What is Polygon technically?

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Anyone dealing with DeFi and NFTs will have heard about Polygon or Matic ($MATIC). It was renamed from Matic Network to Polygon Network and it is a Level-2 blockchain sitting on top of Ethereum. So what does this mean technically?

What is a Level-2 blockchain?

A level-2 blockchain sits right under a level-1 blockchain. Level-1 blockchains are the foundation of blockchains and they are typically tied to well-known cryptocurrencies. Like Ethereum is the blockchain and Ether is the native currency that is used within that blockchain. Most level-1 blockchains (if not all) suffer from congestion and scaling issues tied to deep underlying technical reasons. That's not inherently a problem but if you want to move stuff around quickly and without paying a lot of transaction fees (gas fees) you wonder if there aren't ways to optimize main blockchains. And there are The level-2 blockchains. They are, generally speaking, their own blockchains, with their own nodes and everything a level-1 blockchain has as well. The difference is that they utilize the underlying blockchain (level-1) as a foundational block on their own.?

What exactly is Polygon?

Polygon is a whole lot of things. The heart of Polygon is called "Plasma" and it is basically a network to launch "many" blockchains based on Ethereum. That's probably not what you are going to do (unless you are a developer) and so you most likely will deal with the main Polygon sidechains. Sidechain is what Polygon calls any of the sub-blockchains of Plasma.?So when you talk about using Polygon you most likely are referring the Polygon mainnet, which is the main sidechain running through Plasma. It's essential an Ethereum fork (meaning it is a copy of Ethereum) but uses a different way to validate transactions. Polygon has made a name for itself for finding very efficient ways to validate transactions (keyword being "Proof-of-stake") and therefor being cheaper and more efficient than Ethereum.?

Does Polygon trade off security for performance?

You might wonder why Ethereum is not doing exactly what Polygon is doing and that is an excellent question. Ethereum is actually adopting a lot of what Polygon is already doing into its upcoming update (formerly called "Ethereum 2.0"). What Polygon does however, and Ethereum wont be able to do this by design, is to bundle transactions together. I'm over simplifying here but imagine we bundle 50 transactions together and process them in our new blockchain. We then store the current state of our new blockchain in Ethereum. So our data is secured by Ethereum yet we were able to process 50 transactions together while only paying one Ethereum gas fee. Now, we still have our own validators who want a share of the pie but given that Polygon is quite efficient that problem is not nearly as big as it is for Ethereum. And voila: We have a scalable, powerful and yet secure blockchain solution based on Ethereum.?

And that's essentially what Polygon is.

#nft #web3 #polygon

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