# Polygon

## History
Cofounder Jaynti Kanani is the current CEO of Polygon. He developed the project alongside Sandeep Nailwal, cofounder and chief operating officer, and Anurag Arjun, cofounder and chief product officer. The trio created Polygon in 2017. Back then, it was called Matic Network.

At first, funds from friends and family in Mumbai helped support the venture. But, while Polygon has its roots in India, the platform continues to attract investors from all around the globe. Polygon raised over $450,000 in two rounds of startup funding in 2019. The venture has roughly $450 million in funding from various investors.

## What is it

Polygon is “a decentralised Ethereum scaling platform that enables developers to build scalable user-friendly dApps with low transaction fees without ever sacrificing on security.” The Polygon Lightpaper describes Polygon as “a protocol and a framework for building an connecting Ethereum-compatible blockchain networks.”

Polygon is a stack of protocols designed to fix Ethereum’s scalability issues. The Polygon network addresses the network’s challenges by handling transactions on a separate Ethereum-compatible blockchain.

Polygon then returns transactions to the main Ethereum blockchain post-processing. This approach lowers the network load on Ethereum. In doing so, Polygon can speed up transactions and lower transaction costs to less than a cent.

## What is so special?
Polygon isn’t in competition with Ethereum. If anything, it’s reliant on Ethereum and vice versa. Polygon’s mission is to leverage the Polygon network in order to create infrastructure that can handle the mass adoption of Ethereum. Consequently, Polygon is more dependent on Ethereum than Ethereum is on Polygon. This is expected since Polygon is built on top of its blockchain.

## Competitors
Several competing layer-2 networks also allow transactions to be processed externally and bridged onto the main blockchain network. Some of the more notable layer 2 alternatives to Polygon rely on zk-proofs, the two most notable competitors being Arbitrum and Optimism.

There's no doubt that Polygon has some strong competitors, and all the Ethereum layer-2 projects have the potential to positively impact the blockchain environment. But, since Polygon has been investing heavily in different types of zk-proofs, this layer-2 solution has shown great promise as a powerful solution for Ethereum scalability.