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@Polygon #Polygon $POL

I realized why mainstream gaming will never embrace this technology when I tried playing a blockchain game on the Ethereum mainnet.

The game requires a transaction for each action. Signing a transaction and paying gas fees were required when picking up an item. Waiting for blockchain confirmation was necessary while trading with another participant. Battle participation required wishing that network congestion wouldn't result in latency at crucial times. No amount of ingenious game design could make up for the inherently flawed experience.

I have experienced the flawless operation of classic online games with millions of concurrent users and hardly perceptible latency. After that, I experimented with blockchain games, but a few thousand players caused so much congestion that the system was rendered unplayable. The constraints in terms of technology were not subtle. They were too much.

I talked to game creators, and they were always frustrated. They saw the possibilities of player-driven economies, verified scarcity, and real digital ownership offered by blockchain technology. They might foresee game scenarios difficult to build with centralized servers. On infrastructure that cost dollars per transaction and handled fewer interactions per second than a single well-known gaming server, however, they were unable to provide similar experiences.

After that, I learned of Polygon's internal testing accomplishments. One sidechain can process 7,000 transactions per second. Because it marked a transition from blockchain as an intriguing experiment to blockchain as a workable gaming infrastructure, that statistic completely stopped me cold.

For comparison, let me say that there are 7,000 transactions every second.

Around fifteen transactions are processed every second on the Ethereum mainnet. That's the underlying fact that makes sophisticated decentralized apps struggle. The seven transactions per second that Bitcoin can handle is ideal for a store of value but disastrous for applications that need high throughput.

With 7,000 transactions per second, Polygon sidechains can handle almost 400 times the volume of Ethereum. That distinction changes the possibilities for gaming applications because users may create dozens of transactions in a single session. Suddenly, a game that has 10,000 active players each doing 10 transactions each hour becomes feasible rather than unfeasible.

Those figures were even more remarkable because of the horizontal scaling capacity. The architecture of Polygon allows for many sidechains to run concurrently. Ten sidechains can process 780,000 transactions per second if one sidechain can process 7,000. With additional chains added to the network, the throughput increases virtually infinitely.

I used a basic game prototype to test this scalability. Before gas costs and confirmation times rendered the experience intolerable, the application could have been able to accommodate 100 users concurrently on the Ethereum mainnet. The same program managed thousands of users on a Polygon sidechain without exhibiting any discernible performance issues. From dollars to fractions of a penny, the cost per transaction decreased.

Chainbreakers demonstrated what was made feasible when appropriate infrastructure and games came together.

In order to meet their scalability requirements, the German development team creating an RPG game in the virtual world of Decentraland declared they would employ Polygon. This promise in the white paper was not theoretical. genuine gamers selected infrastructure in this game according to genuine technological specifications.

Role playing games produce frequent transactions. Character mobility, gathering of items, trade, fighting, completing quests, and interacting with others. Each of these acts in a blockchain based game requires on chain verification to retain the trustless attribute that makes blockchain attractive in the first place. This amount of transactions is economically unfeasible on costly, sluggish chains.

Chainbreakers were feasible because to Polygon's infrastructure, which lowered transaction costs to the point that gamers couldn't see them. Players may concentrate on playing the game rather than worrying about gas prices. Actions took place almost instantly rather than waiting minutes for confirmations. Instead of being a complex technological presentation, the experience began to resemble real gaming.

I played early versions of blockchain games on Polygon for hours, contrasting the experience with games on other platforms. The change was apparent right away. On Polygon, transactions that took minutes on Ethereum were finished in seconds. In other places, actions that cost dollars cost pennies. Rather than being irritating, the gameplay felt responsive.

The economics of virtual worlds were made clear by the integration of Decentraland's marketplace.

Because digital goods are constantly being bought, sold, and traded, virtual worlds produce a huge number of transactions. Wearables allow users to personalize their avatars. They buy virtual property. They exchange items and artwork. They trade money. Within the ecosystem, value is generated and traded through each transaction.

Those transactions become unaffordable on the Ethereum mainnet. Buying a simple wearable item can cost more in gas expenses than the item itself was worth. Because of the substantial expense, users had to carefully consider each transaction. The impromptu economic activity that makes virtual worlds interesting was eliminated by this friction.

The marketplace was a costly curiosity before Polygon's merger with Decentraland, but now it is a viable economy. I bought a variety of goods on both platforms to test this. On Ethereum, buying five different wearables cost me over sixty dollars in gas costs alone. The identical purchases on Polygon cost less than a dollar total that includes fees and item costs.

There was no incremental improvement in that order of magnitude difference. The transition was categorical. On low-cost chains, activities that were economically illogical on high-cost chains become entirely feasible. Indeed, the virtual economy may operate as intended, with regular small-scale transactions generating thriving marketplaces.

An analysis of the technological architecture underlying this performance was warranted.

