What is polygon?
Polygon is a layer 2 scaling solution for ethereum blockchain, It is built on top of ethereum making it a layer 2 blockchain. Polygon act as plasma enabled sidechains to ethereum.
Sidechain is referred to as a separate blockchain attached to the main chain or parent chain using a two way peg which helps them interact with each other.
Plasmachain is a framework of child chains and also a scaling solution for Ethereum, this chains are independent and have their own security and consensus mechanism.
Polygon is known for their scalability and decentralized payment solutions i.e. low transaction fees. The network have been able to onboard thousands of users because it is a scaling platform.
Polygon was launched in 2017 by a team of indian blockchain developers and it’s native token is matic. Having interacted with ethereum in the past and discovered inconsistencies with scalability as regards throughput and high transaction fees, they saw this as an opportunity and leveraged on it making them “Ethereum’s Internet of Blockchains”.
How do sidechains and mainchains interact?
They interact through a two way peg, for this, Plasma framework send proofs of the transactions/blocks produced on the side chains to be recorded on the mainchain. The public plasma checkpoint nodes will check all the transactions happening on the side chains and send the proofs to the mainchain. To ensure the security of the side chain transactions, Plasma chains uses Fraud Proofs, where any side chain transactions can be checked for any malicious activity.
Fraud proof is a way to detect that a block is invalid and immediately the nodes discover this they will send a fraud proof to the network.
What consensus mechanism is designed?
Polygon uses a proof of stake consensus mechanism. This is used to achieve distributed consensus i.e. it is highly decentralized. All you have to do is buy the networks native token and stake under a validator. This validators are chosen at random to create blocks, the higher your stake the more chances you have of verifying the next block. With all this technologies put in place polygon have been able to achieve a throughput of 7000TPS (transactions per second) and counting, making it more scalable than most blockchains.
How have they been able to achieve this?
Polygon uses quite a variety of technologies embedded together to bring about this secure, scalable and decentralized network. Currently they’re still working on making it more scalable by implementing the ZK-rollups and Optimistic rollups .
Rollups are scaling solutions that carryout transactions on their own execution layers and in turn present their transaction information to the mainchain. They’re among the most impressive and powerful technologies for working with mass crypto adoption in the years to come.