Underrated cryptocurrency : The hunt
Polygon’s live price today is $1.68 USD with a 24-hour trading volume of $1,905,230,453 USD. . The current MarketCap ranking is #19, with a live market cap of $11Billion USD. It has a circulating supply of 6B MATIC coins and a max. supply of 10,000,000,000 MATIC coins.
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Unlike Sol, Luna, ADA, or Avalanche, Polygon is primarily a proof-of-stake sidechain that complements Ethereum. It is important to note that being bullish on Polygon is being bullish on Ethereum. There are a number of DeFi Web3 Daps on Polygon . They include Ethereum Aave, balancer, curve, beefy finance, harvest finance, open sea, and Sushiswap, as well as a Uniswap v2 fork called Quickswap. Find out more by clicking the link below.
https://defillama.com/chain/Polygon
As Polygon has been buying zk rollups (zero knowledge rollups) they have also budgeted 1 billion dollars towards transforming the system into a zk rollup once battle tests have been completed and it is ready to go .
Why MATIC is one of the most underrated cryptocurrency?
Polygon side chains are ready for prime time today. Over a thousand projects have been uploaded to it.
https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/polygon-ecosystem
Additionally, it has approximately 350k daily active addresses, compared to Ethereum’s 550k per day. In other words, Polygon (Matic) has 64% of the users as the second biggest crypto currency but only 2% of the market capitalization.
https://polygonscan.com/chart/active-address
https://etherscan.io/chart/active-address
You need Matic for gas in order to do anything on Polygon .
Now that I’ve established that using Polygon is basically the same as using Ethereum, why would you choose Polygon (Matic) over Ethereum? Polygon (Matic) is cheaper and faster than Ethereum. How cheap is this? Below are the fees as of today.
The following are estimated gas fees from MetaMask.
Swap = 0.01063758 Matic x 1.91 per Matic = $.02
Add Liquidity= 0.01063758 Matic x 1.91 per Matic = $.03
How fast is Polygon Matic?
What makes me think that Polygon will be chosen over other cheap & fast blockchains like ADA, Luna, BNB, SOL, for the next wave of defi?
Honestly, I could write an entire post just on that, but I think it boils down to at least one of these three reasons for each coin.
The system is not decentralized.
As of today, the project is not functional.
Ethereum is its main competitor. It is difficult to build a userbase.
What makes Polygon better than Optimism or Arbitrum? They are layer 2, which is pretty much the same as Ethereum. I would use these projects if there is an airdrop since they do not have a token yet. I like both of these projects. I believe they will be successful as well and I believe they will have several solutions to the high gas problems. Here is why.
Battle tests have not been conducted on Layer 2. It is not yet ready for prime time. Polygon sidechain is ready to go today and has 64% of the active daily addresses as the second largest crypto currency.
Layer 2 rollups are cheaper because they combine many transactions into one. Layer 2 rollups come in two varieties. Zero knowledge rollups and optimistic rollups. One is better than the other. There is a fundamental difference between optimistic and zero knowledge rollups in that optimistic rollups require trust that everything has been done correctly.
It has been budgeted 1 billion dollars to turn Polygon into a zk rollup once its been battle tested and is ready for prime time, so they will probably be the first company to do it on such a large scale. More information can be found here.
https://blog.coinbase.com/scaling-ethereum-crypto-for-a-billion-users-715ce15afc0b
Polygon has thousands of projects on its ecosystem, whereas we only have a few.
On CoinGecko
https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/polygon-ecosystem
https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/arbitrum-ecosystem
I couldn’t even find a page dedicated to optimism’s ecosystem.
On Defilama
https://defillama.com/chain/Polygon
https://defillama.com/chain/Arbitrum
https://defillama.com/chain/Optimism
The TLV of Polygon is $4.93B, Optimism is $469M, and Arbitrum is $2.71B.
I think Polygon is highly underrated and will be the platform of choice during the next big defi wave.
Here’s how to get started with Polygon (Matic) sidechain.
The following is a simple guide assuming you already know how to use the Ethereum blockchain and have a Metamask wallet. It is intended to help you avoid some of the common pitfalls I see people run into.
Crypto.com is the easiest & cheapest way to do this. Recent additions include the ability to bridge to Polygon ( for free or very little. Here’s how you can do it with Metamask.
1. Buy Matic – Your going to need Matic for gas, so I recommend converting all the funds you want to transfer over to Matic once on it, since it will cost you $250 to bridge over to Polygon so you only want to do it once.
2. Send it MetaMask.
3. Go to https://wallet.polygon.technology/bridge/ and send $250 in Ethereum to layer 2 (pay layer 1 fees)
4. Select your token and click transfer.
5. Switch to the polygon network using the dropdown menu at the top of MetaMask.
