One of the most promising ERC-20 tokens is Matic. Smart contract platforms, as well as digital currencies, have managed to capture the attention of the masses. But they haven’t been able to gain mass adoption and this is due to several challenges they are facing and top on the list of these challenges is scalability.
Decentralized applications on Ethereum (which is the most popular smart contract platform) have not gained mass adoption. There have been some instances where a few apps successfully increased their user base. However, this increase in user base eventually crippled the entire network during a high load period. This is obviously an indication that even the most advanced blockchain platforms such as Ethereum are still not prepared for mass adoption.
The team behind Matic Network strongly believes that once the issue of scalability is resolved, users will enjoy several benefits such as faster confirmations, lower transaction fees and several others. The issue of scalability is not new to the crypto space, so how is Matic’s scalability solution different from most that are available? Let’s find out more about Matic, their goals, as well as the problems they want to solve.
So, what is Matic?
The scalable blockchain network is a project that successfully raised over $5 million from an ICO that was carried out on the Binance Exchange launchpad. The ERC-20 project is a platform for creating decentralized apps (DApps) with a total token supply of 10,000,000,000.
The Matic token runs on the Ethereum blockchain, and individuals use it to pay for services on the Matic Network. It also serves as a settlement token between those who operate within the network’s ecosystem. As earlier mentioned, their goal is to resolve the scalability issue, but they also want to solve issues of the overcomplicated user interface, slow transactions, and high transaction fees.
The team behind Matic believes that they can significantly improve usability without in any way forfeiting the benefits of decentralization. The founders of this project observed that while there is an increased creation of DApps, most of the networks they run on are not well equipped or prepared to support decentralized apps’ mass adoption. Also, the user experience in most of these DApps is extremely poor as they are not designed to ensure that the average user can easily use them.
How Matic is Solving Blockchain Challenges
There is no doubt that blockchain technology also faces its challenges. But the major challenge that most blockchain projects are facing is known as the “Scalability Trilemma.” This means that in a bid to solve one problem, they are often faced with the possibility of sacrificing other features. The Matic Network has actually taken a good look at some of these issues plaguing the blockchain industry and has devised several measures to address the challenges.
The first challenge they are interested in solving is that of scalability. Most new blockchain projects are more interested in projecting their blockchains while ignoring the network effects that decentralized applications, as well as other blockchain projects, have been able to generate on several blockchain platforms like Ethereum. They are also neglecting the rich developer community and ecosystem that is already in place in platforms like Ethereum.
Matic is taking advantage of these benefits as it is a layer 2 scaling solution that has managed to deal with the issue of scalability by making use of sidechains for off-chain computation and at the same time utilizing the Plasma framework with decentralized PoS validators. With this solution, the Matic Network can handle millions of transactions per second. The Matic Network developers are taking advantage of the existing developer community and ecosystem to solve the scalability and usability challenges.
Another challenge they have identified has to do with the size of blockchains. In case you don’t know how public blockchains function, every node on the public blockchain is required to manage a full copy of the blocks as well as the state of the chain. Over time, the blockchain will grow larger and this also implies that fewer nodes will want to participate. When this happens, then the decentralization of the blockchain will be threatened.
What Matic Network proposes is that the primary layer can store just the blocks from the last checkpoint to the most recent checkpoint. Since all the previous blocks have been submitted to the main chain, this can be achieved.
They’re also solving the problem of slow transactions by using the PoS algorithm but in a different way to ensure the network remains decentralized. Remember, one of the issues they want to solve has to do with the user interface. If decentralized apps are to gain mass adoption, then they need to create user interfaces that people can freely use just like their centralized counterparts on Play Store and several others.
The Matic Network is building a product ecosystem that features desktop wallets, user-friendly mobile apps as well as browser extensions. They believe this would offer users a seamless experience so they can easily pay, transfer, or even hold cryptocurrencies without being bothered about how complex its underlying system is. They are providing these services without compromising the security of DApps.
Matic Network offers interesting products such as the Matic Dagger. Dagger refers to a Zapier integration that enables builders on the network to collect real-time Ethereum updates and plug into their apps, spreadsheets or any other product. Presently, developers have built over 400 DApps as well as trackers with this trigger tool. Users can track real-time transaction notifications on mobile apps or web, listen to multi-signature wallet events and even track the movement of tokens from one address to another.
The Matic community is fast-growing and with the ruling of the Indian Supreme Court, which lifted the ban on digital currency trading, this blockchain project has great prospects. If you’re thinking of buying Matic, you can do so on Binance, Poloniex, Bittrex and several others. You can find out more about Matic Network as well as other crypto projects by reading “The Digital World of Crypto Riches.” The book contains summaries of over a hundred digital currencies.
