What are Polygon Supernets?
Polygon Technology, a company that builds Web3 infrastructure on Ethereum, has announced the launch of Polygon Supernet. The technology known as Supernet enables developers to create customized networks while also lowering the costs associated with the servers required to run those networks. Dedicated Web3 hosting presents an opportunity because, as the firm puts it, “Every Supernet is developed and run for a single application, project, or use case.”
The difficulties encountered by the customization blockchain stack known as Polygon Edge served as the inspiration for the development of Polygon Supernet. Polygon Edge enables developers to rapidly deploy Web3 applications on the blockchain network without compromising the network’s security or performance. Polygon Edge is a framework that can be modularized and extended to serve a broad variety of infrastructure solutions, ranging from sovereign and enterprise Ethereum Virtual Machine chains to Layer 2 solutions.
What exactly is the Supernets?
The aforementioned difficulties can be mitigated by utilizing supernets, which are a type of blockchain network that possesses several significant qualities. This will allow for the widespread adoption of Polygon and blockchain technology in general. The most crucial aspects of those traits are listed here.
Main features of the Polygon Supernets
The Supernets are totally dedicated
Each and every Supernet is constructed and maintained for a particular application, project, or use case.
Protected by Polygon MATIC
Polygon is creating a “shared security” layer in the form of a MATIC-staked validator marketplace for Edge users who want to employ Proof of Stake as a security mechanism. This will let Edge users collaborate on the security of the network. Projects who decide to utilize this service will immediately gain access to a decentralized and trustworthy Proof of Stake validator set, allowing them to bypass the difficulties associated with first establishing a validator network.
Additionally, Polygon validators will stake MATIC and receive rewards in MATIC; hence, there is no work required from application or project teams in terms of validator incentivization and sustainability. Polygon validators will earn rewards in MATIC. With the help of this service, projects are able to reap the benefits of Proof of Stake security without having to devote any bandwidth or resources to the technology. Instead, they are free to concentrate entirely on their primary product and the accomplishment of their objectives. Although participation in this service is voluntary, given the many benefits it provides, we anticipate that it will have a significant demand.
Each supernet can communicate with ethereum and other supernets
Each Supernet is able to communicate with the other Supernets as well as the Ethereum mainnet in order to trade values and messages. This is something that can be accomplished via a variety of bridge implementations and integrations that Edge currently provides, as well as in the near future. In the long run, polygon developers are thinking about initiating a larger, more formal effort to design and establish a cross-chain communication protocol that will connect all of the Polygon networks and possibly even other networks that are part of the Ethereum ecosystem. This would allow for a seamless transfer of data between all of these networks.
Can be handled by Edge partners who have been certified
Launching, operating, maintaining, and upgrading a blockchain network are not simple activities. Application developers frequently lack the knowledge and capacity to launch, operate, manage, and upgrade blockchain networks in the manner in which they should. Edge Certified Partners is a group of certified development shops and teams that can help with or completely take over some or all of these operations. This will allow the application or project team to focus on what they know and are good at doing the most. To help mitigate this challenge, polygon is introducing Edge Certified Partners.
Can utilize any scaling architecture
Keeping the above information in mind, it is essential to emphasize that all of the “blockchain Legos,” also known as the architectural choices made available by Polygon Edge, will continue to be accessible via Supernets. The development of Supernets is only making it simpler to deploy and operate each of them individually.
In addition, any Supernet has the ability to alter the architecture that lies behind it at any time. For instance, a Supernet might choose to launch operations as a sovereign Proof of Authority network, later transition to Proof of Stake, and then finally launch operations as a full-fledged Layer 2 network. Polygon Edge already provides the capability to easily upgrade from Proof of Authority to Proof of Stake, and the same will be provided for Layer 2 solutions in the near future.
Author:Martin Published:October 10, 2022
What is Polygon?
Ethereum, the most popular smart contract blockchain, can be slow and expensive to use. While upgrades are on the way to speed things up, a host of other networks have asked: why wait?
One such network is Polygon, a “layer-2” network that helps scale the Ethereum blockchain. That means that it sits atop Ethereum but processes transactions faster and cheaper, then feeds back transaction information to Ethereum.
Polygon has since advanced to become a suite of scaling solutions, plus an independent network capable of standing on its own two feet.
This network can process up to 65,000 transactions a second for under a penny each – by contrast, Ethereum processes just 14 transactions per second, as of August 2022, and each can cost well over a dollar – and sometimes over $100!
