TL;DR: With a new update or project being released almost every day, it’s clear the crypto ecosystem is constantly evolving. Polygon has gone through a lot of ups and downs to reach the level it’s at today — but it’s just the beginning. Knowing what brought it here and why it was created will lead you to make better decisions when investing or simply using Polygon.
In this article, we’re gonna dive into the Polygon ecosystem, answer all the $MATIC related questions and even more. Prepare yourself for a history lesson and a journey to the future of Polygon!
What is Polygon (MATIC)?
Polygon is a Layer 2 scaling solution created in 2018 by a team of Ethereum contributors. It is a platform designed to support infrastructure development and help Ethereum scale.
Scalability is defined as the amount of transactions that Polygon can process per second, or throughput. Matic is one of the many projects working to make Ethereum scalable. Some took the route of on-chain scaling, while others took the off-chain scaling route.
On-chain scaling keeps all the transactions at the base Ethereum chain. The approach is to increase the throughput of the base chain itself. It is generally considered that on-chain scaling provides better security guarantees because. This is because security measures are implemented on one layer, removing complexity along the way. The most popular on-chain scaling technique is called sharding, which is seen as still at an experimental phase.
Sharding splits the entire state of the network into smaller blockchains (called shards) that contain their own independent piece of state and transaction history. In this system, certain nodes would process transactions only for certain shards, allowing the throughput of transactions processed in total across all shards to be much higher.
By contrast, off-chain scaling separates the computational layer from the base layer. Put simply, transactions are processed off-chain and the proof is posted on the main chain. Layer 2 or off-chain scaling solutions are broadly divided into: State Channels, and Sidechains.
State Channels are similar to Lightning Network, but on Ethereum. They are intended not just to handle transactions but also aim to handle ‘State’ changes in order to process smart contract computations.
Sidechains represent an evolution from Plasma as it’s considered a more viable scaling approach. The only difference between sidechains and Plasma is that the latter trades off some utility for extra security.
Polygon’s flagship product is its POS sidechain, which is used to this day by millions of users. Besides its POS sidechain, Polygon is developing a suite of scalability solutions (Optimistic Rollups, zkRollups, and Validium) that are interoperable with each other. The end goal is to help Ethereum scale while giving projects much needed flexibility for which scaling solution they prefer to implement.
The consensus mechanism that Polygon uses is called Proof of Stake. Proof of Stake means that Polygon gets its security from validators that stake $MATIC to secure the chain. This is different from Proof of Work blockchains, where miners replace the role of validators.
The concept of blockchains is not new, and Polygon is one of many such networks. The idea started in 2007 with the release of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin Whitepaper. This kicked off the subsequent creation of many different types of networks under the same “blockchain” terminology. Despite being similar in concept blockchains have all different architectures and use cases. What all have in common — including Polygon — is that they have to be secure.
Security is the ability of a blockchain to prevent attacks and penalize malicious actors. This is usually done through their consensus algorithm and the mechanism they use to reach finality. When a block has been created and mined, the transaction is considered final, meaning that nobody can change the date inside.
Over time many different mechanism have been designed, ranging from Proof of Work, Proof of Stake to novel ones called Proof of Spacetime. Each one hopes to achieve the best way of securing the network they are built for. As noted before, Polygon makes use of type of consensus mechanism we call “Proof of Stake” — or PoS for short.
Polygon’s sidechain framework is used to guarantee the security of assets on the Ethereum main chain, while generic transactions are secured by its PoS network. Transactions made on the POS sidechain are then bundled and confirmed on the Ethereum main chain. Theoretically, Polygon can scale to millions of transactions per second with its bundling mechanism.
Although entirely focused on Ethereum at present, Polygon plans to develop its scalability-focused product offering to support other blockchains, and to provide cross-chain interoperability between different protocols.
Ethereum has been created in 2014 and introduced the concepts of smart contracts. These are small applications that run inside a virtual machine called the Ethereum Virtual Machine. The EVM allows for a blockchain to process more than simple token transfers. To give more info, it opened up the possibility to run applications in a decentralized manner.
