Meet 6 Upcoming Supernets!

Polygon Labs

May 19, 2022

It’s been less than a month since Polygon unveiled Supernets, the plug-and-play approach to building blockchains from scratch, and the response from developers has been overwhelming. There are now about 30 teams already building with Supernets and more than 50 that have applied for the program.

Supernets is the fast-track for blockchain adoption in new private and public networks for dApps and enterprises alike. The product uses Polygon Edge, a modular framework for bootstrapping application-specific Ethereum-compatible networks. But why bother building a custom blockchain in the first place?

The answer in one word is customization. Some projects may want to experiment with innovative features or tailoring the network to a specific use case, while others simply need more control over network fees. Below are 6 examples of team building something special using Supernets.

SX Network

Ever since SX launched its SX.bet prediction market dApp on Ethereum in March 2018, it has been haunted by the specter of rising gas prices. In October 2020, as Ethereum network cost spiked, it became one of the first dApps to launch on Polygon. In March, the team behind the largest blockchain betting platform launched SX Network, making it the first Supernets chain to go live.

Building a prediction market on a general-purpose network like Ethereum or Polygon PoS runs into a number of problems, including fee sensitivity due to relatively low transaction sizes, the challenge of integrating traditional data feeds with blockchains where all transactions are irreversible, and latency issues.

SX Network is designed from the ground-up to have low transaction costs. It is compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine, which means it can run any code written for Ethereum or Polygon as is. There are now over 25 protocols and applications across the prediction market, DeFi, and NFT space deploying on SX.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLzczbTna3Y

Uttarakhand State Government

The local government in Uttarakhand, an Indian state in the foothills of Himalayas, was looking for a way to track medical equipment assets in seven of its medical colleges. The goal was to have accurate record keeping, improve usage and performance data collection, reduce overspending, and insure proper maintenance.

The solution was to deploy a network with the SettleMint platform which offers a full integration of Polygon Edge. The resulting system offered asset tracking through RFID, performance tracking to improve ROI, decrease downtime due to scheduled maintenance, and automation of supply and ordering process. It is being deployed at one of the colleges as a pilot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8vJ672VqGo

Zo World

Zo World is a decentralized travel ecosystem from Zostel, one of the biggest backpacking hostel chains in India. The team has already mapped over 10 million real world locations where users can complete quests, mint NFTs and earn the $DOPE token.

The team chose Supernets because it delivered on key specifications for its product: contracts and services that are designed with an open ecosystem in mind, gassless transactions, responsiveness with 2-second block time, minimum investment into devops and easier maintenance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yArsaAyRth8

Meta Apes

Meta Apes is a F2P, P2E MMO strategy mobile game set in a post-apocalyptic world ruled by apes. Building a Web3 game comes with a number of challenges that the team chose to tackle by using Supernets. This list includes the need to keep gas fees low to sustain high volume of transaction and P2P interactions, scalability and throughput to support real-time gaming experience, low latency and immediate transaction finality, and the ability to bridge to other chains.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY3JrMpB61Y

KNOWnet

The Know foundation is building the KNOWnet -- an infrastructure for the metaverse and a massive supercomputer decentralized with many thousands of nodes. Using Polygon Supernets has saved the team over a year of developing, allowing it to quickly boot up a sidechain. The project has already attracted enterprise metaverse company Touchcast as a commercial partner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvrZumrJ3wY

Arcana

Arcana is offering decentralized storage, identity, access and key management services to help developers build secure and privacy-preserving apps. App developers are increasingly under pressure from governments, companies and users to take privacy seriously, but current solutions often fall short. Supernets allow Arcana to address those issues while staying close to the Ethereum/Polygon ecosystem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqKvk2nqLcI

Development of Supernets began about two years ago in close collaboration with the Trapesys team. Polygon unveiled the product last month and announced plans to invest $500 million in projects interested in building on the Supernet chain.

Upcoming Supernets development efforts are focused on implementing a cross-chain bridge solution, which would allow custom blockchains to interact between each other. Another area of focus will be Proof of Stake, with new features and improvements such as governance and delegated staking underway. Additionally, the Polygon Supernets team is considering adding support for additional runtimes in the future, as the current EVM implementation is plug and play.

Presentations by the projects listed above at Polygon Ignite are available online. For more information regarding Polygon Supernets, dig into the documentation, check out the GitHub repository and join the Polygon Supernets Discord. Keep up with the latest on the Polygon ecosystem on our blog.

Let’s bring the world to Ethereum!