For many, Polygon is a network far cheaper than Ethereum that allows new crypto users to learn how to do things without expensive mistakes. For others, Polygon is the future of scaling Ethereum.

Over the years, Ethereum has introduced all kinds of advancements into cryptocurrency. Everything from smart contracts to high-interest paying decentralized applications. It does come with its own problems though. The first issue is the low throughput, which basically means that Ethereum can only handle 30 transactions per second.

With how many people are using Ethereum every day, that makes it a pretty major problem if you just look at one particular use case or application that uses Ethereum. In comparison, the Cardano blockchain can do around 257 transactions a second, Polkadot can do up to 1,000 and Solana all the way up to 65,000. Solana has had some issues lately with fully going down though, and Cardano still hasn’t actually produced anything that works.

The second major problem that the Ethereum network faces is that it isn’t really user-friendly. You are basically bidding in an auction against everyone else who wants to be one of those 30 transactions that happen every second.

There’s a good visual that shows this. It starts at 8:11 into the video, so I set it up so you can see the visual of this.

With this much competition, you could end up spending $20-$100 of Ethereum just to get your transaction to go through… even if you were only trying to send $10-$20 to someone. That adds up quick!

The third major issue with Ethereum is that the Ethereum blockchain presents developers with limited options in that all Ethereum projects run on the same network and have a similar throughput. This means they all share the same problems that Ethereum has.

But… what if there was another blockchain that leveraged Ethereum’s technology while offering higher throughput and extremely low transaction fees?

What Is The Difference Between Polygon and Matic?

Polygon (previously the Matic Network) is a Layer 2 scaling solution that is backed by Binance and Coinbase. The project seeks to to stimulate the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies by resolving the problems of scalability on many blockchains. Essentially, they are the same thing, but Polygon is the name that it ended up being switched over too. It’s kind of like how Facebook turned into Meta, although none of us here at BrainsOfCrypto.com are fans of Meta because it will never be decentralized. We’ve all seen what he did to both Facebook and Instagram. Remember when they used to be good platforms? Okay, off topic, my bad.

The token that is used on Polygon will still be called the $MATIC token, so keep that in mind when you are discussing that with friends.

The $MATIC token will continue to exist and will play an increasingly important role, securing the system and enabling governance.

How Many Decentralized Apps Are On Polygon?

There are currently over 3,000 decentralized applications that are running on Polygon. So far, over 80 big name projects have migrated from the Ethereum main chain over to Polygon. The chains are very similar which made the transition relatively easy for the many developers who made the switch.

We’re hoping that as time goes on, we’ll see more and more projects come to the Polygon chain.

Are There NFTs On The Polygon Chain?

Yes there are NFTs on the Polygon chain. In fact, it has been way less expensive for both creators and buyers of NFTs to use Polygon. Instead of having to pay $50-$100 in gas fees like on Ethereum, users pay pennies on the dollar to interact on Polygon. This has made it really easy to useand we’re hoping to see more creators on the Polygon chain.

One of our favorite projects that is an NFT project is The Visitors by Mike Mitchell. They did an initial minting of 10,001 but they have this cool idea where you can put a few of your “Visitor NFTs” into the recycler and get a different one. Each time this happens, less of the originals are available which makes it a sort of deflationary collection. It’s a really cool concept and they community they built on Discord is great. Mike Mitchell is the first “big name artist” who chose Polygon for his release and it’s been fun to watch. There are currently only 9,001 Visitors because of the first recycling event removing 1,000 from circulation.

There are also some photography NFT projects that are over on Polygon as well. I’ve got a feeling that eventually many photographers will use Polygon because of the ease of use once people are on the blockchain. One of my favorite artists over there is Chris Bird. You can check out (and buy) some of his pieces here: https://opensea.io/collection/off-in-a-dream , https://opensea.io/collection/off-in-a-dream-2 and https://opensea.io/collection/off-in-a-dream-bnw.

Related: Is There A Way To Wrap My Polygon Eth to Normal Eth? (Without Paying a $100+ Gas Fee)

The Ultimate Guide to Polygon

Who Are the Founders of Polygon?

Polygon (formerly Matic Network) was launched in October 2017. Polygon was co-founded by Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal and Anurag Arjun, two experienced blockchain developers and a business consultant.

Before moving to its network in 2019, the Polygon team was a huge contributor in the Ethereum ecosystem. The team worked on implementing the Plasma MVP, the WalletConnect protocol and the widely-used Dagger event notification engine on Ethereum.

The team included co-founder of Polygon, Jaynti Kanani. Jaynti, a full-stack developer and blockchain engineer currently serves as the CEO of Polygon.

Jaynti played an integral role in implementing Web3, Plasma and the WalletConnect protocol on Ethereum. Prior to his blockchain involvement, Jaynti worked as a data scientist with Housing.com.

Co-founder and chief operations officer of Polygon, Sandeep Nailwal is a blockchain programmer and entrepreneur. Before jointly starting Polygon (formerly Matic), Sandeep had served as the CEO of Scopeweaver, and the chief technical officer of Welspun Group.

Anurag Arjun is the only non-programming co-founder of Polygon. As a product manager, he has had stints with IRIS Business, SNL Financial, Dexter Consultancy and Cognizant Technologies.