And while Polygon remains focused on Ethereum, it’s building a framework to capture the “multi-chain future” – the hypothesis that the future home of crypto will be spread across many blockchains rather than a single market leader, like Ethereum.
This article explains what Polygon is, how its coin, MATIC, works, and which protocols support it.
From MATIC to Polygon
Polygon was founded in 2017 as the creation of a talented group of Ethereum developers: Anurag Arjun, Jaynti Kanani and Sandeep Nailwal. They set up an Indian technology company called Polygon Technology to build the network. Their creation launched as a single layer 2 chain in June 2020 under the name of Matic Network.
After it became clear that Ethereum couldn’t be serviced by a single layer 2 network, the team began to expand its offering. In February 2021, the Matic Network rebranded Polygon to reflect the project’s shift to focus on building a suite of Ethereum scalability solutions.
Upon rebranding, the team added Mihailo Bjelic as a fourth co-founder. The coin’s ticker, MATIC, still reflects the project’s original name. Now, things are coordinated by a non-profit called the Polygon Foundation.
You might have heard of MATIC before – it’s been in the (crypto) news because of its rising price. It was worth less than a penny until the start of 2021, around the time of the rebrand.
Then it soared in price, first to $2.45 in May 2021 and then again to $2.87 in December 2021. At its December peak, MATIC held a market cap of $20.41 billion – before crashing to $3 billion by June 2022, along with the wider crypto market.
MATIC’s spurt to the top, albeit short-lived, showed that there’s a lot of demand for a high-speed, low-cost blockchain. In 2021, rising prices for other similar blockchains, like Solana and Avalanche, showed that there’s competition, too.
The Polygon network is now very well funded, having sourced $451 million in investments as of August 2022. A single venture round in February 2022, led by Sequoia Capital India and joined by 39 other investors, including Variant Fund and Union Square Ventures, comprised $450 million of its total funding.
How Polygon’s PoS chain works
Polygon achieves most of its scaling through a proof-of-stake sidechain – this is the technology that went live in the original Matic Network.
Proof-of-stake chains are those that let those who have locked up the most coins, rather than those with the beefiest computers, validate transactions. Sidechains are networks that feed data back to a parent blockchain, in this case, Ethereum.
Polygon’s sidechain claims transaction speeds of up to 65,000 transactions per second. How come it’s so much faster than Ethereum? It’s all thanks to something called “More Viable Plasma”, a scaling solution that removes the need for confirmation signatures (thereby speeding up) on Plasma, a framework for a network of child blockchains that feed data back to Ethereum.
Each of these child blockchains, which run parallel to Ethereum, is essentially a copy of the Ethereum blockchain – but one that operates at several hundred times the speed. Every so often, Polygon’s validators record all the activity on these plasma chains and submit their data to Ethereum.
This means that if Polygon’s child chains should go awry, it’s possible to get your crypto back from the child chain. Polygon prevents validators from manipulating these snapshots by requiring them to stake MATIC tokens – i.e. to lock them up on the Ethereum blockchain. If validators try and manipulate their snapshots, some of these staked MATIC tokens are destroyed.
Polygon’s PoS network structures this work into three layers. The first is the Ethereum layer, on which MATIC is staked. The second is Heimdall and the third is Bor. Heimdall is responsible for coordinating the selection of (and updating) validators and taking snapshots of the child chains. The Bor layer is responsible for shuffling transactions into blocks. The 7-10 validators that complete the work on Bor are chosen at random from the 100 validators that operate on Heimdall.
Polygon allows any web3 project to launch a dedicated version of Ethereum that relies on these fast and cheap proof-of-stake child chains. Their smart contracts run in the Ethereum Virtual Machine, virtual instances of Ethereum that abide by its computational logic.
Polygon’s PoS chain allows for a degree of flexibility in how web3 projects operate on the network. All Polygon chains can speak to other Polygon chains and also to Ethereum.
These chains can, however, be independent of Ethereum – even though they ultimately feed data back to Ethereum, standalone chains can have their own pool of validators. Alternatively, they can validate transactions through “secured” chains, whereby Ethereum validators, or a pool of professional validators, confirm transactions.
Polygon’s other scaling solutions
Polygon’s proof of stake chain is just one of the scaling solutions the network offered. But what else is in its toolkit?
