in January 2022. Halfway through February 2022, Polygon has already sold more than 1 million NFTs.
Avalanche vs Polygon: The Comparison
| Avalanche | Polygon | |
| Ticker | AVAX | MATIC |
| Founder(s) | Emin Gun Sirer | Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, and Anurag Arjun |
| Infrastructure | Triple blockchain ecosystem | Sidechain running on Ethereum. Has plasma and zk-Rollup functionality. |
| EVM Compatibility | Yes | Yes |
| Burning Mechanism | Transaction fees burned | Annual burning for 0.27% tokens |
| Consensus Mechanism | Snowball | PoS |
| Transactions Per Second (TPS) | 4500 TPS. Potentially 20,000 TPS. | 10,000 TPS |
| DeFi TVL | >$10 billion | >$5 billion |
| OpenSea Availability | No | Yes |
Avalanche vs Polygon: Which One is A Better Buy?
Both Avalanche and Polygon are extremely popular and well-built protocols. Both of them have immense potential, so you can’t go wrong with either. Having said that, you must do your research before going in on those coins. Once you are ready, be sure to check out the following:
