Contrary to reports at the time, Polygon never attempted to slay Ethereum. Back in 2021, various organizations, including CoinGecko and the Nasdaq, labeled Polygon as a “faster and cheaper” blockchain than Ethereum and built a perception among some that the project’s proof-of-stake blockchain intended to become an “Ethereum killer.”
The label couldn’t be more inaccurate, claims Polygon and Avail co-founder Anurag Arjun.
“I don’t think that was the intent. For sure, maybe a perception, but in terms of actual action, I mean Polygon built one of the first zkEVM rollups on Ethereum,” the Indian-born tech entrepreneur tells Hall of Flame.
“I think that fact alone says a lot about the strategy and the future,” he says on a call from Dubai, just like every other crypto tycoon these days.
He explains that Matic (Polygon’s original name) was initially built on the 2017 premise that it would be a Plasma solution — which was one of the first L2 scaling solutions for Ethereum.
Also read: Slumdog billionaire: Incredible rags-to-riches tale of Polygon’s Sandeep Nailwal
“So the motivation behind building the company was to build out a scaling solution for Ethereum; of course, Plasma didn’t work out then; it wasn’t ultimately feasible,” Arjun says.
He says this is why Polygon pivoted to the Polygon PoS network in 2020 before ultimately building out a suite of ZK-rollup solutions.
“And so that’s why we had to pivot to the Polygon PoS chain. And, of course, there was time required for us to build out the rollup solution, which is there right now.”
Arjun acknowledges that from the outside, switching from a Plasma solution to a PoS network might have looked like they were trying to “build a competitor to Ethereum.”
However, internally, it was simply a product pivot. Polygon needed to “ship something useful to users to get feedback again.”
The feedback helped the…
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