Welcome to Polygon
Polygon is a scaling solution for public blockchain networks. Polygon PoS chain supports all the existing Ethereum tooling along with faster and cheaper transactions.
What is a Blockchain?
Blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger for recording transactions, tracking assets and building trust. Head over to Blockchain Basics section to read more.
What is a Sidechain?
Think of a Sidechain as a clone of a parent blockchain, supporting transfer of assets to and from the main chain. It is simply an alternate to parent chain that creates a new blockchain with its own mechanism of creating blocks (consensus mechanism). Connecting a sidechain to a parent chain involves setting up a method of moving assets between the chains.
Types of Interaction on Polygon
Query the Blockchain
Most blockchain interactions involve reading its state.
Alchemy offers a reference guide on how to make basic requests to the blockchain. Check out their guide on how to query Polygon.
Deploy Smart Contracts
- Deploy your Contracts on Polygon
Configure the Web3 RPC-URL to "https://rpc-mumbai.matic.today", everything else remains the same.
Validator and delegator roles
On the Polygon Network, you can be a validator or a delegator. See:
Architecture
If your goal is to become a validator, it is essential that you understand the Polygon architecture.
See Polygon Architecture.
Components
To have a granular understanding of the Polygon architecture, see core components:
Codebases
To have a granular understanding of the core components, check out their codebases:
How-Tos
Node setup
If you want to run a full node on the Polygon Mainnet or Mumbai Testnet, you can follow the Run a Validator Node guide.