@adlrocha - Polygon: L2 or not L2?
It’s time for another L2 comparison! The other day I came across a project I wasn’t aware of: Polygon. Polygon is advertised on its official site as the “Ethereum’s Internet of Blockchains”. What does this mean?
Polygon seems to be tackling all of Ethereum’s current limitations at the same time: its current low throughput (which hopefully will be improved with Ethereum 2.0); the poor UX provided for applications as a result of gas fees and the delayed PoW finality; and what they call “no sovereignty” which translates into the lack of composability of the Ethereum stack; and its governance dependence, which limits the influence decentralized applications can have over the underlying blockchain substrate. They aim to solve all of this by building “a protocol and a framework for building and connecting Ethereum-compatible blockchain networks.”
If you’ve been reading my publications lately, you may already be aware of how several projects in the community are trying to mitigate some (or all) of the aforementioned limitations by building Ethereum-compatible blockchains. They’re building completely new blockchain protocols like Polkadot which are EVM-compatible or implementing Layer 2 solutions built on top of Ethereum’s mainnet, such as Metis, Optimism, or Arbitrium.
