Polygon, the low-cost solution from NFT Bunny

In the design phase, the NFT Bunny team decided to use the best technologies to create an NFT marketplace that was easy to use, inclusive, and low cost. This is why Polygon was chosen as the infrastructure for NFT minting and trading, to take advantage of the peculiarities of this sidechain.

NFT Bunny aims to be much more than a marketplace, integrating also social functions, and the possibility to host events and galleries in the metaverse. But for all this to be realized, it was necessary to start with a technology that would be able to make minting and trading NFT fast and convenient. This is why (also) Polygon was chosen.

In a nutshell, Polygon, compared to Ethereum, appears more scalable, with fast transactions and significantly reduced commission costs. But these are not the only features of Polygon.

Let’s take a look at the protocol that aims to make the Ethereum network efficient.

How Polygon was born

Polygon is the current name of Matic, a project started in 2017 by three developers from India, Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal and Anurag Arjun, who decided to find a solution to Ethereum’s scalability.

The team funded themselves with the IEO of the Matic token in 2019, launched on Binance Launchpad with which they raised $5.6 million. Matic’s mainnet was launched in mid-2020. In 2021, the team decided to expand its projects and opted to rebrand to Polygon to create a more complex ecosystem that would allow for the connection of Ethereum’s different scaling solutions.

The characteristics of Polygon

Matic’s first project, later Polygon, was the sidechain.

By sidechain we mean a kind of blockchain parallel to a layer 1 blockchain. Polygon is an Ethereum sidechain.

The advantage of sidechains is that they are faster and have lower transaction costs than the main chain. They also have their own form of consensus to validate transactions and blocks, which is different from the layer 1 blockchain.

Not surprisingly, Ethereum’s consensus protocol is currently based on Proof of Work (pending the transition to Ethereum 2.0 which will introduce Proof of Stake). Polygon’s consensus protocol is already based on Proof of Stake.

Unlike other Ethereum sidechains, Polygon has a consensus mechanism that allows anyone in the community to become part of the mechanism to validate transactions on the blockchain. Every participant can basically become a validator and verify that transactions are processed correctly. In order to become a validator, each user can stake Polygon’s native tokens, the Matic tokens, directly on Ethereum, and manage a full node.

If a validator starts behaving maliciously, e.g. extending response times or signing transactions twice, its staked Matic tokens are cut off.

Thus, although Matic has its own consensus protocol, security still rests on Ethereum’s blockchain and a system called ‘checkpoints’. The checkpoints periodically transmit information from selected block producers to Ethereum.

The entire operation of Polygon is managed on its smart contract deployed on Ethereum’s mainnet.

Polygon’s blockchain is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and this allows the migration of Ethereum-based projects directly to Polygon.

The success of Polygon

Polygon’s success is evident from the fact that it currently hosts several major projects such as Quickswap (a fork of Uniswap), Sushiswap, Poly Market, Polkamarkets, Aavegotchi.

The Graph and Chainlink are also expanding to Polygon, while a big name in the gaming industry, Atari, has partnered with Polygon.

In the future, Polygon aims to expand its network of Ethereum scaling solutions, which currently includes the Matic Chain and Plasma Chain, but in the future could also include optimistic rollups and Zk rollups.

To learn more on Polygon, watch this video.

Why NFT Bunny is not limited to Polygon

With this long overview of Polygon, it remains to be seen why NFT Bunny has chosen to be a multichain platform and has not limited itself to the advantages of Polygon.

Polygon, unlike Ethereum, guarantees fast and low transaction costs.

Polygon can be very attractive to those who don’t want to spend a fortune on gas. But the size and popularity of Ethereum (and Binance Smart Chain) in the NFT sector cannot be ignored.

That’s why NFT Bunny, which wants to be a platform as inclusive as possible, has chosen to be multichain, an option that fits with the company’s philosophy of breaking down barriers starting with technological ones.