(#21) Polygon vs Solana

APIs + Web3, intentions

Jan 16, 2023

Don’t walk into a place like you wanna buy it, walk in like you own it. - Matthew McConaughey

The more I train myself to think & focus my intentions toward what I want or think matters (i.e. job, relationship, goals) I notice and recognize them when they come up.

If your intention is already placed on what you want, the belief that you will get what you want will subconsciously draw you closer to that goal in reality.

🤔 Thoughts

Thoughts on APIs + Web3

The dream of interoperability and composability through open source in web3 seems to be through APIs at the moment.

I think we will continue to see companies connect fintech to tradfi through APIs:

continue to integrate with more exchanges
start integrating with wallets and Dapps
continue to bridge tradfi to crypto through stablecoins (USDC)

Solana vs. Polygon: A Developer’s Perspective

Interesting article on Polygon vs Solana from a dev perspective. The focus is on comparing performance, approach to scaling, and security between the two chains. I think both have an important place in crypto, but there are certainly tradeoffs.

👇 Here are some key differences that I highlighted 👇

performance:

Another technical consideration when comparing block times is that Polygon (like other [Ethereum Virtual Machine] EVM chains) uses a mempool where transactions are indexed before being added to a block. Solana takes a different route, where transactions are submitted directly to the leader in the validator set. So while block time on Polygon is ~2 seconds, there is no guarantee a transaction will make it into the next block since it could get stuck in the mempool – especially in times of high volatility. On Solana, the block time (referred to as “slot time”) is ~0.4 seconds. On Polygon the block time is ~2 seconds.
Block capacity manifests in fee markets, which we can see today. The average transaction fee on Polygon is ~$0.02 whereas Solana is ~$0.0002.
Polygon is designed to scale through parallelized sidechains, which opens up the option to increase total block capacity through more chains, so that could bring the fee markets down.

approach to scaling:

Solana is built to keep everything on a single chain and Polygon is built to add more concurrent chains that merge state periodically.
Polygon is set up to scale by adding more sidechains running in parallel and merging state periodically through a commitment to Ethereum.
Polygon’s variant finality is a substantial drawback, and may impact what type of apps could be built on it. For instance, crypto apps might put a user’s funds on hold until a transaction is considered final or allow users to transact immediately and accept the risk of a double spend exploit (like accepting credit card chargeback risk).
A single chain will always be better than a collection of sidechains, assuming the single chain can scale. A single chain has less coordination complexity, less aggregation latency and less surface area for attack.

security:

Potential blockchain developers should focus on a network’s resiliency to bad actors trying to influence state. This is most objectively measured by the Nakamoto Coefficient (NC), a metric that quantifies the number of validators that would need to collude to corrupt a network.
At the time of this writing the Solana NC is 32 and Polygon is 4.
As more validators come online, Polygon’s NC will grow, and other technical improvements in development like zk rollups will improve security.