It’s clear that Polygon considers the future to be in zero-knowledge proof rollups. In August 2021, Polygon committed $1 billion to develop the technology, which rollups up lots of transactions into a single one, then feeds the transaction back to a more powerful chain, like Ethereum.
Polygon is betting on zero-knowledge proofs, which only publish the date and time of a transaction, being the future rather than optimistic rollups, which “optimistically” assume that all transactions are valid. Still, “optimistic rollups have the advantage of being ready now,” wrote Brendan Farmer of Polygon in the January post.
That’s why one of Polygon’s solutions, a collaboration with Big 4 professional services firm EY, Nightfall, is a mix of both optimistic and zero-knowledge rollups. It’s the only rollup that’s live so far on Polygon– and even then, it’s in beta. Also in the works is Polygon Zero, a true zero-knowledge rollup, and Miden, another EVM-compatible rollup.
Polygon is also working on Polygon zkEVM, an open-source zk-rollup that provides the equivalence of the Ethereum Virtual Machine, plus the security of Ethereum, and Polygon Avail, a modular blockchain that collates transaction data from other blockchains. But even Polygon Avail, which doesn’t rely on any of these fancy rollup technologies, remains in testnet.
The only other thing live as of August 2022 is Polygon Edge, “a modular and extensible framework for building private or public Ethereum-compatible blockchain networks.”
What can you do with Polygon?
All this tech is well and good, but what can you actually do with Polygon? Thankfully, quite a lot. According to DeFi Llama, Polygon has $2 billion in total value locked up on the network, as of August 2022.
About 22% of this, or $446 million, is in decentralized lending protocol Aave, which started to use Polygon in its V2 version to cut costs and sped things up. When Aave launched the third iteration of its lending protocol, v3, it deployed the entire thing on scaling solutions, including Polygon.
Uniswap, the largest decentralized exchange on Ethereum, supports Polygon (alongside rival scaling solutions Optimism and Arbitrum), meaning that traders can rely on the network to process cheap transactions.
About $82 million is locked up in the Polygon version of Uniswap. While sizeable, that’s small potatoes considering Uniswap’s total TVL of $6.24 billion, of which $6 billion sits on Ethereum.
The largest decentralized exchange on Polygon is Quickswap, which supports $359 million in TVL. But lots of big names from Ethereum have also set up shop on Polygon, including Curve, Sushi, Balancer and PoolTogether.
To use all of these, you’ll need to use MATIC, the platform’s gas token. It’s the equivalent of using ETH to pay for Ethereum’s transaction fees. As of August 2022, average gas fees are about $0.003, or well above Ethereum’s average gas fee of $0.8, as of this writing.
Whether Polygon remains an important scaling solution depends on the future of Ethereum. The network, still the largest one that supports smart contracts, massively changed in September 2022 after it merged to proof-of-stake – the same technology that powers Polygon’s chain. After, Ethereum will eventually add plasma chains, similar to how Polygon works.
However, it’s still too early to determine whether Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin was right when he said that scaling solutions will continue to complement Ethereum, rather than being cast by the wayside after Ethereum upgrades its protocol.
Polygon
Polygon is a cutting-edge Ethereum scaling solution that revolutionizes transaction efficiency by providing lightning-fast transaction speeds and remarkably low transaction fees.
Sidechains, Blockchains
What is
Polygon
Polygon, formerly known as Matic Network, was established in 2017 by Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, Anurag Arjun, and Mihailo Bjelic. It serves as a scaling solution for Ethereum, providing developers with the advantages of low transaction fees and rapid transaction processing speeds.
Utilizing a modified proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, Polygon enables consensus with each block. To validate transactions on the Polygon network, participants are required to stake MATIC, the native token of Polygon. Validators who exhibit proper behavior are rewarded with MATIC tokens.
Polygon has garnered attention from prominent web2 brands such as Starbucks, Reddit, and Coca-Cola, who have become notable customers. Additionally, leading Web3 companies like OpenSea and Magic Eden have also expressed their support for Polygon. Build your own Polygon dapps with Moralis’ Polygon API.
Polygon: Web3 for All
One of the biggest milestones in the Web3 space was the introduction of Ethereum, which led to a surge of demand for decentralized applications (also referred to as dApps). Ethereum soon became the most popular network for developers to build, now hosting around 3000 different dApps.
And with popularity, came congestion. With most developers across DeFi, NFTs as well as games all looking to build on Ethereum, using the service became expensive. For example, one Ethereum user reported spending $44,000 USD to mint an Otherdeed NFT back in May. During this period, overall gas fees for the Ethereum network reached an all-time high.
