Polygon

The Layer 2 Aggregator

Optimism announced “delaying official public mainnet in favor of a more coordinated community launch” in March 2021, postponing the mainnet launch to at least Summer 2021 (they did indeed launch in August 2021). Meanwhile, Polygon continued to capitalize on their kind-of-plasma mainnet, onboarding an increasing number of real-life projects (including ours) into their platform. As Polygon lite paper explains, their platform’s architecture consists of four layers: “Ethereum, Security, Polygon Networks and Execution” [Bjelic].

Polygon’s COO Sandeep Nailwal explains that the gist of the pivot they made in 2020 is becoming a Layer 2 solutions aggregator instead of pushing a single solution (which was Plasma for Matic) [Kuhn]. He explained in a recent interview to Coindesk: “we’re doing Optimistic Rollups, zk-rollups, data-availability chains, Polkadot-like substrates, standalone chains where teams can come and create their parachains that connect back to Ethereum.”

The mechanics of the Polygon Blockchain technology solution looks like the following. Polygon has created a copy of Ethereum nodes architecture with the Plasma feature and checkpoints to Ethereum (therefore Layer 2). The decision of Polygon to copy Ethereum nodes is indeed justified: the tech is 100% production-ready. Furthermore, the improvement with Plasma and PoS allows Polygon to save dramatically on gas cost and increase the speed of transaction, which made their entire solution more appealing.

Anyways, we all understand that a genuinely functional Layer 2 solution won’t be there instantaneously for Ethereum. There are several valid points of criticism around this issue [Chang]. These include (1) interoperability and “standard feud” between the various ready-to-use solutions, (2) liquidity split, (3) onboarding and offboarding friction within the transaction flow and UX. Nevertheless, Ethereum has to evolve to survive as the central dApps solution out there. Meanwhile, we are following the latest industry developments for you and are ready to implement the most efficient and cost-effective solution.