Applications usually run in the cloud or on your computer, so running them on a blockchain was unheard of at the time. This makes them uncensorable (nobody can stop them) and ensures they’re always online — as long as the chain they run on is processing transactions.
Polygon is based on the same EVM architecture created by and used in Ethereum. This brings advantages to both the developers as well as the main Polygon (MATIC) chain, as the deployment of dapps can be done without modifying the code.
Polygon is powered by the MATIC token, a central part of the Polygon ecosystem. MATIC is an inflationary token due to the way its tokenomics have been planned. This means that new MATIC coins are created with each block and the total supply increases from 7 to 38K MATIC per block mined. The Polygon inflation rate sits currently at around 13% and gets lower every year.
The tokenomics of Polygon also specifies a maximum amount of tokens that will ever be created. The maximum amount that will ever be minted by the protocol is 10,000,000,000 MATIC
For more details about how you can earn more Polygon by running a validator node at home check out our Polygon Mining & Staking guide. It includes the exact steps and best methods of earning more crypto like $MATIC in 2024 and beyond.
When was Polygon (MATIC) created?
Polygon (MATIC) was created during Jaynti Kanani’s research into scaling solutions. Work began on the Polygon chain in 2017, but before that, a couple of important events happened. Most events revolve around the Polygon CEO and Founder, Jaynti Kanani.
The first meaningful event is Jaynti’s research into Plasma.
The concept of Plasma was first introduced by Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Poon in a paper titled “Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts.” Released on August 11, 2017, it proposed a framework for scaling the amount of transactions that can be processed on a blockchain.
According to Vitalik, it is a bad idea to build sophisticated features into the base layer of a blockchain. It would create a lot of complexity as the community would have to continually discuss, implement and coordinate newly discovered technical improvements. Such a time intensive activity might cause Ethereum to stagnate. His idea was to keep the layer 1 blockchain stable, and layer 2 will take the burden of carrying the innovation and change.
The term “side chain” was first used to describe the child chains in Plasma. These side chains report periodically to the main chain and use it to settle disputes. Plasma qualifies as an off-chain solution, which is different from doing the computation on the main blockchain. To relieve the main blockchain from the burden of computation, the activity is done on the child chain, and the proof is later submitted on the main chain.
The Plasma structure is built out of smart contracts and cryptographic verifications, enabling the creation of an unlimited number of smaller chains, called child chains, which are essentially smaller copies of the parent Ethereum blockchain. This means that the child chains could coexist and operate independently. Eventually, Plasma would make it possible for businesses to implement scaling solutions in various ways, according to their needs.
Plasma was promising scalability to the level of Visa transaction volumes. In the midst of the 2017 bull run, Ethereum network was struggling to keep up with the demand. Their community was still the biggest in the crypto space, but even the diehard fans couldn’t afford to pay $100 for the transaction fees.
The paper on Plasma led to instant excitement from the Ethereum community, who had the chance to experiment and implement the concept. It was up to the crypto community to build up a functional implementation of Plasma, and this is how Matic was born.
Another meaningful event was Matic’s transition from a research project into a blockchain company.
Jaynti, Sandeep and Anurag had released a Plasma MVP. Their research has led them to the conclusion that the proposed plasma implementations had usability as well as scaling issues.
Their model was outperforming most versions of the Plasma. Matic’s framework achieved 7000 TPS on a single sidechain on internal testnet. All while achieving finality on the Ethereum main chain. Despite the promising metrics, it was difficult to attract more projects to use Matic. The team envisioned all the existing businesses moving to Ethereum. By contrast, even the most skilled developers had a difficult time integrating blockchain into their framework, let alone a scalability solution on top of that.
It became clear that Matic would have to make the entire process much simpler. Driven by a lack of user experience, they were looking to create a smooth UX and developer abstraction from main chain to Matic chain. This is how Matic became a company.
After validating their idea, Jaynti Kanani together with the Matic team started building today’s Polygon blockchain and codebase.
What the team had created can be described as a More Viable Plasma. The Plasma framework is used to guarantee the security of assets on the Ethereum main chain, while generic transactions that occur on Matic sidechains are secured by a Proof-of-Stake network.
