$MATIC: Polygon’s Top 5 Achievements in 2021

Recently, the Polygon team outlined 2021’s biggest achievements, and in this article we take a closer look at five of these.

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 went through each month of 2021 — which they called “an absolutely breakthrough” year — and listed the most interesting achievements for that month.

Here, we focus on five of the achievements mentioned in that blog post that we feel are the most interesting.

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.

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.

IMAGE CREDIT

Featured Image by “geralt” via Pixabay

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