Polygon makes Ethereum faster. COTI makes it private. Both are shaping what’s next.

Ethereum’s scaling problem has been headline material for years. Gas fees, slow transactions, network congestion, solutions like Polygon have stepped up to ease the pain. But as Ethereum expands, a new gap has emerged: privacy.

It’s not enough to make Ethereum faster. For Web3 to become truly useful for real businesses, real-world assets, and confidential apps, privacy has to be part of the architecture. And that’s where COTI enters the picture with a fundamentally different mission.

Let’s break it down.

Polygon: Ethereum’s Go-To Scaling Stack

Polygon is Ethereum’s speed engine. By creating Layer 2 chains like Polygon PoS and zkEVM, it gives users cheaper, faster transactions, perfect for NFT platforms, DeFi, and gaming. Polygon has even launched Polygon CDK, a modular kit for projects to spin up their own zk-powered chains. Big brands like Nike, Reddit, and Stripe have already built or integrated on Polygon.

Polygon’s approach works: Make Ethereum faster and cheaper without changing its foundation. But there’s something Polygon doesn’t focus on and that’s data privacy.

In Web3, not all transactions should be public forever.

COTI: The Privacy Layer Ethereum Has Been Missing

That’s where COTI V2 comes in. Unlike scaling solutions like Polygon, COTI is about making computation itself private.

Using Garbled Circuits, COTI enables encrypted smart contracts that keep inputs, logic, and outputs hidden, not just from the public, but even from node operators. This means:

• No front-running
• No MEV attacks
• No exposing private financial or business data
• Full selective disclosure for compliance when needed

And it’s not just theory. In benchmark tests, this tech has shown operations up to 3,000 times faster than typical ZK-based privacy solutions, using 250x fewer resources. That’s not a small step, it’s an entirely different category.

As Shahaf Bar-Geffen, CEO of COTI, put it:

And it’s not about hiding everything forever, either. COTI’s architecture enables selective disclosure, meaning users can choose what to share and when. That’s good for privacy and also it’s good for regulatory compliance.

What They Solve and What They Don’t

Here’s the real point: Polygon solves scalability. COTI solves privacy.

They don’t compete. They complement each other. Polygon is perfect for things like fast NFT drops, low-fee token swaps, and scaling existing apps. COTI, on the other hand, is built for use cases where privacy matters, encrypted DeFi strategies, private AI agents, sensitive business contracts, and on-chain applications where the data itself is valuable.

As Ethereum matures, both of these are required for a complete developer stack.

Final Thoughts: Not a Competition, A Completion

Ethereum becoming an ecosystem of specialized parts. Polygon gives Ethereum the speed it needs to compete with the rest of the internet. COTI brings the privacy it needs to grow into something bigger than speculation, something useful, serious, and built for the real world.

As more projects start building serious applications for finance, healthcare, identity, and AI, they’ll need both. It’s Web3 filling in the missing pieces so builders don’t have to choose between scale and security.