Enter Polygon: a layer-2 interchain scaling solution for the Ethereum network. Built to solve the congestion problem, Polygon helps Ethereum expand in size, security and efficiency. Since its launch, the network has attracted some of the biggest names in DeFi including Aave, Decentraland and OpenSea. It has also enticed big investors, having recorded investments from the likes of Binance, Coinbase and Mark Cuban Companies.
What is Polygon?
Polygon, formerly Matic Network, was developed in 2017 and launched in 2020 as a layer-2 solution focused on the Ethereum blockchain. Aiming to “bring the world to Ethereum”, Polygon helps alleviate the network’s congestion and allow more users to access Web3.
Supporting Polygon’s speed, low cost and security is the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism which invites users to contribute and participate in the network’s operations. This framework was designed with developers and their diverse range of needs in mind – providing the optimal tools for building, developers can build scalable, user-friendly dApps all with low cost, high security and interoperability.
The network now hosts over 19,000 dApps and 130M+ unique users, with an infrastructure designed to complement Ethereum’s decentralized security. As of date, Polygon has recorded over 3.4B transactions, proving to be one of the leading platforms for launching Web3 projects to a global audience.
How does it work?
As mentioned, the three key features of the Polygon network are speed, security and scalability. To understand how it achieves these features comes with understanding the underlying infrastructure supporting the overall network.
The Polygon network functions like any other PoS-based blockchain in terms of structure, tokens, applications and validator nodes. The main factor allowing Polygon to operate on low cost and high transaction speed (which in turn allows scalability), is its adoption of Commit chains. Commit chains are transaction networks which work adjacent to the main chain (in this case, Ethereum). They basically bundle transactions together and confirm them before returning the data to the main chain. This helps build throughput on the main chain and spread evaluating proficiency across the network.
Polygon’s high level of security can be attributed to its consensus mechanism, PoS, as well as its use of a Plasma bridging framework. The use of PoS as a consensus mechanism allows for PoS validators, who are responsible for running validator nodes by verifying transactions and adding them to the blockchain. PoS validators ensure a high level of security as its compensation structure makes malicious attacks on the network less advantageous and ensures validators work in good faith.
Additionally, its Plasma bridging framework, one which supports the moving of assets from the main chain to the side chain, also plays a role in the guarantee of security. This is possible due to the Plasma exit mechanism which creates exit NFT tokens of equal value to deposited assets, and places the NFT in a minimum 7-day challenge period where users are unable to access their funds. Although this sounds tedious, it is essential to guarantee security – however, understanding user concerns, the Polygon team has come up with an option for users to sell the NFTs in a secondary marketplace for higher liquidity.
Driving the Polygon network is its native token $MATIC, which can be used to pay transaction fees, stake or govern. $MATIC is the medium of exchange for two main groups helping to operate the network: validators and delegators. Anyone can become a validator by staking their $MATIC, which gives them access to running validator nodes – essentially verifying new transactions and adding them to the blockchain. In return, validators receive a cut of transaction fees and newly created tokens. Delegators on the other hand, are users who do not want to run validator nodes themselves. Requiring lower commitment, they can stake $MATIC indirectly by delegating their assets to a trusted validator. They are still critical to the ecosystem as they are responsible for choosing validators.
Bringing Web3 to the mainstream
So why exactly are projects like Polygon essential to the Web3 space? How has it reeled in big investments and attracted DeFi juggernauts like SushiSwap, Aave, Curve Finance and 1inch?
Projects like Polygon provide the crucial infrastructure in scaling Web3, and eventually leading it to mainstream adoption, which has been difficult despite its rapid development over the past few years. Polygon’s considerable success can also be attributed to its consistent efforts in piecing together ways to improve what’s already there. Ethereum is a big name, but there are clearly ways it can do better in terms of security, efficiency and scalability. Polygon provides a fundamental gateway to scaling it further and eventually embedding it into the broader economy.
And Polygon’s work doesn’t stop here. It aims to expand beyond the scope of Ethereum and eventually become the trusted infrastructure for blockchain networks – almost like the “internet of blockchains”. On top of that, it continues to form strong Web3 partnerships, kickstart environmental initiatives, and build a tight knit community around their ecosystem. Becoming the ultimate framework for all blockchains seems ambitious, but it seems entirely possible based on the progress Polygon has been making since inception.