Polygon

Text for summary

Ethereum

Original author(s)	Vitalik Buterin Gavin Wood
Developer(s)	Ethereum Foundation, Hyperledger, Nethermind, OpenEthereum, EthereumJS
Initial release	30 July 2015 (2015-07-30)
Stable release	London / 5 August 2021 (2021-08-05)
Development status	Active
Software used	EVM 1 Bytecode
Written in	Go, Rust, C#, C++, Java, Python
Operating system	Cross-platform
Platform	x86-64, ARM
Size	991.56 GB<ref>"Ethereum Chain Full Sync Data Size". YCharts. 30 September 2021. Retrieved 30 September 2021.</ref> (2021-09-30)
Available in	Multilingual, but primarily English
Type	Distributed computing
License	Open-source licenses
Active hosts	3,481 nodes (2021-09-30)
Website	ethereum.org

Basics

• Based in: Bangalore, India and British Virgin Islands
• Started in: 2017
• Mainnet release: In steps (12-5-2020), with the first step on 17-5-2020.
• After its rebrand into Polygon, it wants to be a multichain, instead of purely Ethereum linked (9-2-2021). Is called a sidechain, but could be seen as its own Layer 1, since it has its own consensus and native token.

• From CMC:

"Matic Network describes itself as is a Layer 2 scaling solution that uses sidechains for off-chain computation while ensuring asset security using the Plasma framework and a decentralized network of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) validators. Matic aims to be the de-facto platform on which developers will deploy and run decentralized applications in a secure and decentralized manner.

Matic Network claims to have worked on implementations of Plasma MVP (Minimum Viable Plasma), WalletConnect protocol, and the Ethereum event notification engine - Dagger. Matic intends to provide Matic wallet, payment APIs and SDKs, products and other solutions that will allow developers to design, implement, and migrate DApps built on platforms like Ethereum. Matic plans to support other blockchains in the future to offer interoperability alongside scalability to existing public blockchains."

• From this piece, by Bitcoin.com (9-2019):

"Decentraland and Makerdao are among the partners Matic can count, while on the dapp side it’s got a handful of applications up and running. Matic Network uses an adapted version of Plasma, a scaling technology originally conceived for Ethereum. It enables fast and cheap transactions, which attain finality once confirmed on the mainchain."

• Testnet went live (12-2-2020):

"Matic’s incentivised staking testnet, CS-2001, is now live! Stage 1a of Counter Stake is now underway, with the purpose of preparing for the basic network rollout. Beginning with 20 active validators, we will add more as the stage progresses."

History

• Originally was called Matic Network, but rebranded into Polygon (9-2-2021).

Audits & Exploits

• Polygon Bug Bounty is live on Immunefi with a maximum bounty of $2,000,000 per critical bug found (28-9-2021). Got paid out, see below.

Bugs/Exploits

• Polygon Plasma bridge double spend vulnerability (23-10-2021):
  1. $2 million bounty paid
  2. Exit transaction could be resubmitted 223 times
  3. ~$850 million was at risk

• After getting more active accounts than even Ethereum, Polygon's founder recommends (5-10-2021) higher minimum gas prices due to a flood of spamming txs (probably causing the activity spike).
• From BlockThreat (25-8-2021):

"Polygon patched a DoS vulnerability in its StakeManagerProxy and StakeManager contracts after it was responsibly disclosed by Ashiq Amien."

Governance

Admin Key

• When Polygon pushed a hard fork through in a very short time, discussions arose over its decentralization. Answers from the team were not very clear nor conclusive (17-12-2021).
• From their Transparency Report (15-5-2021):

"Polygon uses three different multisigs, each for a different purpose.

