Polygon (formerly Matic Network) is a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum. It was founded in 2017 by Jaynti Kanani, Anurag Arjun, and Sandeep Nailwal, and is headquartered in Singapore. The company has raised over $400 million in financing from various investors such as Binance, Coinbase Ventures, and Polychain Capital.
Compared to other blockchains, the goal of Polygon is to provide developers with an easy and cost-effective way to connect their dApps to the Ethereum blockchain. This is done by utilizing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and deploying a series of scaling solutions such as Plasma, Optimistic Rollups, and zkRollups to increase the scalability of Ethereum.
At its core, Polygon uses the Cosmos SDK, which is an open source framework for building blockchain applications. The Cosmos SDK provides several features that make development easier and more secur such as the Tendermint consensus algorithm which provides faster and more secure transactions.
The Polygon blockchain ecosystem also offers developers a suite of tools for building and deploying decentralized applications (dApps) on the Ethereum network. These tools include the Polygon SDK and the Polygon Node. The Polygon SDK provides developers with a set of APIs to build and deploy their dApps on the Ethereum network. The Polygon Node is a full-node infrastructure that allows developers to run and manage their dApps.
Polygon’s mainnet was launched in 2021 and has quickly become one of the most popular Ethereum scaling solutions. A range of defi products and services have launched on Polygon such as decentralized exchanges, lending and borrowin, yield farming and much more.
Well known projects such as Avee, 1inch Exchange, Decentraland also saw an opportunity and decided to deploy on Polygon. As of December 2022, the total value locked on Polygon is over $1 billion with Avee accounting for over 20%. The Total Value Locked (TVL) on the Polygon blockchain is a measure of the total amount of assets locked up in the various DeFi protocols on the network.