With low throughput, high latency and high gas costs limiting Ethereum scalability, Polygon (formerly known as Matic Network) is at the forefront of blockchain scalability. Polygon’s solutions have been battle-tested over recent years and have been adopted en masse by the Ethereum developer community.
Overview
Polygon is the first well-structured, easy-to-use platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development. Its core component is the Polygon SDK, a modular, flexible framework that supports building and connecting Secured Chains like Plasma, Optimistic Rollups, zkRollups and Validium, and Standalone Chains like Matic POS. The Polygon SDK is designed for flexibility and independence.
Polygon’s Layer-2 chains have seen widespread adoption, with 130+ dapps, ~14M transactions and ~280K unique wallet addresses.
If you’re an Ethereum developer, you’re already a Polygon developer! To leverage Polygon’s fast and secure transactions for your dapp, get started here.
Background
Polygon was founded as Matic Network in 2017 by Jaynti Kanani, Anurag Arjun and Sandeep Nailwal as a blockchain scaling solution. They were later joined by Mihailo Bjelic. Polygon utilized Plasma and POS technology to take process transactions off-chain and finally settle them on Ethereum. As a commit chain (as opposed to a sidechain), the hybrid POS–Plasma chain utilizes the decentralized power of around 90 validators to validate transactions on the network and provide finality on Ethereum.
Since rebranding to Polygon, the scope of these solutions has expanded. Polygon has become the Swiss Army knife of Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development. With Polygon, Ethereum becomes a fully fledged multi-chain system (aka the Internet of Blockchains).
Features
- Ethereum compatibility
- Scalability
a) Dedicated blockchains
b) Scalable consensus algorithms
c) Custom Wasm execution environments - Security – Modular security as a service
- Sovereignty
a) Dedicated throughput/resources
b) Fully customizable tech stack
c) Sovereign governance - Interoperability
a) Native support for arbitrary message-passing (tokens, contract calls, etc.)
b) Bridges to external systems - Superior user experience
a) Comparable to Web 2.0
b) Zero-gas transactions
c) Instant transaction finality - Excellent developer experience
a) Equivalent to Ethereum
b) No protocol-level knowledge required - Modularity
a) High customizability, extensibility, upgradeability
b) Short time-to-market
c) Community collaboration
The MATIC token
MATIC is the only native token of Polygon and is used to pay transaction fees and participate in Polygon’s proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.
Polygon resources
- Website: http://polygon.technology/
- Telegram community: http://t.me/maticnetwork
- Telegram announcements: https://t.me/maticnetwork_announcements
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/0xPolygon
- Medium: https://polygontech.medium.com
- Discord: https://discord.gg/KCC8zKsc
- Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/maticnetwork/
- GitHub: https://github.com/maticnetwork/
