Vitalik Buterin when talking about Polygon as a Layer 2 Network at the Lex Fridman show on whether it is positive, is it negative for Ethereum, is it both, or does it have a future stated:
There is a big difference between security models and roll ups in side chains, which is basically that roll ups inherit from the security of Ethereum. If I have coins inside of Loopring, Arbitrum, or Optimism, then even if everyone else in this world who is participating in this ecosystem hates me and wants to steal my money, I can still personally make sure that no matter what may happen I get my money out.
It might be even expensive for me to get my money out after doing transactions on the main chain, but I will be able to do it. Whereas in Polygon which is a side chain that has been secured by Ethereum, it has also been secured in part by its own Proof of Stake Consensus with its own token.
So, if 70% or 51% of the holders of Polygon token wanted to take my money in Polygon they can’t. To be fair the supply is not that widely distributed so potentially you could – this idea of the 51% token holders coming together and stealing everything is not possible.
Where does the scaling of Polygon come from? Why is it able to process much more transactions than the Ethereum Main Chain? What is the idea there? I think, I am not actually nor sure of the capacity level is because I imagine they have a higher capacity because it is a bit more willing to take decentralization tradeoffs.
Then the other thing is that with the Ethereum ecosystem, even if you think about Ethereum ecosystem hypothetically trading with side chains you will have a 100 copies of Polygon.
They would each have their own tokens and each have their own chains. And, even if each one of those chains were as scalable as Ethereum, you could still the total sum would be still a 100 times more than Ethereum.
The thing that I want to say about Polygon’s favor, just to be very clear with respect to the work that they are doing. They made this deliberate tradeoff for very pragmatic reasons, which is that the Ethereum ecosystem needs to scale and all the applications that want to do something now, and if there aren’t Ethereum friendly options for them then like they are not going to wait peacefully and do nothing for 12 months.
They are going to some other system like the Binance smart chain or with something that has no alignment with Ethereum’s values. The best thing to say about Polygon is: Optimism is not live and Polygon is live. It just takes more work to create the extra roll ups and security features.
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