Polygon
Polygon is a blockchain for global payments offering $0.002 average transaction costs and fast settlement.
What is Polygon?
Polygon (originally Matic Network) was founded in 2017 by Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, Anurag Arjun, and Mihailo Bjelic. Polygon is a blockchain for global payments that offers developers low transaction fees and fast transaction processing speeds. Polygon employs a modified proof-of-stake consensus mechanism that allows for consensus with each block. In order to validate Polygon network transactions, network participants must stake POL, the native token of Polygon. Polygon validators that behave are rewarded with POL. Polygon's Open Money Stack provides wallet infrastructure, crosschain interop, on/off-ramps, and blockchain rails for enterprise-grade money movement, with 159M unique wallet addresses and over 7B total transactions.
Web3 dapps and developer tools related to Polygon
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Alchemy
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OKX
Developer resources from Alchemy
Permissioned vs. permissionless blockchains
Permissioned blockchains restrict one or more network roles. Permissionless blockchains open participation. Compare access, trust, and when each model fits.
How we fine tune our RPC for speed and reliability
We moved compression for large RPC responses to a better layer in our serving path, cutting P95 latency on heavy calls and reducing connection churn.
How Goldsky kept transactions flowing with zero downtime
Goldsky migrated its Compose bundler and paymaster to Alchemy and built a provider abstraction layer that makes failover a single environment variable change—no code deploy, no downtime.
Polygon alternatives
Explore web3 competitors and apps like Polygon.
Base
Arbitrum
Starknet
OP MainnetApp store listings are independently reviewed and written by Alchemy using a combination of inbound submissions, editorial research, public project sources, and third-party directories, including ecosystem data from The Grid under the Open Database License, DefiLlama, DappRadar, Reown, and chain ecosystem pages.
