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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

note

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.

Staking operations

External Resources