Polygon integrated proof-of-stake consensus based on Tendermint with plasma frameworks. High throughput for generalized transactions on sidechains was made possible by this hybrid architecture, which also guaranteed security for assets on the main chain. The plasma design provided that even if something catastrophically wrong happened on a sidechain, users could escape back to Ethereum mainnet with their assets intact.

On sidechains, block producers created new blocks around every second. The near-instantaneous confirmations needed by gaming apps were made possible by this quick block time. Minutes must not pass before players could observe the repercussions of their activities. The speed at which Polygon's design provided the input they need was measured in seconds.

Block hashes from sidechain producers were sent to the Ethereum mainnet by the checkpoint system around every five minutes. As a result, the secure mainnet and the speedy sidechain developed frequent synchronization points. Applications benefited from the speed of sidechain operations and the security of anchoring to Ethereum's proven consensus, giving them the best of both worlds.

To gain a personal understanding of these mechanics, I installed many test programs. The speed and responsiveness of the sidechain performance seemed on par with those of centralized databases. However, Ethereum's recurring checkpoints provide cryptographic evidence of the transaction history, in contrast to centralized databases. Users received promises of blockchain security in addition to a positive user experience.

Natural selection for high-quality infrastructure was established by validator economics.

Staking MATIC tokens and keeping up-to-date, high-performance hardware with exceptional uptime were necessary for operating a validator node on Polygon. Block producers required dependable infrastructure and network connectivity in order to manufacture blocks at a pace of about once every second. Poorly performing validators were subject to cutting fines, which decreased the amount of tokens they staked.

This economic mechanism made guaranteed that validators could only be operated economically by serious operators with the necessary resources. The network was able to sidestep the issue that several other platforms had, which was that low entrance barriers led to unreliable validators degrading overall performance. The incentive system was designed with quality standards in mind.

Validator reliability was crucial for gaming applications. Unpredictable performance or frequent outages would not be tolerated by players. Natural push toward the high uptime needed for gaming was provided by the financial incentives that matched validator revenues with network dependability.

In order to evaluate decentralization and geographic dispersion, I looked at the validator set. By avoiding risky centralization, where a single organization or jurisdiction may jeopardize the network, the validators were spread among several nations and organizations. The more than 100 validator slots preserved the performance requirements of apps while fostering significant decentralization.

The ambition was demonstrated by the journey from 7,000 to infinite throughput.

One sidechain handling 7,000 transactions per second was not the only aspect of Polygon's architecture. The system allowed for horizontal scalability by use of many parallel chains. This meant that by adding more sidechains to accommodate increased demand, throughput might increase.

This scaling strategy was ideal for game environments. The sidechains used by various games might be tailored to meet their unique needs. A rapid paced combat game could demand maximal throughput. Security may take precedence above speed in a strategy game. It may be necessary for a social virtual environment to have balanced performance in several areas.

Flexibility that monolithic chains couldn't match was made possible by the ability to alter sidechain parameters for particular applications while preserving ecosystem-wide interoperability. Instead of accepting one-size-fits-all concessions, developers were able to optimize for their use case.

My belief that gaming will spur adoption was reflected in the allocation of my portfolio.

Polygon was my main wager on blockchain gaming technology when I examined my Binance assets. The argument was straightforward: gaming represents one of the greatest entertainment sectors globally, and blockchain offers game experiences hard to produce with centralized servers. However, the infrastructure needed for blockchain gaming has to function at the size of a game.

Polygon proved they could. The raw performance was demonstrated by the 7,000 transactions per second during testing. The live integrations with Chainbreakers and Decentraland demonstrated practical uses for that functionality. The modular architecture showed possibilities for future development as technology advanced.

Adoption of gaming might result in a huge volume of transactions. Millions of participants each making hundreds of transactions every session would dwarf existing DeFi transaction volumes. Transaction fees paid in MATIC would result from that use, driving demand for the token that is closely linked to the expansion of the gaming ecosystem.

Recognizing the potential problems was necessary for the honest appraisal.

Gaming is fueled by hits. Most games don't work. As players' focus moves to more recent experiences, even popular games can have brief lifespans. Investing in blockchain gaming infrastructure required placing a wager that enough popular games would select Polygon and blockchain in particular.

Gaming ventures that may otherwise build on Polygon could be taken over by competition from other layer two solutions and high performance layer one chains. There may be more widespread technical problems than internal testing indicated. Blockchain gaming may be impacted in unanticipated ways by regulatory issues.

However, the basic idea seemed reasonable. Ethereum mainnet infrastructure was insufficient for gaming. With demonstrated performance in production, Polygon provided that infrastructure. As the industry developed, their development tools and alliances put them in a strong position to take on game ventures.

I was persuaded that this architecture made something truly novel possible by the shift I saw from broken blockchain gaming experiences on Ethereum to functioning experiences on Polygon. Seven thousand transactions per second wasn't simply a figure on a spec sheet. For a whole category of applications, it was the line separating the impossible from the possible.

Value is created by the transition from impossibly feasible to possible. And when more creators realized they could now create the blockchain games they had been dreaming of but couldn't previously implement, I was wagering that value would increase.