Matic sidechains are essentially a copy of Ethereum, essentially making it an easy tool for developers to use it for scaling their dapps and protocols. At the sidechain layer, there are Block Producers, selected by stakers, who will be creating the Matic blocks.
Stakers are incentivized to select honest block producers in order to earn rewards. Over time, more people would join as validators to help decentralize the network. Even with a small number of validators, Matic was able to process transactions at high speeds, without any security incidents.
Later on, the team spun out into Polygon Technology and launched the $MATIC token. The $MATIC token was sold only through a private sale first, and then a public one. The private sale brought in $450 million to accelerate the growth of Polygon. The next sale was a massive success, bringing in $5 million from retail investors.
Such a huge investment has allowed Polygon to continue building the vision of a fast and scalable EVM compatible blockchain.
Who created Polygon (MATIC)?
Polygon was created by Jaynti Kanani together with Sandeep Nailwal, Anurag Arjun, and Mihailo Bjelic, after Ethereum became popular.
Jaynti Kanani is a computer engineer born in India. He worked as a data scientist and now serves as the CEO of Polygon Technology. Jaynti works on the underlying protocol that powers Polygon along with the rest of the Polygon Technology members.
Jaynti grew up on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. In his school days, his family didn’t have money to pay school fees. But luckily he passed 10th, 12th and then joined a college nearby called Dharamsinh Desai University in Nadiad and did his engineering there. He studied at Dharmsinh Desai University between 2007 and 2011, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology.
His goal was to have a decent paying job and to pay the debt his father took for his education and his sister’s marriage. Upon graduation, Jaynti started his career working as a software engineer at Persistent Systems. His salary was Rs 6,000 per month (round $80). After spending three years at the company, Jaynti started to look for a job that hopefully paid better. Jaynti worked on multiple side projects to make ends meet. Leveraging his networking circles, he joined a startup of Sumit Maniyar, a successful angel investor who then later started Rupeek, a digital lending platform.
Things didn’t work out until Jaynti joined Housing.com in 2014. He finally achieved some stability working as a full-time data scientist. But on a financial level, Jaynti was in deep debt for taking a loan to get married. The stress of the debt pushed him back into taking side jobs.
In 2017, he was working on a side project that involved microtransactions. Working with limited resources, Jaynti knew traditional infrastructure was no fit to implement microtransactions. Making even a regular transactions required the interaction of third parties, who would take a commission. Eventually, the processing costs would end up higher than the microtransaction itself.
Dissatisfied with the global payment options, Jaynti started to research for alternatives. Around that time, Ethereum was making headlines. The ICO craze had just begun, as millions were being raised overnight by projects all over the globe. Jaynti was intrigued about Ethereum and how anons were able to transact in a trustless manner without third parties. In a way, he had found the solution to microtransactions.
The problem was that Ethereum wasn’t fit for global payments at large scale. Ethereum’s first clogging incident happened with the emergence of NFT project CryptoKitties. This event determined Jaynti to explore scaling solutions on Ethereum.
He started to engage with the crypto community, looking to implement Plasma, one of the first scaling solutions on Ethereum. Crypto circles were small, but they were full of motivated people that wanted to see Ethereum succeed.
In the Indian crypto forums is where he met his future co-founders. Anurag Arjun and Sandeep Narwal were also very active members, and they were also looking into scalability solutions. Together, they’ve decided to work on the same research project, and this is how Matic was born.
Matic Network started as a pure research effort back in November 2017. At the time, Jaynti was an avid contributor to the Plasma research. With the help of Sandeep and Narwal, they worked to get their first Plasma MVP implementation. All three founders have rich engineering experience that helped drive the research forward.
Sandeep Nailwal now serves as the CTO of Polygon. Sandeep studied at National Institute of Industrial Engineering between 2012 and 2014, where he obtained his Master’s of Business Administration (MBA), Technology, Finance and Supply Management.
In the following years, he started working at Delloite as a consultant. Over the next couple years, he served as the Head of Technology & Supply Chain at Welspun Group, before moving to his newfound passion: blockchain.
