What Is Polygon? The Complete Guide to the Blockchain Network, MATIC Token, and Polygon 2.0
Ethereum changed what blockchains could do. But it also exposed a painful truth: when millions of users show up, the network slows to a crawl and transaction fees balloon to absurdity. Paying $50 in gas to swap $100 of tokens is not a sustainable model for the open internet.Polygon was built to fix that. Since launching in 2017, it has grown from a single Ethereum scaling sidechain into one of the most ambitious multi-chain ecosystems in crypto processing hundreds of millions of transactions, hosting thousands of decentralised applications, and now reinventing itself from the ground up with Polygon 2.0.This guide covers everything you need to know: how Polygon works, what makes it different from Ethereum and other Layer 1 chains, the economics of the MATIC (and now POL) token, and where the network is headed next.