What is Polygon (MATIC)?
Ethereum is great and by far the most popular decentralized application (dApps) network but has two issues:
- Due to large demand of the network, it has become very expensive and slow to run applications on the network.
- It doesn’t play well with other blockchains (what if you wanted to connect DeFi applications together?)
This is exactly why Polygon (aka. MATIC) was created.
Polygon is a Layer 2 solution backed by both Binance and Coinbase, whereby it is an add-on that sits on top of Ethereum blockchains. Developers of Ethereum-based DeFi Apps can use their SDK to ‘add-on’ Polygon and:
- Enable instant transactions (up to 65,536 transactions/per second, when compared to roughly 17 transactions/per second on Ethereum)
- Perform cheaper transactions (on average)
- Allow communication with other decentrailzed applications (dApps)
How Does It Work?
Polygon uses sidechains, which are unique blockchains that are bound to the main Ethereum blockchain (Imagine this as whole blockchains, connected to blocks on the main blockchain).
How is actual Coin used?
The cryptocurrency behind Polygon is used for the following purposes:
- Fees – Transaction fees used on the network and paid out to the validators.
- Staking – Providing MATIC coins to validate transactions, in return for more coins.
- Ecosystem Staking – Using MATIC coins for projects on the whole ecosystem, basically all the Apps using Polygon, ( At the moment there are 1318 dApps).
What makes Polygon unique?
The team behind Polygon focuses on creating the most usable suite of tools for developers to create ultra-scaling and high-performance blockchains for decentralized applications (dApps). This, together with the exceptional technology behind Polygon which manages to achieve up to 65,536 transactions per side chain are the most unique factors of Polygon.
There also lies the possibility of Polygon adding the support for another basechain in the future, rather than only supporting Ethereum for now. This would be huge as it would allow applications to communicate over different basechains (an example would be a decentralized application running on Ethereum and communicating with other dApps on Cardono).
Ethereum 2.0 vs Polygon
Ethereum 2.0 upgrades the ETH network to use proof-of-stake, making the network:
- Much Faster
- More Secure
- More Environmentally Friendly (Miners are not needed anymore to calculate complex mathematical puzzles)
One of the most important factor when buying the underlying coin as an investment, is that you believe in the development team and the team behing Polygon have always delivered exceptional results. Similar to the fact that you should look at the management team when you invest in Stocks, you must look at the development team behind Cryptocurrencies.
This together with the fact that Polygon has grown so much in terms of dApps in its ecosystem and that it is a layer-2, whereby it can also be adapted to Ethereum 2.0, will keep Polygon going.
Conclusion
Considering the large scale ecosystem of dApps running on Polygon ranging from DeFi to NFTs to Games, and the reliable development team behind Polygon, I would personally keep an eye on it as I believe this coin still has alot of potential to grow. Polygon also recently got funded by Sequoia Capital India, raising over $450 million which is a great sign to see.
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Disclaimer:
Any views or opinions presented in this article are personal and shouldn’t be taken/used as professional advice as we are not qualified financial advisors.
Any statistics mentioned have all been linked to their respective documents together with their ownership.
Lastly, we would like to note that this article has no tie to our professional jobs and was conducted in our free time.