1. MS1: PoS/Plasma contract upgrades
2. MS2: Custom "Child ERC20" contract upgrades
3. MS3: Mapping of "Child ERC20" contracts

The first two require 5 out of 8 signers. The signers are Polygon cofounders and people* from reputable Polygon/Ethereum projects:

1. CurveFinance

1. QuickswapDEX
2. MUSTCometh
3. 0xHorizonGames

*identities protected

As the contracts secured by multisigs become battle-tested, we will be exploring introducing the following optimizations/changes:

1. Moving from multisigs to governance-controlled proxies
2. Introducing timelocks
3. (Eventually) Completely removing multisigs/upgradability."

• One of the reasons the above was made public was due to DeFi Watch asking questions. Most of its questions revolved around the multisig and what they held and how they were generated.

Token

Token allocation

• Will start liquidity mining for Aave on its chain (14-4-2021):

"The team behind the protocol has allocated $40 million in rewards for lenders and borrowers, the bulk of which is made up of 1% of the total MATIC supply. Users will be able to earn rewards by depositing and borrowing assets on Aave’s Polygon market."

• From Binance Research:

1. Private Sale tokens comprise 3.80% of the total supply
2. Launchpad sale tokens comprise 19% of total supply.
3. Team tokens comprise 16% of the total supply.
4. Advisors tokens comprise 4% of the total supply.
5. Network Operations tokens comprise 12% of the total supply [staking].
6. Foundation tokens comprise 21.86% of the total supply.
7. Ecosystem tokens comprise 23.33% of the total supply.

Utility

• From Crypto Briefing (7-6-2020):

"The network’s token, MATIC, is used in a similar way to Ethereum to pay gas fees for transactions."

Tech

• Whitepaper can be found here.
• Code can be viewed here.
• Programming language used:

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS) From Crypto Briefing (7-6-2020): "a throughput of 65,000 transactions per second without compromising on decentralization." Update (14-7-2020): "Stress Test Results: 7,200 TPS"
• Latency:

How It Works

• From DeFi Lama (27-4-2021):

"Unlike several other chains, Polygon was architected with EVM compatibility in mind. This has made it very easy for so many top DeFi project to port their services onto Polygon. In fact, Polygon is architected as four layers which can easily interact amongst themselves.

Of the four layers, only the Polygon Networks and Execution layers are mandatory. Polygon Networks are sovereign blockchain networks that serve a specific community. Polygon networks are independent, but can send messages to other Polygon networks using the Polygon Protocol.

The Polygon Networks are collectively governed by the Execution layer, which interprets and executes all transactions passed to it from the Polygon Networks layer. The Execution layer itself consists of two sublayers, an Execution Environment that serves as a plug-and-play virtual machine running eWASM, and a smart contracts layer that handles execution logic in EVM.

The Ethereum and Security layers are optional, but useful for interoperability and validation. The security layer can be used by any Polygon network to verify its chain integrity for a fee. The Ethereum layer allows any Polygon network to lean into Ethereum’s smart contracts, to provide functionality like checkpointing, staking, and messaging."

• From Mihailo Bjelic (16-4-2021):

"Polygon is a suite of Ethereum scalability solutions, it's not a single solution. Currently we offer Polygon Plasma and Polygon PoS commit chain, and in the future we will offer other major scalability architectures (e.g. zkRollups and Optimistic Rollups).

Plasma fully relies on Ethereum security and it is, to the best of my knowledge, the only decentralized L2 solution (it has a decentralized operator set). Polygon PoS has it own permissionless validator set, and it uses Ethereum for validator staking/slashing and checkpointing.

[Polygon PoS] is not really a sidechain and it's actually *fully decentralized*. It has an open validator set + huge number of delegators. Anyone can participate in securing the network, with any amount.

There are many more differences compared to other chains that you mentioned. For example, our two-way bridge to Ethereum is run by the whole PoS validator set, i.e. it is secured by the whole amount staked in our system ($600M+). Usually bridges are run by a few PoA authorities."

