https://ift.tt/3zKPJOU ($MATIC) Co-Founder Says in Reality Polygon Has More Traction Than Solana

Yesterday, Sandeep Nailwal, Co-Founder and COO at Polygon, pointed out that despite popular misconception, Solana ($SOL) has not achieved more traction than Polygon ($MATIC). We take a closer look at Nailwal’s argument and some recent Polygon news.

What Is Polygon ($MATIC)?

Polygon is “a protocol and a framework for building and connecting Ethereum-compatible blockchain networks”; it aggregates “scalable solutions on Ethereum supporting a multi-chain Ethereum ecosystem.”

On 18 May 2021, Anthony Sassano, who joined Polygon as an advisor earlier this year, took to Twitter to clear up some of the confusion around Polygon (e.g. some people refer to Polygon as a sidechain to Ethereum, while others call it an L2 blockchain). Below are a few highlights from that Twitter thread:

• “There is the Matic Plasma Chain and the Polygon PoS chain. The vast majority of the activity is happening on the PoS chain.“
• “The PoS chain is what people refer to as a ‘sidechain’ to Ethereum because it has its own permissionless validator set (100+ who are staking MATIC) which means it doesn’t use Ethereum’s security (aka Ethereum’s PoW).“
• “The PoS chain goes beyond a standard sidechain and actually relies on and commits itself to Ethereum (what some people may call a ‘commit-chain’). It relies on Ethereum because all of the validator/staking logic for the PoS chain lives as a smart contract on Ethereum.“
• “This means that if the Ethereum network went offline, the Polygon PoS chain would also go offline. Secondly, the PoS chain actually commits/checkpoints itself to Ethereum every so often.“
• “This has 2 benefits: it provides Ethereum-based finality to the PoS chain & it can help the chain recover in case of catastrophic event. This also means that Polygon is paying Ethereum to use its blockspace (in ETH) & paying for it to secure the contracts & checkpointing.“

Furthermore, Sassano took this opportunity to talk about the two bridges that exist between Ethereum and Polygon:

• “There are 2 bridges – the Plasma bridge which is secured by Ethereum and the PoS bridge which is secured/operated by the PoS chain validator set.“
• “Of course, for the PoS bridge, 2/3 of the validators could theoretically collude and try to steal the bridge funds but there’s $3.4 billion at stake so this is risky. If this attack did happen, the checkpointing & social coordination could be the only recourse.“

He also commented on multi-sigs for Polygons contracts:

• “The multi-sigs exist to allow the contract to be upgraded in case of a bug/exploit which is a practice used by many existing projects (especially those within DeFi).“
• “However, Polygon’s multi-sigs are 5 of 8 which is definitely not ideal and not decentralized and the plan is to greatly improve this in the near future.“

Finally, he said that Polygon is “committed to building & deploying L2 solutions like rollups in the future” and this is what he is “most excited about.”

Five Key Achievements by the Polgon Team and Community in 2021

In a blog post published on January 3, the Polygon team went through each month of 2021 — which they called “an absolutely breakthrough” year — and listed the most interesting achievements for that month.

Here are just five of these achievements:

First, in 2021, “Matic Network” got rebranded to “Polygon”, and the team announced that they had decided to expand the project’s “mission and tech scope.”

Second, in April 2021, we got the announcements that “Curve.fi” and Aave had gone live on Polygon and that Decentraland had chosen Polygon as its layer 2 scaling solution.

Third, in May 2021, SushiSwap went live on Polygon and Polygon SDK got unveiled.

Fourth, in June 2021, The Sandbox chose Polygon as its scaling solution and OpenSea integrated with Polygon.

Fifth, in December 2021, Uniswap went live on Polygon.

Current State of Polygon’s PoS Chain and Planned Improvements

On January 7, the Polygon team took to Twitter to provide an update on the current state of Polygon’s PoS network and how it is being improved:

Then they went on to make some recommendation to developers:

Polygon vs. Solana

On January 9, the Polygon COO commented on a very interesting tweet from crypto investor Spencer Noon, who said on 13 December 2021 that “many web3 enthusiasts think Solana is the #2 most used smart contract platform, but the data doesn’t support that.”

If Noon’s data is correct, then Polygon has quite a few daily active users than Solana and roughly 10X the number of active development teams.

Regarding Polygon’s traction, yesterday, New Zealand-based crypto analyst Lark Davis talked about how Polygon is successfully seducing Ethereum users — especially those involved with DeFi, NFTs, and gaming — with its low transaction fees (despite the temporary spikes in Polygon gas fees we have seen recetly due to the popularity of certain play-to-earn games such as Sunflower Farmers).

Universe Finance Coming Soon to Polygon

Earlier today, Universe Finance, which is “an active liquidity management platform of Uniswap V3 based on risk ranking and quantitative strategies”, announced that it will soon be deployed on Polygon:

DISCLAIMER

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.