In 2017, he co-founded ScopeWeaver.com, a blockchain product and Dapp architecture design. His work was focused around designing blockchains for financial instruments and building dapps. Sandeep described the initial vision of ScopeWeaver as the “Alibaba for services.” The startup was doing well, but given the focus on services, it was not scaling as it needed to. He began to look into emerging tech, and this is how he came in contact with Bitcoin. Sandeep was hooked on the idea of Bitcoin and decided to focus his entire career around developing the technology.
The third-co-founder is Anurag Arjun. He now serves as the Chief Product Officer at Polygon. Anurag studied at the Nirma Institute of Technology between 2002 and 2006, where he graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering and Computer Engineering. He started his career working at several consultancy firms, including Cognizant Technology Solutions and Dexter Consultancy.
One of his most important projects was at IRIS Business Services Limited. He helped create a cloud based platform for enterprise reporting, along with other accounting solutions. Like the rest of Matic founders, Anurag stumbled upon Ethereum and joined the effort with Jaynti and Sandeep.
Mihailo Bjelic is a prominent contributor to the Ethereum ecosystem. He joined the Polygon team in 2020, and now forks full time on building Polygon’s scaling products.
In 2017, Ethereum was hitting its bottlenecks in terms of scalability. At 15 transactions per second, the network was regularly experiencing high demand, taking the gas fees to triple digits. The team’s initial motivation was to iterate on Plasma, the first Ethereum scaling solution.
A challenge at the time was that scaling solutions were a new concept. Nobody had any idea how it would work in practice. Only a handful of developers had the understanding of how to design a Plasma-based solution, but the stakes were too high to ignore. If Ethereum was able to scale to thousands of transactions per second, it could replace traditional centralized systems and bring about massive change in the way people transact.
Matic network used an adapted version of Plasma with Proof of Stake-based sidechains. The proof of concept provided low gas fees and finality on the Ethereum main chain. Their solution was quickly adopted by the community thanks to how easy integration was. The Matic team did all the heavy work of creating development tools. All the documentation was readily made available for any project to bring their dapp to Matic network.
The wider vision was to transform Ethereum into the “internet of blockchains.” Their plan would have a concrete roadmap after Matic rebranded to Polygon, in 2021. But in order to get to that level, Matic would need a lot more testing and funding.
To advance their concept, Jaynti Kanani and Sandeep Nailwal pitched their idea to VCs. Their first fundraise was $450,000 from Coinbase. With fresh funding, Jaynti Kanani and Sandeep Nailwal went on to expand their team and turn their idea into a marketable project.
The year Matic was rebranded to Polygon, they’ve attracted investments from high profile VCs such as Galaxy Digital, Sequoia Capital, SoftBank, and Mark Cuban. These efforts can now help Polygon develop its full suite of scaling solutions and expand to other chains.
How is the Polygon (MATIC) token used?
The MATIC token is the native token for the Polygon network. Most assets in the Polygon ecosystem are denominated in MATIC, which makes it the default unit of account.
MATIC is the fuel that powers transactions and block creation on the Polygon chain. We sometimes refer to it as “gas”. Its primary use case is securing the network and keeping actors aligned to the same principles. Making a transaction on the Polygon network requires a small fee in MATIC, usually between $0.002 and $0.05.
Because Polygon has a quick time to finality and processes more transactions per second the gas fees quickly add up. This small fee is paid by users and goes to validators for doing their work.
Recently, Polygon implemented the much-anticipated EIP-1559 to its blockchain. EIP-1559 has been first initiated by Ethereum to make transaction fees more predictable. The upgrade gets rid of first-price auction as the main mechanism for fee calculation. Instead, there is a modest base fee for transactions to be included in the next block and a priority fee to speed up processing. The base fee, which fluctuates depending on network congestion, is then burned.
Polygon’s MATIC has a fixed supply of 10 billion, so any reduction in the number of available tokens will have a deflationary effect. That annualized burn is expected to represent 0.27% of the total MATIC supply. For token holders, this means MATIC appreciates in value over time due to its newly deflationary mechanism.
