I have covered Polygon's progress in the past. The reason Polygon and Optimism interests me is because their ability to reduce the chain fees and also get variety of the blockchain games and the dApps on their blockchain in a short amount of time. And they have been scaling really well than the Layer 1 Ethereum itself.
Ethereum has serious scaling issues. And it kind of passes those transaction fees over layer 2 too. And that's one of the reason regardless of any layer 2 chain you use there is a min 1 USD worth of the fee. Which is a bit too much for small transactions. And to bypass this problem, many chains are working harder to scale.
Polygon is working real hard to reduce the layer 1 issues. Which includes fees, scaling and the model issues in the layer 1 blockchain. And they are now moving towards an update known as the agglayer.
So let's discuss what is this agglayer and how it impacts us.
Initially when blockchains were created they had the monolithic models. And the model turned out to be slow, low scale and also with lot of model issues as the demand for the blockchain in real world changed. Then came the modular models which also tried to solve the earlier blockchain model issues but then blockchain use case evolved and so the current modular models too had the scalable issues.
Most of the monolithic blockchains has the slow transaction issues and the high fees. And the modular blockchains too had the high fees issue. Apart from that after certain threshold even the sharding approach of those had issues. And new solution was meant to be innovated in this space. This is where the aggregated model of the blockchain came out.
Agglayer as Polygon documents it works on the modular chain approach and extends it for more scalability, flexibility and the sharding gets even more modified for the cross chains and multi chain transactions. For example, polygon shares the data with the chainlink, atom and say with the ronin. So here the sharding and the other scalability component features are now improve in this agglayer.
Polygon's 2.0 update has this aggregated blockchain model where the problem of the cost, fees and the scalable nature of the chains. Where new update of the polygon is trying to act in the cross chain and the interoperability is meant to take the space for the scaling. Now the thing is that when it comes to blockchain like polygon on layer 2, it's moving in a right direction for the cross chain use case.
Agglayer is meant to solve variety of the problems. And it also has a use case in the ecosystem. For example, for consumers they don't care whether it's a bridge or the layer which does the work. In such case they just want the layer to work for the simplicity on UX front which agglayer aims to solve. Another thing is keeping the chain that does the seemless work across the layer 1 and the other layer 2s of the blockchain.
This in turn solves a lot of problems. Like say Agglayer connects to crosschains like arbitrum, ronin, optimism and also the Polygon. This kind of helps when deployihng the dApp that works across the layer 2 chain seemlessly. Where this is useful? In such case you can think of the use case for DEX, smart contract based exchanges and zkEVM features in it too.
Agglayer is a new updated component of the Polygon 2.0. And Polygon seems to be growing more in the direction of the bridge with the features to handle variety of the scale and the fees issues. Let's see how this new agglayer update benefits the community.
