Advantages and use cases of Polygon
Polygon is a scaling solution built atop the Ethereum blockchain, which allows developers to multiply their throughput and scale their businesses. It is achieved by adding additional chains and enjoying the in-built performance-enhancing measures. It’s aimed particularly at the creation of more efficient decentralized apps (dApps).
It’s integrated completely into the Ethereum network, so you can move assets from one to the other seamlessly. There is a lot of benefit to using Polygon, at least for the developers. For regular people, there isn’t really any visible border, although the advantages of this system do shine immensely.
MATIC token
MATIC is what Polygon was formerly known as. It’s still the name for their native token, which people use here to operate data transactions, fund projects, and for any other purpose that native tokens are commonly used for. It’s not particularly popular, but there is a lot of use for it.
Fortunately, however, any Ethereum-compatible token can also be used on Polygon instead of MATIC, and that includes, for instance, USDC. So, if you don’t feel like investing in MATIC, want to use some of your already acquired funds, or simply want to use something else, you can do that on Polygon.
Advantages
Multi-chain functionality
The main point of interest about Polygon is its multi-chain functionality.
Polygon is basically an extension of regular Ethereum that allows you to create additional chains parallel to the main one and then delegate tasks to them. It can improve your throughput, decrease congestion and transaction fees, as well as make operations faster.
These chains are fully operational and compatible with the larger network, although they do need to provide their own security. In everything else, these sidechains are just as good as you can make them. They can process transactions, help maintain smart contracts, and do any other job you entrust to them.
Bridge to Ethereum
Polygon can be accessed from Ethereum at any point via the POS Bridge. The two environments are woven together very tightly, but they aren’t really the same system. To get your assets to Polygon, you’ll have to move them from Ethereum (or any other compatible network).
Doing it from Ethereum is the easiest way — the solution was created specifically for this blockchain. However, you can also do it from other networks, such as TRON. TRON and Ethereum are compatible enough for this to work and you don’t even have to move the assets to Ethereum first.
Scalability
The reason Polygon was created in the first place back in 2017 was to increase the scalability of Ethereum, which showed cracks in this sense back in the day.
One way to increase this performance was through the creation of sidechains, which was already explained. Chains can work as a backup solution when your main network is congested or complement the existing infrastructure from the start, relieving its load and making transactions less costly.
The other way they allowed for more scalability was by adopting the proof-of-stake mechanism, which is way more effective and sustainable than regular proof-of-work, used back in the day by Ethereum and still utilized by Bitcoin. Ethereum has since moved to PoS, but Polygon hasn’t become worse for it.
It can be of incredible use if you want to create a decentralized app, a decentralized finance solution, a decentralized exchange, or any other automated, programmed platform built on crypto. High scalability essentially means an easier job advancing and expanding the project.
Smart Contracts
Polygon still uses smart contracts, like regular Ethereum. It’s because of this fact that Polygon can be utilized so efficiently while building dApps, DeFi solutions, and other such projects. Smart contracts here are further supplemented by those sidechains, which allow for more processing power to go into said contracts.
The other reason why smart contracts here are better than Ethereum contracts is because of the much lower transaction costs associated with Polygon. It basically means that a lot less of your money goes into funding each data transfer compared to regular Ethereum, all thanks to the scalability measures.
Use Cases
DeFi
The most notable use of the Polygon capabilities is in decentralized finance (DeFi). It’s been home to a large multitude of solutions offering decentralized banking and finance services, such as giving loans, providing credit, building interest, or simply moving funds. Ethereum in general is a good place to build these services, but Polygon is an even better environment.
It’s possible thanks to the combination of extremely low fees, fast transaction speeds, and smart contracts. For this reason, solutions built on Polygon can process money transfers extremely fast and with a very cost-effective model. If the provider maintains proper security, there are no drawbacks.
NFTs
Polygon was very heavily used as an NFT-minting environment specifically because of its scalability and low fees. You can very comfortably create NFTs on this platform, which many people took advantage of back when non-fungible tokens were on the constant rise. Right now, the trend diminished, but there are still enough actually useful startups out there that make use of NFTs.
Gaming
Decentralized gaming is still overshadowed by regular centralized gaming because there isn’t really much edge that blockchain solutions can give gaming in general. There’s not much sense in visiting crypto-operated platforms when you can simply play computer or mobile games the usual way.
Polygon provides a slightly greater edge in the sense that the transactions hosted here are processed much faster. In fact, it’s one of the fastest decentralized networks in this regard. Thanks to this advantage, games can enable real-time interactions much easier, which many mobile game developers did.