Stacks is currently listed on multiple exchanges. The major ones are Binance, Coinbase and Kraken. If you want to skip ahead and learn how to earn more Polygon by running a validator node at home check out our Polygon Mining & Staking guide. It includes the exact steps and best methods of earning more crypto like $MATIC in 2022 and beyond.
Who is developing Polygon (MATIC) now?
Development on Polygon started in 2017 by a team who later spun out into Polygon Technology. After validating their idea, Jaynti Kanani and his team established Polygon as a for-profit company with their headquarters in Mumbai, India.
Founded in 2018, Polygon Technologies handles the development of the Polygon (MATIC) blockchain and protocol. Besides handling the development of the core protocol, it is also tasked with growing the ecosystem via partnerships inside and outside the crypto industry.
Parts of the codebase was written by external developers, making open source contributors pivotal to the success of the network, especially during the early Plasma implementation. Open source contributors can access the protocol’s code on GitHub and see the latest developments.
Currently, their GitHub has 19 core contributors, and more than 800 forks for their repositories. Development activity has been steadily going up, as some of their scaling solutions are in open beta.
Like any successful blockchain network, it was essential that Polygon amasses a strong community of validators that could maintain the network. To attract validators and builders, Polygon started offering a multitude of incentives. The initial sponsorship budget is $100.
Dubbed the Polygon Adoption Fund, it is mainly dedicated for development and adoption of Supernets. Every Supernet is built and run for a specific application, project or use case. Funding is allocated for a wide range of activities such as smart contract development, third party integrations, partnerships, liquidity mining and acquisitions.
The second fund is dedicated for Polygon DAO, a recently launched initiative. The DAO has implemented its own Bounty Board and an Ecosystem Job Board to allow everyone to contribute. If you are interested to become a contributor to the protocol, you can check Poylgon’s Ecosystem Board Job and get yourself a gig in the Web3 industry.
Due to the seer size of the network, Polygon has joined a series of partnership funds. The most important ones are: Polygon x Wintermute, Polygon x 776, Polygon x Outlier Ventures. Each of these funds aims to boost the development of specific areas in Web3 such as social media, governance, token design, and community growth.
Polygon Studio is a recent venture that represents the home of all NFT, Gaming, and Metaverse projects that are on the Polygon protocol. Polygon Studios seeks partnerships with large scale NFT projects for globally recognized IP and Brands, and are the best in class solution for energy efficiency and scaling on the blockchain.
3 years into the protocol’s development, the team decided to launch Polygon Foundation. The Foundation is tasked offering support for startups and making sure projects follow the principles of the protocol.
In the beginning of 2022, Polygon announced its plans to further decentralize the network. However, they intend to gradually transfer power to the community, starting with validator selection.
Currently, the validator set is capped at 100 by the Polygon team. This set was established during testnet and has so far remained unchanged. To prevent the centralization of validators, Polygon is developing its own DAO. The first initiative is the Polygon Ecosystem DAO, where the community gets to allocate funding towards projects they deem valuable. Polygon’s long term vision is to establish a governance mechanism for each scalability solution that is being developed.
What are the latest updates on Polygon (MATIC)?
Polygon in 2019
2019 was Matic’s alpha mainnet year. For almost a year, the Matic team has been building and testing the code diligently. Now it was time to open it up to the community for feedback.
The alpha mainnet opened early access to a variety of applications, which need fast and low-cost ERC20 and ERC721 transfers, to test their migration and Dapp experience on Matic Network. The technical documentation was ready to be made public with an important caveat: Matic was prone to bugs. This was a bet that developers were willing to take though. More dapps were starting to emerge as the competition grew. Matic’s scalability was the opening gate towards user adoption.
Matic wasn’t the only project working on scalability. Dozens of new projects were taking the route of scaling their network. Some took the route of on-chain scaling via sharding, while others took the off-chain scaling route, via state channels, sidechains, and sharding.
On-chain scaling keeps all the transactions at the base Ethereum chain. The approach is to increase the throughput of the base chain itself. The most popular on-chain scaling technique is called sharding.
Sharding splits the entire state of the network into smaller blockchains (called shards) that contain their own independent piece of state and transaction history. In this system, certain nodes would process transactions only for certain shards, allowing the throughput of transactions processed in total across all shards to be much higher.
By contrast, off-chain scaling separates the computational layer from the base layer. Put simply, transactions are processed off-chain and the proof is posted on the main chain. Layer 2 or off-chain scaling solutions are broadly divided into: State Channels, and Sidechains.
State Channels are similar to Lightning Network, but on Ethereum. They are intended not just to handle transactions but also aim to handle ‘State’ changes in order to process smart contract computations. Some of the projects that were applying State Channels were Celer Network and Raiden Network.
Besides Matic, other projects such as Loom Network and Truebit were looking to scale via sidechains. The difference is that Matic can host multiple protocols just like on Ethereum. In addition, Matic was EVM-compatible right out of the gate, whereas Loom didn’t support DeFi applications.
Matic’s infrastructure was also more advanced. The team at Matic released their native wallet where users could interact with their sidechains. It has been designed specifically to simplify the user and developer experience of moving funds to and from the sidechains, which at the time, was not possible using any mainstream crypto wallet.
While competition was steep, projects were constantly collaborating with each other to make their solutions interoperable. The crypto community was divided over which scaling solution would succeed, so they hedged their bets.
On April 26, 2019, Matic held its public token sale on the Binance Launchpad. The project raised a modest $5.6 million to continue developing their sidechains. No one had expected Matic to reach the success it had later on. Some investors were doubtful that Matic would be able to scale using the Plasma framework.
The alpha mainnet was followed by the beta release on September 30. Teams developing on Ethereum were able to immediately port their existing smart contracts and begin testing on Matic sidechains.
Polygon in 2020
On June 1, Matic mainnet went live. The mainnet culminated 2.5 years of hard work, but it was just the beginning.
The network launched with a strict number of validators comprising the Matic Foundation nodes. It was part of a phased roll out that would guarantee the network remains stable. $MATIC holders were able to delegate their tokens to the Foundation and receive 100% of the staking rewards.
From a usability standpoint, developers could deploy their Dapps on a high-performance sidechain1/100 with a 1-2 second finality, and transaction costs lower than 1/100 of that of Ethereum gas fee costs.
Despite the work happening behind the scenes, Matic wasn’t very active on social media that year. Figuring out the validators and protocol technicalities was the priority.
We’ll spare you the details, and join you to the more exciting 2021.
Polygon in 2021
2021 was Matic’s best year to date, reaching an all time high of $2.92. This was heavily influenced by a few key events and updates.
In the beginning of the year, Matic rebranded to Polygon. Changing their name implied expanding their vision beyond Plasma to become “The Internet of Blockchains.” Along the way, they learned that scaling is not a winner-takes-it-all game; different projects have different requirements, so multiple scaling and infrastructure solutions will likely coexist in the long term.
Secondly, Ethereum had cemented its position among the alternative layer-1 blockchains. New blockchains such as Avalanche, Cosmos and Polkadot were gaining significant market share. But their significant downsides are the lack of synergy, security and the network effects that Ethereum has.
The Polygon team concluded that in order to succeed, they had to become the “Swiss army knife” of scaling solutions on Ethereum. Polygon planned to host all the existent scaling solutions (ZK rollups, optimistic rollups, sharded chains, and much more) under one interoperable framework — Polygon SDK.
Polygon’s PoS chain and Matic Plasma chains would still remain functional and their development will continue. Moreover, users would be unaffected by the rebrand. Polygon’s vision would be executed in parallel with the existing PoS chain.
Over the course of 2021, dozens of Ethereum projects deployed on Polygon. Some of them are: SushiSwap, 0x, Balancer, BadgerDAO, Aavegotchi, RenVM, and many others. Polygon’s vibrant ecosystem of projects and Dapps has led to wide adoption with more than 15 million transactions, 300,000 unique users thanks to 130+ decentralized applications.
On June 28, Polygon announced Avail, its first component of the upcoming suite of products. Avail is a scalable blockchain targeted for standalone chains, sidechains, and off-chain scaling solutions. The key feature of Avail is that monolithic blockchains and sidechains could benefit from security without needing to create and manage their own validator. This was possible thanks to the data availability guaranteed by Avail.