• From Anthony Sassano (18-5-2021):

"The PoS chain is what people refer to as a “sidechain” to Ethereum because it has its own permissionless validator set (100+ who are staking MATIC) which means it doesn’t use Ethereum’s security (aka Ethereum’s PoW). The PoS chain goes beyond a standard sidechain and actually relies on and commits itself to Ethereum (what some people may call a “commit-chain”). It relies on Ethereum because all of the validator/staking logic for the PoS chain lives as a smart contract on Ethereum. This means that if the Ethereum network went offline, the Polygon PoS chain would also go offline. Secondly, the PoS chain actually commits/checkpoints itself to Ethereum every so often. This has 2 benefits: it provides Ethereum-based finality to the PoS chain & it can help the chain recover in case of catastrophic event. This also means that Polygon is paying Ethereum to use its blockspace (in ETH) & paying for it to secure the contracts & checkpointing."

Upgrades

• When Polygon pushed a hard fork through in a very short time, discussions arose over its decentralization. Answers from the team were not very clear nor conclusive (17-12-2021).
• From their Mainnet announcement (3-6-2020):

"Currently, we have started the network with a set of 7 Matic Foundation nodes. DApp partner nodes will be joining this set in the coming week."

Staking 

• From their blog (19-5-2020):

"MATIC holders will be able to delegate their tokens to Matic Foundation nodes in the initial phases."

• This went live (29-6-2020).

Scaling

• From Decrypt (9-2-2021):

"Polygon will have additional support for such layer two solutions as Optimistic Rollups, zkRollups, and Validium."

• As of 12-2021, Polygon has aquired different zk-tech projects, like Hermes and Mir to add to their stack.

Interoperability

• From EthHub (10-12-2021):

"Polygon and Wanchain are launching a decentralized L2 to L2 cross-chain bridge that connects Arbitrum and Polygon’s PoS chain."

• Connext & 1Hive have together created a bridge between Matic and xDai (18-3-2021).

• From their docs (7-3-2021):

"Matic brings you a trustless two-way transaction channel between Matic and Ethereum by introducing the cross-chain bridge with Plasma and PoS security. With this users can transfer tokens across matic without incurring third-party risks and market liquidity limitations. Matic uses a dual-consensus architecture (Plasma + Proof-of-Stake (PoS) platform) to optimise for speed and decentralisation. We consciously architected the system to support arbitrary state transitions on our sidechains, which are EVM-enabled."

Matic seems to have 2 bridges, PoS (which they recommend) and Plasma.

• From State of Stake #31 (10-9-2020):

"The PoS (Proof-of-Stake) token bridge is now live on the Matic mainnet for deposits and withdrawals from Ethereum to Matic and vice versa. DApps can now use the robust validator-run token bridge to move ERC20, ERC721 and ERC1155 tokens from Ethereum to Matic and from Matic to Ethereum. Deposits from Ethereum to Matic take ~7-8 minutes to complete and withdrawals take ~30 minutes. This is a vast improvement from the previous deposit & withdrawal mechanism."

Oracle Method

• In their docs (7-3-2021), three projects are mentioned; Chainlink, Bandchain and Razor (only on Görli testnet).
• DIA is now live (15-2-2021).

Their Other Projects

• Matic PoS Chain and Matic Plasma Chains. However, these seem both to be bridges to Ethereum.

Avail

• From EthHub (29-6-2021):

"Avail is a general-purpose, scalable data availability-focused blockchain targeted for standalone chains, sidechains & off-chain scaling solutions."

Polygon Hermez

• Hermez was previously a standalone project but merged (or was bought) by Polygon (13-8-2021). It will be the ZK-Rollup and zkEVM side of Polygon.

Polygon Miden

• From EthHub (23-11-2021):

"Polygon Miden is an advanced ZK Rollup. ZK Rollups are very promising, but currently, it's hard for them to support arbitrary logic and transactions, such as those happening on Ethereum. Polygon Miden will solve this challenge using its core component - Miden VM."

Polygon Studios

• Will aid the development of blockchain gaming and NFTs (19-7-2021).

