Golem will collaborate with the Polygon team and ecosystem for a new payment driver!

A community built Polygon (ex Matic) Payment Driver on Golem - An announcement of an announcement.

In the near future, we will be announcing dedicated bounties for the creation of a new payment driver utilizing Polygon, in addition, Polygon will be joining us in a hackathon.

There will also be a 2nd hackathon following to further build on Golem, Polygon and other platforms that we’re in the process of organizing.

Why?

To answer the why we’ll give a brief update on payment drivers on Golem first: the new Golem platform (implementation name, Yagna) is modular and allows for multiple payment drivers to be implemented. So far there are two payment drivers;

1. Regular ERC20 (GLM) token payments on Ethereum, which are expensive and we recommend using during times of congestion unless absolutely necessary.
2. zkSync payments, implemented in the Alpha III, which take payments off-chain. These are much cheaper and greatly improve latency and fees.

So now into the “Why?”. With the official Golem mainnet release incoming there’s still a problem for Golem that exists and remains to be solved. The issue being that it still requires on-chain Layer 1 (Ethereum) transactions to take payment off-chain and this is expensive! We’re solving this problem temporarily in a very centralized manner where we offer some tokens that are already off-chain to requestors. While a reasonable short-term solution, it doesn’t solve the underlying problem. So it’s clear that Golem requestors and creators need a realistic long-term solution for onboarding off-chain that is not so reliant on Golem Factory (and reliant on human sleep schedules!).

Polygon Network can also provide Golem users with a different set of trade-offs that will likely be desirable to some Golem users, that is that the fees are much lower.

The trade-off being that it takes longer to withdraw back onto Ethereum. For larger projects that run on Golem this trade-off would be favourable since they’d likely run in the span of weeks or even months (such as CHEM@Golem) where having a bit slower withdrawals is worth the trade-off in much cheaper transaction fees per task.

This makes implementing a Polygon Network/Polygon payment a bit of a “Two birds, one stone” scenario in helping further improve the requestors and the Golem user experience that doesn’t necessarily compete with the current options and more complements them to give Golem requestors more sets of benefits depending on what they want to achieve.

How will we achieve this goal?

This is where the bounties mentioned earlier come into play. We will offer rewards and bounties for developers to build this integration. We understand that this task requires a lot of knowledge around Golem, Ethereum and Polygon Network and this is why we’re announcing the announcement. To light the beacon, starting the call and lookout for those up for the task.

One of the benefits we get from having this payment driver implementing Polygon Network developed by, specifically, external developers is that we get to observe how developers outside of the Golem Factory Payments team handles the modularity of Yagna and adding payment drivers. This feedback will be important for us so we can get an outside perspective and improve on making Golem an even more flexible platform.

When?

The hackathon will start shortly after the official mainnet release of Golem (implementation name, Yagna). This release is in the process of Testing in Production so it’s not long to go. For more details, check out the Golem Alpha IV release coverage. As for the second hackathon mentioned, there is no date set yet.

Anything else?

YES! Glad you read that question.

We’re also engaged in discussions with another Polygon partner in seeing how we can further improve onboarding and fees with the Golem platform+payment driver (e.g. meta-transactions and gasless transactions).

Around the same time as the first hackathon, we are also going to be announcing a meetup/talk in collaboration with Polygon and other key projects in the Web3 space. The date and projects are in the process of being organized and no date is set in stone yet. So be on the lookout!

If you’re interested in learning more about that topic then it will be a great opportunity to join the future meetup mentioned above.

About Polygon (Formerly Matic)

Polygon is the first well-structured, easy-to-use platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development. Its core component is Polygon SDK, a modular, flexible framework that supports building and connecting Secured Chains like Plasma, Optimistic Rollups, zkRollups, Validium etc and Standalone Chains like Matic POS, designed for flexibility and independence. Polygon’s Layer 2 Chains have seen widespread adoption with 90+ Dapps, ~7M txns and ~200K unique users.

If you're an Ethereum Developer, you're already a Polygon developer! Leverage Polygon’s fast and secure txns for your Dapp, get started here.
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