On Tuesday (November 9), $MATIC, the governance token of Polygon, may not be setting new all-time highs, but it is still up over 10,504% so far in 2021, and more importantly, Polygon continues to impress with the rate at which it is gaining adoption among high-profile projects.
What is Polygon?
On May 18, Anthony Sassano, who joined Polygon as an advisor earlier this year, took to Twitter to clear up some of the confusion around Polygon (e.g. some people refer to Polygon as a sidechain to Ethereum, while others call it an L2 blockchain). Below are a few highlights from that Twitter thread:
- “There is the Matic Plasma Chain and the Polygon PoS chain. The vast majority of the activity is happening on the PoS chain.“
- “The PoS chain is what people refer to as a ‘sidechain’ to Ethereum because it has its own permissionless validator set (100+ who are staking MATIC) which means it doesn’t use Ethereum’s security (aka Ethereum’s PoW).“
- “The PoS chain goes beyond a standard sidechain and actually relies on and commits itself to Ethereum (what some people may call a ‘commit-chain’). It relies on Ethereum because all of the validator/staking logic for the PoS chain lives as a smart contract on Ethereum.“
- “This means that if the Ethereum network went offline, the Polygon PoS chain would also go offline. Secondly, the PoS chain actually commits/checkpoints itself to Ethereum every so often.“
- “This has 2 benefits: it provides Ethereum-based finality to the PoS chain & it can help the chain recover in case of catastrophic event. This also means that Polygon is paying Ethereum to use its blockspace (in ETH) & paying for it to secure the contracts & checkpointing.“
Furthermore, Sassano took this opportunity to talk about the two bridges that exist between Ethereum and Polygon:
- “There are 2 bridges – the Plasma bridge which is secured by Ethereum and the PoS bridge which is secured/operated by the PoS chain validator set.“
- “Of course, for the PoS bridge, 2/3 of the validators could theoretically collude and try to steal the bridge funds but there’s $3.4 billion at stake so this is risky. If this attack did happen, the checkpointing & social coordination could be the only recourse.“
He also commented on multi-sigs for Polygons contracts:
- “The multi-sigs exist to allow the contract to be upgraded in case of a bug/exploit which is a practice used by many existing projects (especially those within DeFi).“
- “However, Polygon’s multi-sigs are 5 of 8 which is definitely not ideal and not decentralized and the plan is to greatly improve this in the near future.“
Finally, he said that Polygon is “committed to building & deploying L2 solutions like rollups in the future” and this is what he is “most excited about.”
Examples of Projects Powered by Polygon
Examples of popular decentralized applications (DApps) that have built on Polygon include Ave ($AAVE), Decentraland ($LAND), and SushiSwap ($SUSHI).
However, perhaps, one of the best recent examples of real world usage of Polygon is Enegra Group Ltd (“Enegra”), an international mineral commodities trading business based in Malaysia — with approximately $28 billion in net asset value (NAV) — which announced last Friday (November 5) that it had moved its equity-tied EGX security tokens from Ethereum to Polygon with the help of Tokeny Solutions.
Tokeny’s T-REX platform is “a user friendly solution that allows asset owners to digitally and compliantly issue, allocate and manage security tokens, whilst providing an improved and highly transferable service for their investors.”
Energa’s press release went on to say that this migration “enables faster end-to-end transfers of EGX security tokens with near-zero transaction fees on Polygon and puts EGX tokens on a pathway to attract global top 20 token market cap status.”
Energa, which “tokenized 100% of its equity and issued EGX equity-backed digital security tokens via Tokeny’s T-REX Platform” in September 2019, made the decision to move from Ethereum to Polygon in order to “address Ethereum’s mounting gas fees and slow transaction speed and improve liquidity for EGX token holders.”
Since the EGX tokens had been issued via the T-REX security token standard, which is now recognized as ERC-3643 by the Ethereum community, “the migration to Polygon from Ethereum was seamlessly managed over a few days, and investors were able to retain the same wallet address for holding their EGX tokens.” After the migration took place, “investors were able to interact immediately with their tokens on Polygon via the same platform but without prohibitive gas fees.”
Matthew Averay, Managing Director and CEO at Enegra, had this to say:
“We tokenized our equity to improve liquidity. And, now that the technology is available for faster, cheaper, and compliant transactions on the blockchain, we wanted our investors to take advantage of it. Polygon and Tokeny provided the complete infrastructure we needed to do so, and we are extremely pleased with the results.“
And Sandeep Nailwal, Co-Founder and COO at Polygon, commented:
“The tokenization of real-world assets and financial securities is probably the next big wave in DeFi, and we are excited to see our partner, Tokeny, bring qualitative and compliant assets to the Polygon network. By leveraging our infrastructure with the right software provider, such as Tokeny, businesses can quickly deploy or convert their assets to Polygon.“
Also, as Polygon Co-Founder Mihailo Bjelic pointed out on November 4, it is interesting that so many metaverse projects, such as Bloktopia and The Sandbox, are powered by Polygon:
$MATIC’s Price Action
According to data by TradingView, currently (as of 11:20 UTC on November 9), on crypto exchange FTX, $MATIC is trading around $1.8664, which is roughly 23% below the all-time high price of $2.4450, which was reached on May 18.
However, there are quite a few crypto analysts who remain very bullish on $MATIC and feel that it is still undervalued despite its highly impressive performance in 2021. One of those people is pseudonymous crypto analyst and influencer “Coin Bureau” (“@coinbureau” on Twitter), who talked about $MATIC (one of the few cryptoassets that he regrets “not buying sooner”) in a YouTube video released on August 10, where he said that with “mass adoption”, the price of this cryptoasset has a “realistic” chance of hitting $5 by the end of this year.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=UK3PAEAfIfE%3Ffeature%3Doembed
Another popular crypto analyst who has a $5 price target for $MATIC is Lark Davis, who said in a YouTube video released on September 29 that he expected the $MATIC price to get to this level and that he won’t be selling sell any of his $MATIC holdings any earlier than that.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=TT7Y0Bu5zkY%3Ffeature%3Doembed
Also, it is worth mentioning that some crypto analysts and influencers are hinting that $MATIC’s “supply shock” could help to drive its price higher:
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.
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