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