According to Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon Technology, the success of Ethereum’s Merge is a significant milestone for the community and may pave the road for widespread adoption.
While Nailwail acknowledged that Ethereum’s switch to proof-of-stake (PoS) from proof-of-work (PoW) does not provide any scalability – the Polygon frontman stated that the answer to the original problem now at least exists, and he sees a benefit for systems like his.
“It’s the first major step in the series of a large number of steps that can bring in a billion users into Web3,” Sandeep told Coindesk. “In the journey of Web 3, [the merge] is one of the biggest inflection points to make it more mainstream.”
Nailwail also believes that the much-anticipated Ethereum update “opens up the way”, regarding the future of the second largest cryptocurrency in the world by market capitalization.
Ethereum’s new Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism is said to pave the way for Ethereum to introduce updates looking to improve the scalability and by that lower the blockchain’s fees.
To achieve this, Ethereum will resort to sharding. Sometime in 2023, the main blockchain of Ethereum will be divided into smaller, easier-to-manage chains. When Ethereum is shared, the blockchain will become considerably quicker and more affordable to use.
What Does The Merge Mean For Polygon
If Ethereum’s predictions come true, and the blockchain is able to significantly improve its functionality and scalability – does this means that Polygon, a layer 2 blockchain built on top of Ethereum, will become obsolete?
Well, not necessarily.
In fact, Ethereum does not see Polygon and other layer-2 solutions as rivals. Instead, the main blockchain welcomes the help that other blockchains can bring.
Ethereum’s goal is to work in coordination with other Layer-2 solutions in order to improve everyone’s scalability. By dividing the number of transactions between them, the blockchains are able to “share the burden” of these financial processes and all of them can perform better.
Developers predict that after sharding is enabled, Ethereum will be able to manage roughly 1,280 TPS, a good improvement over the present 20 TPS, but 1,280 TPS is insufficient to accommodate all of the world’s traffic.
And when it comes to handling more transactions, Polygon is more than up to the task. Currently, the layer-2 is capable of managing 7,000 TPS, and once Ethereum’s sharding is complete, Polygon’s TPS rate could increase even more.
Contrary to what you might read in cryptocurrency forums out there, Layer 2 sidechains like Polygon won’t disappear after The Merge – instead, they can become stronger and have a more important role in the future of Web3.