Last week, while reviewing cryptocurrencies on Coingecko, the title 'Categories' caught my attention. While browsing the categories, I noticed that 165 cryptocurrencies were included in the Polygon ecosystem. With this number of cryptocurrencies, Polygon has even surpassed the Binance ecosystem, which has recently become extremely popular in the DeFi space. Polygon was ranked 16th among all cryptocurrencies at the time, and its value has increased approx 70 times in a year.
I follow the Defi space on https://debank.com/. As a wallet application, DeBank displays investments in various DeFi applications and publishes up-to-date DeFi statistics. The DeFi world, as we all know, developed on the Ethereum network. Then the Binance Smart Network came into play, and thanks to its low transaction costs, it was able to take a big piece of the pie. In addition to the Ethereum and Binance smart network, DeBank also publishes statistics on DeFi applications operating on networks such as Polygon, xDai, Fantom. Therefore, it is a resource that can be used to get to know the Polygon ecosystem. To come alive in your mind, I've included a screenshot below.
When I examined the statistics, I saw that the applications operating on the Ethereum network such as Aave, Sushiswap, Curve were also included in Polygon. QuickSwap, the primary swap application of the Polygon network, was in third place among all DeFi applications in terms of daily user count. All this information increased my curiosity even more.
During my review on https://polygon.technology/, I came across another surprising piece of information. The https://awesomepolygon.com/ menu listed over 600 blockchain projects using the Polygon network. It turns out that Polygon (formerly Matic), which has positioned itself as the internet of Ethereum blockchains, was almost in a position to rival Ethereum in prevalence.
So what is Polygon? According to the statements on the Coinmarketcap site:
"Polygon (formerly Matic Network) is a structured, easy-to-use platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development. Its core component is the Polygon SDK, a modular, flexible framework that supports building multiple types of applications.
Polygon (formerly Matic Network) is a Tier 2 scaling solution listed by Binance and Coinbase. The project serves to the mass adaption of the crypto world by solving scalability problems on many blockchains.
Polygon combines Ethereum's Plasma framework and proof-of-stake blockchain architecture."
After all the research, it was time to take action. Matic, Polygon's cryptocurrency, can be staked. For this purpose, I bought Matic from Binance and tried to send it to the Polygon network. Besides investing, I intended to experience how transactions happen on the Polygon network. However, it is not possible to send Matic directly to the Polygon network via Binance. The transfer had to be done over the Ethereum network. Due to the high transaction costs on Ethereum, I gave up using the Polygon network. I decided to buy Matic on the Binance Smart Network using my Metamask wallet. I bought Matic from https://apeswap.finance/ and added it to the Matic-USDT liquidity pool on https://app.wault.finance/. So I wanted to take advantage of a Matic price increase and the nearly 100% annual return on investment the pool provides.
The next day I discovered a way to transfer money to Polygon without using the Ethereum network. Although there are several alternative methods of transferring funds from the Binance Smart Network to the Polygon Network, I used the bridge from Evodefi. Excitement was at its peak, and I was finally able to experience the Polygon network.
The other alternative is using https://www.xpollinate.io/ bridge. The transfer is realized using currencies such as USDC and USDT.
The user experience I had on the Polygon network was similar to the experience on the Binance Smart Network, with transactions completed in a few seconds. It was nice that the transaction fees were even under 1 cent. In the image below, the costs of transaction types are compared with the Ethereum network. Polygon transactions are very cheap even compared to Binance Smart Network.
Source: https://defi-lab.xyz/polygon
The following statistics on the Polygon network show that the wind of Polygon is still blowing strong.
Source: https://defi-lab.xyz/polygon
I continue to follow Polygon closely because I believe in its potential. At this stage of the article, I would like to state that this article does not contain investment advice.
Let's see what the future will bring to Polygon(Matic) investors. Thanks for reading.
Cover Image Source: https://polygon.technology/