What is Polygon?

Polygon is popularly known as one the most adopted Layer2 for Ethereum, due to its faster speed transactions, low transaction fees & dev friendliness. The excellent throughput and lower gas fees have attracted worldwide developers to start creating ethereum based decentralized applications through the polygon network. The scalability solution of Polygon has helped it to achieve a new level of success.

Here’s everything to learn about the Polygon.

About Polygon

Polygon is a Layer-2 scaling solution that fosters multiple tools to enhance the speed of transactions and minimize the cost and complexities on the blockchain networks.

The core of Polygon’s vision is to scale Ethereum, which is the hub of many decentralized applications (Dapps) through which you can join virtual worlds, purchase art, play games, and participate in multiple DeFi products.

Polygon acts as an layer on top of Ethereum. Polygon has different scaling mechanisms that promise to build simple frameworks for interconnecting the blockchain networks.

Polygon helps Ethereum to upscale its usability and efficiency. It entices the developers to bring new products to market with great speed and low fees. Here is more about Ethereum to help you understand it briefly.

Matic rebranded itself to Polygon but kept MATIC as their digital currency to carry the underpinning transactions within the network. Matic token will still acts as fuel to the ecosystem.

Who created Polygon?

Polygon was initially called Matic Network, a group of blockchain developers, Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, and Anurag Arjun, as well as Mihailo Bjelic Co-founded Polygon.

The vision was to eliminate the issues present in Ethereum chain which to certain extent discouraged adoption i.e, High transaction cost & slower transactions.

During their initial exchange offering, the Polygon team raised approximately $5.6 million with the sale of 1.9 billion MATIC tokens within three weeks.

They went live in 2020 and attracted global investors like Mark Cuban to invest in Polygon.

MATIC was rebranded to Polygon in February 2021.

How does Polygon work?

Polygon provides a multi-layered scaling solution that helps Ethereum scale & adoption possible.

Due to the great interoperability, Polygon gives tough competition to the crypto giants such as Polkadot, Avalanche, and Cosmos.

Here are some of the scaling solutions provided by Polygon:

• Plasma Chains – A separate blockchain that is anchored to the main Ethereum chain, and uses fraud proofs (like Optimistic rollups) to arbitrate disputes. These chains are sometimes referred to as "child" chains as they are essentially smaller copies of the Ethereum Mainnet.
• zk-Rollups – Many transfers are offloaded to ZK Rollups, where it rolls them into a single transaction, using zero-knowledge Proof, which is sent to the Ethereum main chain for the final public record.
• Optimistic Rollups – This scaling solution runs on top of Ethereum and allows near-instant transactions by relying on a "fraud proofs" mechanism

Polygon has a Proof of Stake (PoS) sidechain mechanism in which network participants can stake MATIC to validate the transactions on network.

Polygon’s Sidechains works like other proof of stake blockchains. The structure, client nodes, validator nodes, dapps, tokens, etc., are similar to other POS mechanisms.

The only thing that separates Polygon from other Layer2 platforms is that they’re not just offering one flavour of scaling solution, and also they’re interoperable.

Thus, execution and evaluation power is significant compared to other Layer2 & POS implementations.

Read more in detail about its growth here.

Why build on Polygon?

• Polygon is to address the real-time issues and limitations of similar interoperability projects like Polkadot and cosmos.
• Polygon functions well with the Ethereum virtual machine, making it approachable and accessible to those building dapps on Ethereum through solidity.
• It is flexible enough to incorporate and foster any scalability solution required.

Resources

https://polygon.technology/