The following post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga.
The Ethereum Layer 2 scaling narrative is as popular as ever, and Polygon has been a project that has received the most notoriety from this. Luckily, investors now have the ability to invest in Polygon (MATIC) directly from their Crypto IRA / 401k with iTrustCapital.
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What is Polygon (MATIC)?
Launched in 2019, Polygon (previous Matic) is an Ethereum scaling solution. It is a hybrid between an actual Layer 2 and a side-chain. It assists in scaling Ethereum by taking processing off the mainnet, allowing transactions at a fraction of the cost and with rapid settlement times. It offers full EVM compatibility, Proof of Stake validation setup and pays fees directly to Ethereum miners.
The Ethereum blockchain is the most in-demand and therefore the most expensive in the world to use. This has caused the world’s largest smart contract platform to face scalability issues. High fees and processing times has caused many average users to be priced out of using Ethereum entirely. Polygon helps with that and has quickly become the primary Ethereum scaling solution.
The Polygon rebrand from Matic was done to bring the “Internet of Blockchains'' idea to life. It wanted to build a Polkadot type system directly on Ethereum, by allowing different blockchains to freely exchange value and collaborate with each other.
This has made Polygon a type of aggregator of Ethereum scalability solutions. The rebrand was successful and the new Polygon protocol soon onboarded many high-level projects and has made the activity on the Polygon network take off.
What projects are building on Polygon?
Polygon has seen a high influx of projects lately, many deploying a copy of their original project that currently lives on Ethereum and even some novel new projects only available on Polygon itself. At the height of activity, it was onboarding one or more projects each day and that number hasn’t changed much. The total number of projects is now more than 250.
Projects setting themselves up on Polygon include Yearn Finance, Aave, SushiSwap, Curve, Augur, QuickSwap and Kleros. These are projects that exist on Ethereum and have now deployed a low-cost version on Polygon.
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The on-chain metrics show a similar picture, the activity on the Polygon network has grown rapidly. The latest data as of June 2021 show that Polygon has more than 6 million transactions each and every day.
This is easily explained by the fact that since transactions are low cost, people can participate more on the Polygon network even when they only have a few dollars to use within the protocol ecosystem.
What will Polygon do in the future?
Polygon’s future is bright, as the leading Ethereum scaling solution it doesn’t intend to limit itself to the Plasma POS scalability method currently in use. It aims to include other proprietary Ethereum scaling solutions such as ZkRollups. Optimistic Rollups, Validium and it’s own research candidates. This will fulfill Polygon’s goal of becoming the “Polkadot on Ethereum”. Offering a variety of solutions, all connected through a single Polygon SDK, allowing developers seamless integrations without rewriting the code for each solution.
What is Polygon (MATIC) the token?
Polygon native token is called MATIC. It’s used for staking delegations, POS rewards and paying for transaction fees on the network. It has a 10 billion total supply, out of which 6.3 billion tokens are in circulation. The remaining tokens are used to reward users for staking their tokens and contributing to the functioning/security of the network.
MATIC tokens have seen rapid appreciation in price since the beginning of 2021 and especially after the Polygon rebrand. MATIC has been a vital component of Polygon DeFi yield farms, where It’s offered as a reward to users who engage with polygon-based decentralized applications.
Tax-Free Polygon (MATIC)
If you want to learn how you can potentially invest and trade Polygon (MATIC) tax-free, head to www.iTrustCapital.com
The preceding post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga. Although the piece is not and should not be construed as editorial content, the sponsored content team works to ensure that any and all information contained within is true and accurate to the best of their knowledge and research. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice.