Introduction
As Ethereum expanded and onboarded a massive number of users, the need to handle a higher volume of transactions while maintaining efficiency became a pressing concern.
The current transaction throughput of Ethereum often leads to network congestion, a stiff blow to user experience. To address this scalability challenge, developers and researchers have been exploring solutions that facilitate off-chain transaction processing, effectively easing the burden on the Ethereum chain.
One of the most promising projects in this regard is Polygon, which aims to scale the Ethereum network by processing transactions outside of it. By offsetting a portion of the transaction activity away from the Ethereum chain, Polygon relieves the network’s capacity constraints, creates more available space, and ultimately improves the overall user experience within the Ethereum ecosystem.
Polygon’s Impressive Metrics
Polygon’s impressive metrics speak for themselves, with over $800 million locked into the Polygon PoS ecosystem and an astounding number of more than 290 million unique addresses actively engaging with the network. The project has become one of the most widely used protocols globally, processing over 3 million daily transactions on average.
What Is Polygon?
Polygon, formerly known as Matic Network, is a suite of scaling solutions designed to address the scalability and congestion issues of the Ethereum blockchain and allow for faster and more cost-effective transactions.
Founded as Matic on October 1, 2017, by Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, and Anurag Arjun, Polygon was rebranded in February 2021 to align with its broader vision as a multi-chain scaling framework. While its roots are in Ethereum scaling, Polygon’s scope now extends beyond just that.
Polygon takes a multifaceted approach to achieve its mission, offering a range of solutions rather than relying on a single scaling method. This flexibility allows Polygon to address both application-specific and general-purpose scaling needs and cater to a wide array of use cases within the Ethereum ecosystem.
The Polygon PoS Network
The Polygon PoS (Proof-of-Stake) Network operates as a standalone, permissionless public blockchain network, even though it is a scaling solution developed to address Ethereum’s scalability issues.
Unlike Layer 2 solutions that ultimately rely on Ethereum’s security, Polygon PoS can independently handle transaction processing, secure its network, and aim for efficiency. Although it has access to Ethereum’s security features, Polygon PoS maintains its security through its PoS consensus mechanism.
Polygon PoS uses the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism to ensure the validity of transactions on its network and maintain its security. It boasts an impressive capacity to process up to 65,000 transactions per second (tps), a significant improvement compared to Ethereum’s 15 tps.