Polygon Zero (fka Mir)

• Mir was previously a standalone project but got aquired by Polygon (9-12-2021). It will be another ZK-Rollup side of Polygon. The deal was made for $400m. It got renamed into Polygon Zero.

Roadmap

• Can be found here (3-6-2020). New one here(24-5-2021), but only goes until Q1 of 2021.

• From their blog (10-6-2020):

1. "Staking UI to be publicly available on testnet by 15th June and functional for our Staking Education Initiative. Participants will be able to experience live delegation to validator nodes on testnet. Register here to take part.
2. Final staking & delegation to Foundation nodes on the Matic mainnet to go live on or before 29th June.
3. Public deposits and withdrawals for end users using the Matic Web Wallet are also slated to go live shortly; the exact date will be provided by Friday, 12th June."

Usage

• From Our Network (1-5-2021):

"Polygon has seen a meteoric rise in transaction volume, exceeding Ethereum’s transaction count by 18% on Tuesday. Its native DEX, Quickswap, accounted for 41,000 transactions that day, hitting over 20% of Uniswap’s transaction volume. There are only 400,000 unique addresses on Polygon, a far cry from 150 million on Ethereum or 61 million on BSC. Curiously, Polygon’s top 3 addresses sent 573,000 transactions this week, a large majority of which appear to be arbitrage trades. Interestingly, only 25% of all Polygon addresses ever sent transactions on Ethereum."

• From Our Network (5-6-2021):

"As of writing this, the average user on Polygon's implementation of Aave does ~5 transactions on any given day. The combined gas cost for supporting over 4,000 users as of early June was under $15."

• Polygon’s Bridge TVL has been on a slow decline and hovering around $2.5b since peaking at ~$4.6b (9-2021). Meanwhile TVL on Arbitrum and Avalanche went up substantially.

Projects that use or built on it

• From Crypto Briefing (7-6-2020):

"Before launching its mainnet on Jun. 3, 2020, Matic had already attracted more than 50 dApps, making it the most adopted layer 2 platform in the space. dApps on Matic encompass a variety of niches ranging from gaming to DeFi, with notable projects including Decentraland and whitelabel betting platform BetProtocol."

A list of projects built or deployed on Polygon can be seen here (3-5-2021).

• Aave; 31-3-2021
• Aavegotchi; decided to go live on Matic rather than Ethereum due to the latter’s high gas fees, according to a recent tweet (5-1-2021) from the project.
• BadgerDAO; planning to deploy (17-3-2021)
• Curve, deployed on Polygon (20-4-2021).
• Decentraland; (2-4-2021)
• Distributed Town (DiTo); From State of Stake (11-2020) "It’s building a network of interconnected, self-sovereign communities (DAOs). They have also introduced ERNE Finance a decentralized financial platform to farm, mint and lend."
• Indexed Finance; deployed (13-5-2021).
• IGGalaxy is migrating away from Tron and onto the Matic Network (15-9-2020).
• Injective Protocol; partnered for its Layer 2 DEX (12-2020).
• Gelato Network; will deploy (6-5-2021).
• Kyber; announced (16-6-2021).
• mStable; deployed (27-4-2021).
• Neon District will roll out on Matic (7-7-2020).
• Polymarket builds on it (4-11-2020).
• PoolTogether; (29-4-2021)
• QuickSwap is built on top of Matic (13-10-2020). 
• Slingshot; DEX live on Polygon (8-4-2021).
• SushiSwap; deployed its contracts on it as part of adding support for 5 new chains (4-3-2021).
• Superfluid; (10-3-2021)
• Unmarshal; announced it will add support (24-3-2021).

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Is EVM compatible, therefore it is easy for Ethereum projects to launch on Polygon.
• Low tx fees.
• Is considered 'ETH-aligned', this narrative has been working in their favour, compared to other EVM-chains or scaling options.

