WHAT IS POLYGON MATIC? HOW DOES POLYGON WORK?

Ethereum is awesome — it’s the most popular hub for DeFi development and, in terms of miner and node activity, the most secure smart-contract enabled blockchain. However, there are a few significant drawbacks… It doesn’t work well with other blockchains, and it has major congestion issues as a result of high user demand.

However, Polygon, a framework for creating Ethereum compatible blockchains, could be the solution for these issues.

What is Polygon Matic?

Challenges that are being faced by ethereum such as high gas fees, poor user experience, and slow execution of transitions, Polygon aims to improve on those aspects and provide a better solution.

Polygon’s main aim is to create “Ethereum’s Internet of blockchains” by allowing developers to create custom ethereum-compatible blockchain in a single click with the help of a simple and easy framework. A vision of Polygon is to create an ecosystem in which distinct blockchains can easily interchange information and value.

The project was originally known as Matic Network, but as the scope of the project grew, it was renamed Polygon. Polygon is the framework as mentioned above and whereas Matic was a basic layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum.

Founders of Polygon

A multi-talented team led by the four co-founders — Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, Anurag Arjun, and Mihailo Bjelic — is now working on it. Kanani, Polygon’s CEO, is a professional developer with a knack for scaling mechanisms, while the rest of the team has extensive experience founding, managing, and expanding a tech firm.

How does polygon work?

Polygon offers a range of modules that allow developers to quickly create and configure their own unique blockchain. Consensus and governance modules, as well as execution environments and virtual machine implementations, are among them.

The Matic proof-of-stake (PoS) sidechain, which employs a network of validators to greatly speed up transactions and reduce fees while confirming everything on the Ethereum chain, is configured to profit from blockchains built in this manner.

The Ethereum layer, security layer, Polygon networks layer, and execution layer are the four layers that make up Polygon’s architecture.

The Ethereum layer is essentially a collection of Ethereum-based smart contracts. Transaction finality, staking, and communication between Ethereum and the multiple Polygon chains are all handled by these smart contracts. The security layer operates alongside Ethereum and serves as “validators as a service,” allowing chains to benefit from an extra degree of protection. The Ethereum layer and the Security layer are both optional. Chains launched on the platform can communicate with one another and with the Ethereum main chain. This will open the door to several new applications, including interoperable decentralized applications (dapps) and the easy exchange of value across platforms.

As you might have noticed, Polygon intends to incorporate more than one scaling solution, in keeping with its goal of minimizing barriers to entry by attempting to reduce transaction fees to a bare minimum. By taking a multi-pronged approach to the issue of scaling, Polygon is hedging its bets, should any other scaling solution fail to accomplish its purpose.

What is the ethereum scaling problem?

If you’ve used the Ethereum network in recent months during busy times, you’ve probably seen that transaction costs are very high. These fees ranged from $9 to over $30 per transaction in April 2021, and at times greatly exceeded these values. Furthermore, the price of smart contract transactions has recently skyrocketed, with the average Uniswap, Curve, and Balancer transaction currently costing well over $100.

There are a few major reasons behind this:

• The first is the Ethereum network’s transaction throughput, which is limited to a certain amount of transactions per second.\
• The second is that before transactions can be completed, Ethereum must gain global consensus. Due to propagation delays on its proof-of-work (PoW) network, this could take a long period.

So as a result there are two options to tackle this scaling problem of the ethereum network.

Polygon was only announced in February 2021, therefore there isn’t yet a roadmap laying out how it will progress or which features will be prioritized. Polygon’s team, on the other hand, has been hard at work forming collaborations with companies like Mogul Productions, Umbria, Atari, and OpenPredict, which plans to launch its first market product on the platform.