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Bankless: Polygon may become the leader of the next wave of cryptocurrency bull market.

Bankless

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Polygon 2.0 is emerging as a new star in the cryptocurrency market.

The original title: "Polygon's 2023 Rebirth"

The original author: William M. Peaster

The original translation: Luccy, BlockBeats

Editor's note:

In recent times, NFTs have been one of the hottest topics. Yesterday, the NFT craze also spread to Polygon. On November 16th, the gas fee on the Polygon network surged to over 1800 gwei.

Behind the congestion of gas fees is the fact that a community discovered that the 21 million PRC-20 POLS tokens (formerly known as Matic and referred to as the "Horseshoe Chain" by the community) deployed in May had been minted overnight. According to Dune data, over 100 million Matic tokens were spent on minting 21 million POLS tokens. The contract address with the highest minting volume currently holds 2.2287 million tokens, accounting for about 10% of the total supply.

Related reading: "The NFT craze has spread to Polygon, have you participated in the one-click minting?"

This article delves into the rise and future plans of Polygon (MATIC) in the current cryptocurrency market. With the launch of Polygon 2.0 and its Layer 2 solution, the project has attracted widespread attention and support.

Bankless senior writer William details Polygon's technical progress, including zkEVM and zkEVM Validium, and discusses its positive impact on the Ethereum ecosystem. He also states that Polygon's improved economic model and the release of development tools demonstrate the project's ambition to achieve low-cost, high-throughput transactions and sustainable growth of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Rumors are increasing that a new bull market has begun. As a result, many people are reviewing their cryptocurrency investment portfolios and asking themselves:

What should I hold at the beginning of this cycle?

What should I sell?

What should I increase my holdings in?

There is no simple answer to these questions! The interest of institutional investment funds has driven a large amount of capital into Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, there are also many savvy traders chasing after some highly anticipated small tokens, supporting ecosystems like Solana and Celestia, which have been experiencing rapid growth in recent weeks.

One of the investment narratives that I have been closely following is Polygon. This ecosystem has made significant progress in 2023 and has successfully reshaped itself into a cutting-edge network.

zkEVMs, zero-knowledge Rollups compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, are expected to become a top solution in the Ethereum ecosystem. Polygon became one of the pioneers in this field after launching the Polygon zkEVM mainnet test version in March 2023.

Due to the savvy business development team, this project has achieved outstanding success in partner relationships over the long term, and is beginning to attract larger partners to join its impressive technology stack, including Web3 gaming chain Immutable, which is launching an Immutable zkEVM supported by Polygon.

In June 2023, everything continued to develop as Polygon announced its new Polygon 2.0 vision, which is a broad network of Layer 2 (L2) Rollups driven by many zk technologies, making it feel like using a single chain.

Shortly after announcing Polygon 2.0, the Polygon team also revealed their official plan to move their original Polygon PoS chain to the final Validium form. This migration will officially launch the Polygon 2.0 vision, creating a chain that is completely different from the aforementioned Polygon zkEVM, with extremely cheap, sub-penny transaction fees and high potential for throughput.

So, what is Polygon's grand plan? Its plan is to use the combination of Polygon zkEVM and Polygon zkEVM Validium as the foundation of a new L2 super network, all of which is aimed at achieving extremely low fees and very fast transactions to bring Ethereum transactions to the masses.

In order to fulfill the mission of creating a super network, the Polygon team proposed an improvement plan for the MATIC token economy model in July 2023.

This evolution will transition MATIC to a new POL token aimed at enhancing the growth of Polygon's future infrastructure and ecosystem. This will be a significant shift aimed at catalyzing and ensuring the various chains within Polygon 2.0 in the coming years.

除了这些发展之外，Polygon 还通过新的开发工具进行自我改进，帮助项目拥抱 Polygon 正在推动的 zk 未来。在 2023 年 8 月，该项目通过发布 Polygon Chain Development Kit（CDK）进一步引起轰动，这是一个用于通过 Polygon 实现安全性和统一流动性的构建可定制的 ZK 驱动 L2 的软件工具集。

Apart from these developments, Polygon has also been improving itself through new development tools to embrace the zk future that Polygon is driving. In August 2023, the project caused further sensation by releasing the Polygon Chain Development Kit (CDK), a software toolkit for building customizable ZK-driven L2s with security and unified liquidity through Polygon.

Polygon CDK is rapidly developing, with over ten cryptocurrency projects adopting this toolkit to create their own L2 solutions, including Aavegotchi, Canto, Dogecoin, Gnosis Pay, and Manta Network.

However, it's not just the project exploring Polygon CDK. In terms of cryptocurrency exchanges, it has been reported that Kraken is considering adopting Polygon's technology, and OKX has just announced that it will be leaping with its X1 L2. At this rate, it looks like more big companies may soon join in.

Combining all of these positioning and ongoing innovation progress, such as the zkWasm chain, one can only think that Polygon is an undeniable force. As they elevate their ambitions and enhance the content developers can build, they are becoming an increasingly important part of the crypto economy.

For the growth of MATIC, what all of this means is a separate story, but in the short term, the narrative of early bull market investors is clearly built on a weaker foundation than what Polygon currently possesses. I look forward to seeing what other plans they have.