Introduction to Polygon

The Ethereum blockchain is slow and costly. Polygon has a bunch of products and services to solve this problem.

Polygon’s software development kit enables the building of Ethereum sidechains — blockchains linked to Ethereum via a two-way peg.

These sidechains are of multiple types:

1. Bundling transactions into blocks which are batched into a single submission to the Ethereum blockchain (Plasma Chains)

2. Allowing multiple transfers to be bundled into a single transaction (zk-Rollups)

3. Plasma Chains which also scale Ethereum smart contracts (Optimistic Rollups)

MATIC is Polygon’s native token and has the following uses:

1. pay for transaction fees in the network,

2. be the unit of payment and settlement in the Polygon ecosystem,

3. power the Polygon proof-of-stake sidechain.

Consensus mechanism: 
Proof of stake