Nodit X Polygon - 1. What is Polygon and Layer2?

This series of posts has been produced in collaboration with the Aslan Academy’s research team, ART: Aslan Research Team, a blockchain research society. In light of the Nodit’s support for the Polygon chain, this series has been prepared to facilitate an understanding of Polygon. The content has been structured to be easily comprehensible without complex knowledge of blockchain, allowing for an effortless reading experience.

1-0. What is Polygon ?

Polygon is a prominent Layer2 chain for Ethereum, initially launched in 2017 with the aim of addressing Ethereum's scalability issues. Key features of Polygon include high compatibility with Ethereum, reduced gas fees through enhanced scalability, and a variety of sub-products. Leveraging these strengths, Polygon has become a leading public blockchain as of 2023, boasting the second-highest on-chain transaction volume with an average of approximately 90 million transactions per month.

Numerous DApp projects have been steadily migrating to Polygon to take advantage of its stability and scalability. In addition, major Web2 companies such as Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Reddit, Meta, and JP Morgan have also onboarded their Web3 projects through Polygon over the past year.

Mike McGlone, chief strategist at Bloomberg, has mentioned that Polygon serves as a beacon for blockchain developers, as it employs cutting-edge zero-knowledge technology to guarantee privacy and transaction processing speed. He stated, "There is no protocol that can compare with the network efficiency provided by Polygon (MATIC)."

In this series, we'll analyze why Polygon is gaining the trust of enterprises and investors in three posts.

• Nodit X Polygon - 1. What is Polygon and Layer2?
  • An overview of how polygons came to be.
• Nodit X Polygon - 2. Polygon products
  • Polygon's products and technical details
• Nodit X Polygon - 3. Polygon in Numbers
  • Analysis of polygons through numbers

In this article (1. What is Polygon and Layer2?), we will introduce what polygons are, how they came into existence, and how they solve the problems of existing blockchains.

1-1. Ethereum

Before delving into the core topic of Nodit and Polygon, we will first summarize the concept of Ethereum, which was the prominent public blockchain prior to Polygon, and address the challenges it encountered.

Ethereum Overview

Ethereum is a blockchain platform for running DApps and smart contracts. Vitalik Buterin, who first proposed the concept of Ethereum, wanted to address the limitations of Bitcoin (launched in 2013), which only allowed for a limited scripting language, by introducing the concept of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which could run code of arbitrary complexity, enabling general-purpose programming. Vitalik Buterin released the Ethereum whitepaper in December of that year, and on July 30, 2015, Ethereum's first block was mined, officially launching Ethereum into the world.

Ethereum uses a relatively well-known cryptocurrency called ETH (ether) to process transactions; it uses a distributed ledger to process transactions, the same as Bitcoin; it supports the development of decentralized applications (DApps) and smart contracts using a language called Turing-complete Solidity; and it is a public chain with a decentralized network to ensure trust and transparency away from centralized systems.

Nevertheless, with the launch of successful projects like CryptoKitties and NFT Boom, Ethereum's performance issues and the security of its assets have continued to raise concerns, and to address them, Ethereum has undergone several protocol changes through soft and hard forks.

So, what are the inherent Problems facing Ethereum?

Ethereum's Problem: The Trilemma

The systemic Trilemma of blockchain means that Scalability, Decentralization, and Security have conflicting properties, making it difficult for a blockchain to solve them all at once.

🔎About Nodit

Nodit is a platform aims to provide reliable node & consistent data infrastructure for scaling your dapps in multi-chain environment. The core technology of Nodit is a data pipeline that performs crawling, indexing, storing, and processing of blockchain data, along with a reliable node operation service. With processed blockchain data, developers can leverage on-chain and off-chain integration, advanced analytics and visualization, and even AI modeling to build exceptional Web3 products.

Homepage l X (Twitter) l Linkedin

Join us and build more👊🏻

👉Start for Free (Click)

📩 Email: nodit@lambda256.io