Polygon: A Technical Overview

Originally called Matic, Polygon is an Ethereum-based side chain scaling solution. Matic first raised $5.6 million on 26 April 2019. Initially, Matic built a Plasma bridge from the Ethereum main chain to the Matic side chain but later moved on to develop a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) bridge to tackle the issue of data unavailability encountered by the Plasma bridge solution. Following this development, Matic was rebranded as Polygon in February 2021 to address a larger scope of technical goals.

The purpose of Polygon is to increase the transaction throughput of the Ethereum main chain by offloading computation from the Ethereum main chain and onto the Polygon side chain. While this allows for faster and cheaper transactions, the corresponding trade-off is the security of the blockchain.