The Polygon MATIC Story
PUML Better Health’s next generation of native in-app NFTs will be built on top of the Polygon Blockchain. Here is a quick history of Polygon and its benefits and features.
The Founders
Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal and Anurag Arjun co-founded Polygon, a blockchain scalability platform in 2017. It was originally called Matic Network and it aimed to solve two problems: expensive transaction fees and slow transaction speeds on the Ethereum blockchain. Whilst Polygon is built using Ethereum technology, it allows developers to create applications using Polygon at a significantly cheaper price than Ethereum.
The Polygon founders developed the proof of concept in early 2017. They had set up the company by April 2018, had raised a small amount of funds from their friends and family, and started working on the product. They initially launched their ICO with Binance, where it raised $5 million dollars from investors. It was not an easy start as they were building the ecosystem in India at a time when the whole environment around cryptocurrency was unfavourable. Developers were afraid of potential legal hassles as they’re a technology company, but they don’t actually build applications on the chain themselves.
What is Polygon?
Polygon is a scaling solution that provides multiple tools to improve performance and reduce the costs and complexities of transactions on blockchains. At the heart of Polygon’s vision lies Ethereum, a platform that enables a wide variety of decentralized applications, from virtual worlds to games, art, and financial services. However, when there is too much transaction volume on its blockchain it becomes almost unusable, as transaction fees are astronomical when the chain becomes congested.
Enter Polygon. In a nutshell, Polygon bills itself as a layer-2 network, meaning it acts as an add-on layer to Ethereum that does not seek to change the original blockchain layer. Like its geometric namesake, Polygon has many sides, shapes, and uses and promises a simpler framework for building interconnected networks.
Polygon wants to help Ethereum expand in size, security, efficiency, and usefulness and seeks to spur developers to bring enticing products to market all the quicker. After the rebranding, Polygon retained its MATIC cryptocurrency, the digital coin underpinning the network. MATIC is used as the unit of payment and settlement between participants who interact within the network.
Polygon and the Environment
Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake
As cryptocurrencies have become increasingly popular as a financial instrument, their energy consumption has come under scrutiny from some environmentalists. There are more eco-friendly alternatives available such as the Polygons network. With proof of work consensus used by chains like Bitcoin, computers have to solve complex mathematical problems. You can’t mine Bitcoins using your laptop because they require very powerful computers and this is environmentally unfriendly because of the energy consumed. In proof of stake, which Polygon uses, you do not need massive computing power. You have to stake tokens which only require a fraction of the energy usage.
The environmental debate about distributed ledger technology is not going away as blockchain becomes increasingly popular. Investors are becoming more conscious of environmental issues regarding using blockchain applications. However, the projects providing greener alternatives such as polygon are helping pave the road for a more environmentally friendly blockchain future.
According to estimates, the largest Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchain networks can consume up to 1 terawatt hour (TWh) of energy annually, with a continuous draw ranging from 3–15 gigawatts (GW). If Bitcoin was a country, it would be ranked higher than many nation states for their annual energy consumption per capita. Compared to the validation nodes used by most Proof of Work (PoW) blockchain networks, the validation nodes used by the Polygon Network consume far less energy.
Security Risks
In proof of work, if someone wants to take over the network, they need to have more than 51% mining power, although this is not decisive. The other 49% can reject the false blocks and fork into a new chain. In proof of stake, you need to have an even higher 66% mining power this would be currently worth around $1.8 billion tokens for Polygon. Even here the community will reject the false blocks and the person attempting the takeover will risk the worth of his or her tokens they will lose value in such a scenario. These in-built safeguards are essentially socio-economic incentives that manage decentralized networks.
Polygon Goes Green
The Polygon Network has unveiled its Green Manifestos which aims to invest $20 million into helping fund climate change initiatives and creating an industry-wide movement towards sustainable business practices.
Polygon’s promise of sustainability comes before Ethereum’s planned switch from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, which will reduce the carbon emissions of Ethereum by nearly 99 percent.
“Through our sustainability commitment and community-driven efforts, we can successfully address societal shifts, avoid the worst impacts of climate change, and meet the sustainable development goals set out by the United Nations,” Founder Nailwal has said.