Data availability implies the ability of a node to fetch data from previous blocks. A block that has consensus is considered valid only if the data behind that block is available. As blockchains grow in size, running a node takes up more data, making it impractical for the average developer to keep the node running. Polygon Avail ensures the availability of the transaction data by running a light node.
On August 13, Polygon had acquired Hermez Network, one of the most prominent zero-knowledge cryptography-based scaling projects. The merger of the two projects resulted in Polygon Hermez. Polygon paid $250 million in MATIC to acquire Hermez Network.
Following the merger, the team at Hermez will work to build an EVM-compatible solution that implements ZK-rollups. The acquisition is part of Polygon’s strategy to become a leader in ZK technology.
ZK rollups are a scaling method that is based on zero-knowledge cryptography. To give more info, ZK is a technique for proving mathematical statements without revealing (most of) the underlying data, often in a very succinct way.
On September 2, Coinbase announced that Polygon PoS will become the first scaling solution to be integrated by the exchange. The VP of Coinbase said their first choice for scaling Ethereum is the Polygon network and this is a good reason to think of Polygon as an Ethereum scaling OG.
Scaling Ethereum with Polygon PoS network will help Coinbase to address some of the biggest challenges, including high prices and long settlement times, ultimately allowing users to quickly and cheaply withdraw directly onto a supported scaling solution.
On September 14, Polygon made yet another major announcement. Their company and Ernst & Young would will work on Polygon Nightfall, a public, privacy-focused Rollup.
EY announced the initial version of Nightfall in 2019 as a set of protocols for enabling private transactions on the Ethereum mainnet. Along the way, the EY team decided to collaborate with Polygon to create a blockchain for enterprises.
As things weren’t good enough, Polygon announced that they are adding a new scaling solution to their suite of products. Dubbed Polygon Miden, the scaling solution would leverage STARK-based ZK-rollups. STARK enables bundling enormous computations into a single proof. The solution was initially developed by StarkWare.
2021 has been Polygon’s breakout year. The company quickly became the most popular scaling solution, with more projects integrated than we can mention here. Polygon will continue to have the same energy in the next year.
Polygon in 2022
The current year has been a powerful one for Polygon. With the release of Polygon Nightfall, Polygon Avail testnets, the trajectory of the network keeps going up.
The combination of low fees, ease of development and energy efficiency of Polygon PoS has sparked an adoption boom. The network attracted some of the biggest projects in Web3, from DeFi protocols such as lending platform Aave to luxury brands company Dolce & Gabbana and NFT marketplaces including OpenSea.
The number of teams building dapps on Polygon almost tripled every two months since mid last year and stood at 11,400 in January. That’s more than an 11x increase from just 1,000 in August.
Polygon made headlines when it was one of the six companies selected to participate in Disney’s 2022 Accelerator program, a business and development program designed to spur the growth of innovative companies around the world.
Instagram also took an interest in Polygon, choosing them as their partner to launch its NFT marketplace. Soon, Instagram users will be able to showcase and sell their NFTs on Instagram, all powered by Poylgon’s low fees.
On July 20, Polygon has announced that is building the first zkEVM. The vision for a zkEVM with complete EVM-equivalence is simple. Developers seamlessly deploying any Ethereum smart contract to a Layer 2 that scales infinitely using ZK proofs. Any tooling or Dapp on Ethereum used in exactly the same way on a zkEVM. Users and developers alike reaping the futuristic benefits of ZK proofs, all while benefiting from the decentralization, security, and familiarity of Ethereum.
Despite the bear market, Polygon had an amazing year. Its suite of scaling solutions are expected to go live next year, and we are yet to see how the NFT Marketplace on Instagram is going to look like.
Polygon is in a constant growth cycle, and network participants like us can earn more $MATIC without too much hassle or technical knowledge, right from the comfort of our homes.
Learn how to do that in our Polygon Mining & Staking guide, which includes the exact steps and best methods of earning more crypto like $MATIC in 2022 and beyond.