You'll probably hear a lot of excited chatter around Polygon in the coming months/years...but why? What does it actually do?

Put simply: Polygon wants to solve Ethereum’s three biggest problems.

By making it faster, cheaper, and able to handle way more transactions per second.

(These are VERY important problems to solve if we want to see the mass adoption of Ethereum).

But Polygon isn’t Ethereum, it is its own thing.

It’s a layer 2, meaning it’s a totally separate blockchain network, which has been built to interact with Ethereum.

...but what the hell does that mean?

Why add ‘layers’?? That just makes it confusing.

Weirdly enough, global currencies have layers too (we just know them by different names).

The US dollar has two layers that you’ll no doubt be familiar with:
The money in your bank account is the layer 1, and cash is the layer 2.

Cryptocurrency layers share many of the same attributes as bank and cash layers:

Layer 1 cryptocurrencies (like Ethereum) typically have higher security, but their transactions are slow and expensive (just like banks).

Layer 2 cryptocurrencies (like Polygon) often have less security, but their transactions are fast and have little to no fees (just like cash).

Imagine having to do a bank transfer every time you bought a coffee, or paid for groceries - it'd be a pain! Polygon is gunning to be the go-to blockchain for small transactions like this.

…ok, but if Polygon is so fast and cheap - why make it work with Ethereum at all?

Why don’t the creators of Polygon just try and take the whole market for themselves?

We're not telling! At least not yet...we're covering all of this (and more) next Sunday, Oct. 16th, in the next edition of Over The Shoulder.

(Oooft, another cliff hanger!)

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