Polygon has also invested in cutting-edge zero knowledge (ZK) technology, which is believed to be crucial for onboarding the next billion users to the web 3.0 world. The recent adoption of MATIC tokens by the Green Transition project seems to be fuelling bullish sentiments among crypto investors.
Polygon NFTs
Lower Gas Fees
Every time a transaction occurs on a blockchain network, there is an associated fee. Once the money has been transferred from the sender to the recipient, the miner validates the transaction by using his computer system to verify that the transfer was legitimate. So far, the highest gas fee that a user has spent on all transactions within Polygon’s network is 9.50 MATIC, which at that point was equivalent to about US$16.
The standard gas fee for Polygon is extremely low, costing less than $0.01 per transaction (US). On the other hand, ethereum has a fixed gas fee that usually starts out at $25, but that price goes up and down depending on the network congestion level.
Faster Transaction Finality
Transaction finality refers to when a transaction becomes irreversible. Ethereum already has an impressive finality speed that can complete 6 transactions in 1 minute, but Polygon, which is a layer two protocol designed to avoid network congestion, can achieve a transaction finality of 2 seconds per transaction.
Volume of Projects
There are between 15,000 and 50,000 NFT items being sold each week. As more and more popular NFTs are being built on Polygons, we’re seeing an increase in their popularity. There are over a million users now using Polygon to trade NFTs, so there are several projects that have emerged as clear favorites in the space. These include The Martians, Zed Run, and ChainGuardians.
MoonPay
User experience (UX) is critical for NFTs’ adoption. MoonPay has Polygon integration which offers buyers significantly less friction when going from fiat to NFT custody. At first, when NFTs were built on top of Ethereum through the Polygon Network, users still had to purchase ETH on the Ethereum level one blockchain and then transfer their tokens to the Polygon Network. It was a good first step because it limited paying gas fees for each individual NFT transaction to just the initial transaction rather than every single one.
Users can now create accounts with MoonPay and purchase Ethereum on the Polygon Network without having to pay the transaction fees to bridge the ETH across. This is an extremely important step because it allows users who don’t know anything about blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies to purchase NFTs without having to learn everything first. They just need to use their credit cards. Some projects don’t need any ETH to purchase NFTs. Some will take stablecoin USDC instead. MoonPay will let you buy USDC on four different exchanges.
The Future of Polygon
Several projects like Aave and Curve have been launched on Polygons, and metaverse platforms like Decentraland chose it as their dedicated scalability solution. Decentralized exchange platforms like UniSwap and Sushi Swap have also launched Polygon, allowing people to trade their coins directly from their wallets.
Earlier this year, Polygon CEO Ryan Watt announced that they are partnering with Meta to create a nonfungible token (NFT) platform for Facebook and Instagram. Facebook has been testing a digital collectible NFT platform for artists and art lovers to show off their creations on social media. Similar features will be coming to Instagram soon. Disney also announced a recent partnership with Polygon whereby Polygon will be a part of their accelerator program which focuses on developing immersive experiences for the future and specializes in technologies including augmented reality (AR), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The hype surrounding MATIC could help it establish a strong price floor.
Many different factors influence the future of the cryptocurrency market, including the overall economic climate, the level of adoption, and the acceptance of cryptocurrencies by people. It’s estimated that Polygon, with its increased adoption and development, could be a very bright future for both the short and the long terms. As its involvement in numerous dApp and DeFi projects makes Polygon future-proof, it has enormous potential for steady growth as cryptocurrencies become more inclusive and extensive.
About PUML Better Health
PUML Better Health is one of the original Web3, Move-to-Earn, Fitness and Wellness company from Gold Coast, Australia. PUML specialises in the Move-To-Earn industry, where users can get rewarded with their cryptocurrency token $PUMLx on the Ethereum blockchain for completing health challenges such as steps and meditation. PUML successfully launched Move-to-Earn for Corporates in 2021 by signing with major corporations such as Singapore and Malaysia’s Western Union, Deloitte, LVMH and many more, generating substantial revenue and growth.
Visit PUML at https://pumlx.com/ or https://twitter.com/pumlhealthio
