In October 2017, Jaynti Kanani was pondering a scalability issue with Ethereum and considering potential solutions to the problem. Large amounts of congestion were building up on the network due to the popular NFT based game CryptoKitties. He reached out to 2 colleagues in his industry, Sandeep Nailwal and Anurag Arjun to start a new venture they called MATIC.
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The 3 co-founders set up an office in Mumbai and went to work on developing side chains to offset the load of NFT transactions on the main Ethereum blockchain. These derivative chains would act somewhat like buffers, reducing the flow of transactions going directly to the main chain but remaining supported by it. For security concerns, they based their projects on the existing framework of Plasma, which utilized decentralized Proof-of-Stake validators for speed and reliability. Although they had competitors, over the years the robust infrastructure of the MATIC team stood out and was rewarded with prominence in the market.
On February 9, 2021 MATIC did a rebranding and shifted its focus on a new initiative named Polygon. Polygon would be a bridge network to connect all the side chains to the main chain through a common conduit. The ability to jump between various chains easily would maximize the velocity of value flow through the total network.
Before long, they were successful in this pursuit. Later in 2021 they noted that they were averaging 5 million daily transactions on the Polygon network while Ethereum was going about 1.7 million daily transactions on its core blockchain. That massive facilitation of transactions volume off of the main chain had the desired effects of freeing up processing capacity to dramatically reduce congestion. This in turn is driving down transaction fees and processing times.
Polygon’s network enabled other crypto projects to spring up as well. One notable example is AAVE, which itself was outpacing user count gains with its >30,000 compared to Ethereum’s own 26,000. The ease of onboarding new wallets on these side chains meant that an increasing number of wallet services were building on this infrastructure, including through large investment brokerages wanting to capitalize on the cryptocurrency speculation.
Also in October 2022, a police force in the Indian city of Firozabad started using Polygon as the base for their data storage of reporting crimes. This is a clever, non-financial use of blockchain technology, as the major benefits are immutability of data on the chain as well as distributed and open availability to review it. Such benefits ensure that accurate records are kept and there is much reduced potential for fraud, which is very desirable in legal professions.
Today holders of MATIC tokens can stake their coins on the MATIC network as validator nodes and be rewarded for clearing transactions with amounts of more MATIC. Many other users of various cryptocurrencies use the Polygon network to swap different cryptocurrencies or transfer funds between wallets. It’s a key player in the infrastructure surrounding the bustling Ethereum core, helping things run more smoothly.
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If you’d rather support me another way by setting the amount you’d like to contribute or in an alternative coin to ETH, I’d gladly accept donations of BAT, GRT, LINK, MATIC, SHIB, UNI, USDC, WBTC, AAVE, ENS, or WETH at the following wallet address.
0x0979109435E1c570E15A6c1bd939Cb2aBeB6eF28
