If you came across some of Shard Labs’ tweets or articles, you’ve probably heard the big news:

Now you can stake $MATIC in a decentralized, secure way and immediately get the representation of their share in the form of stMATIC token without maintaining staking infrastructure. 

Awesome, right? ? ? ?

LIDO is coming to #Polygon@shard_labs is bringing the Lido Liquid staking solution to Polygon. Users will be able to stake $MATIC & get stMATIC in return for use in other DeFi protocols. Polygon will bring blockchain infrastructure to the masses.

🌐: https://t.co/RXmyCCEoKg pic.twitter.com/VnPLbbdCEB

— Polygon (Labs) (@0xPolygonLabs) September 3, 2021

And for those who are not yet familiar with MATIC/stMATIC… Don’t worry my fren, we got you! 💪

Before you hop on to the staking wagon, read this article first.

🔗 First thing’s first: What is Polygon?

Formerly known as Matic Network, Polygon is a decentralized technology platform and framework. It works on top of Ethereum and enables blockchain networks to connect and scale. The platform uses $MATIC tokens to connect and grow Ethereum-compatible projects, while its proof-of-stake concensus mechanism requires users to stake their MATIC and get rewards for validating network transactions.

🤔 OK, but why is Polygon such a big deal?

Well, after the expansion of NFTs, the Ethereum blockchain became more popular, bringing in more traffic, which resulted in slow transaction processing and high transaction fees. And when you are a part of DeFi or NFT universe – these things are your 🤢kryptonite🤢.

💰 This is where Polygon jumps in, providing the solution and making transactions much faster and fees consistently low.

There is no need to get too technical here. Still, in short, Polygon is using a modified PoS (proof-of-stake) consensus mechanism that can complete the transaction confirmation process in a single block, thus making it faster and cheaper than regular PoS that requires many blocks.

Yeeeeey! 🥳 🥳 🥳

🤑 What is $MATIC?

$MATIC is Polygon’s native token, used to govern and secure the Polygon network and pay transaction fees.

🚦  There are a  maximum of 10 billion MATIC tokens, and most of them are already issued. The rest will be minted by stakers who will deposit their tokens into a smart contract in order to become validators.

Your rewards depend on the amount of $MATIC staked and the transactions in the network.

The next question is – how to stake $MATIC?

What is Lido Finance & Lido on Polygon?

Lido.fi is the largest liquid staking protocol on Ethereum, Terra, and Solana, and recently it expanded to Polygon.

📢 Shard Labs brought Lido on Polygon to enable users to stake Polygon’s MATIC in a decentralized and secure way and to use it on the secondary market —with a simple click of a button on the UI. This way, stakers are entering Lido’s system without spending significant amounts of capital for transactions on the Ethereum mainnet. 

🤔 What is stMATIC?

As the name suggests, stMATIC is staked MATIC that users get inside Lido on the Polygon system. It is an ERC-20 token representing the account’s share of the total supply of MATIC tokens.

🚦  stMATIC is a non-rebasable token, meaning the amount of tokens in the user’s wallet is not going to change. During the time, the value of this token is changing since the amount of MATIC tokens inside the protocol is not constant.

🤔 How does it work?

“The end-user process is quite simple. The user sends their MATIC tokens to the Matic-Lido contract on the mainnet and gets the same amount of stMATIC tokens representing MATIC staking position with Lido validators. What this means is that at the same time, holders can use their stMATIC tokens in other DeFi protocols, while they also earn a stake from staking their MATIC tokens.”

If you got this far, congrats! Good job! 👏 👏 👏

🔥 What can you do with your $MATIC? Stake it.

✅ Get stMATIC and avoid gas fees on Ethereum 👉👉👉 here / via QuickSwap 

✅ To provide liquidity and enjoy a high APR, head over 👉👉👉 here / via Quickswap

✅ Want stMATIC, but do not want to stake your MATIC? Swap directly with your mainnet MATIC 👉👉👉 here / via Balancer

✅ Stake MATIC super easy 👉👉👉 on imToken

✅ Lido’s stMATIC is now live on AaveAave 

🥩 So, what you’re waiting for? 🥩 

This article was originally published by Shard Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.