Cons

• Staking contracts (and with it, the security of their whole chain) are held with a multi-sig with no (15-5-2021) timelock.
• Lots of competition.
• When Polygon pushed a hard fork through in a very short time, discussions arose over its decentralization. Answers from the team were not very clear nor conclusive (17-12-2021).

Competition

• Other EVM-chains or scaling options.
• Sablier, Connext and Celer.

• From Cointelegraph (9-9-2020):

"If Ethereum 2.0 will bring better scalability to the platform, does this mean that second-layer projects such as Matic Network will no longer be required? Sandeep Nailwal, chief operations officer of Matic, doesn’t believe that Ethereum 2.0 will nail the scalability challenge in the same way that Matic has, telling Cointelegraph: “Ethereum 2.0 doesn’t provide infinite scalability. The best-case scenario is 64 shards, with sharded chains similar to today’s Ethereum chain. Assuming a single chain improves with PoS up to 50 transactions per second, total throughput will still only offer 3200 tps.”

Nailwal believes that the simple fact of Ethereum supplying a higher throughput will drive even greater demand, creating a situation where Ethereum can never scale to the level required by its DApp activity, adding: “First layer blockchains are settlement platforms. They are not meant to support the ’business activity.’” With the craze for DeFi DApps pushing gas fees ever higher, those using second-layer platforms for features like governance votes can avoid the need to move to a competitor platform."

Team, Funding, Partnerships, etc.

Team

• Matic Network Ltd. (British Virgin Islands).
• Full team can be viewed here (25-5-2021).
• Jaynti Kanani; CEO "an erstwhile Plasma contributor who started Matic with Sandeep Nailwal and Anurag Arjun in October 2017."
• From Coindesk (3-6-2020):

"Matic has since grown to a team of 25 full-time contributors working out of Bangalore, the “Silicon Valley” of India."

• Arpit Agarwal; engineer
• Sandeep Nailwal, chief operations officer
• Advisors include (9-2-2021): Ryan Sean Adams, the founder of Mythos Capital, Anthony Sassano of EthHub, and the Ethereum Foundation developer Hudson Jameson

Funding

• Got seed money from Coinbase Ventures.
• Had an IEO on Binance.
• Started its own $100M "DeFiforAll" fund (29-4-2021). "The funding, in MATIC tokens, will come from the network’s ecosystem fund and be deployed over the next two to three years."
• Gave a 'significant grant' to Tidal Finance (27-4-2021).
• AU21 Capital started a $21 million fund to invest in projects built on Polygon (2-6-2021).
• Polygon is raising a $100M fund to support blockchain game developers and NFT creators, and tapping the chops of Atari.
• Donated $1M to Gitcoin (11-2021).

Partners

• Partnered (12-6-2019) with and integrated Chainlink
• Funds (1-2020) Plasma Group
• Decentraland and Makerdao are among the partners.
• Is part of (2-3-2020) the first members of the Ren Alliance, as an Utility member integrating RenVM or adding renBTC, renZEC, etc.

• From EthHub #122 (13-7-2020):

"Gitcoin and Matic announced that they have formed a long term staking partnership with Matic to collectively grow the scalability community of Web 3." Gitcoin is also part of the Ren Alliance.

• Partnered with Mantra DAO (15-10-2020):

“Matic architecture is [designed to enable a] … secure and efficient link between the Ethereum blockchain and Matic sidechains. That’s where MANTRA DAO’s … secure staking infrastructure steps in. The security of that Layer 1-Layer 2 link is managed by validators. Transactions are made on the sidechains and are recorded into blocks minted by selected validators. When a sufficient number of blocks is reached, these are checked by a selected validator that will record the trace and send it to the Ethereum blockchain.” 

• API3; is mentioned as a partner on their website (5-3-2021).
• Is one of the announced partners of Unmarshal during their first months (5-4-2021).
• Ramp Network has a partnership.
• Is a member of Asia DeFi Network (ADN) according to the website (13-7-2021).
• Is mentioned as a partner on the GateToken website (22-10-2021).

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