From its inception as a multi-chain scaling solution for Ethereum, Polygon, formerly known as Matic, has seen a surge of interest in the last few months, and is now one of the top smart contract blockchain ecosystems. Many projects have taken advantage of Polygon’s fast transaction speeds and very low fees by migrating their dApps over to the Polygon Network.
Polygon is a “Layer-2” scaling solution with the aim to bring mass adoption to the Ethereum Network, which has been plagued by high gas fees and congestion. It achieves that by providing tools to developers to create scalable decentralized applications (dApps), and linking EVM Ethereum-compatible blockchains with each other. Sharing many similarities with both Ethereum and the Binance Smart Chain, it’s no surprise that some of the biggest names in the business have recently started offering the Polygon Network option to their users.
How’s the Ecosystem?
Polygon does already have a complete ecosystem, and even though the number of their offerings are not yet on par with that of Ethereum or Binance Smart Chain, it’s growing extremely fast. One of the key areas of growth for any DeFi ecosystem is a good decentralized exchange, and Polygon has no shortage of those. Quickswap, SushiSwap, ApeSwap, JetSwap and as of recently PolyCrystal are all providing users with the swaps and liquidity mining they need, covering all new tokens within the burgeoning ecosystem.
Covering the entire spectrum, Quickswap is the more Polygon native oriented option, SushiSwap includes many pairs found on Ethereum and ApeSwap and JetSwap brings out the more BSC centric tokens to the table, covering all the bases in just a handful of dApps.
Yield Farming is also thriving on the Polygon Blockchain, and notable players include Polycat Finance with its vast farming options, Swamp Finance expanded on its BSC offering by launching on Polygon, SushiSwap, Apeswap, Jetswap, PolyCrystal and many more. Some of the APR’s being offered on the Polygon Network are truly really extraordinary and has continuously brought more and more investors to the platform. Many vaults and farms on Polygon have an automatic staking option as well, and therefore can offer larger APY’s due to the auto-compounding effect. Most farms do also offer a lot of Ethereum tokens such as ETH, LINK or even SNX. All available to farm without the crippling gas fees and scalability issues that often plague the Ethereum Network.
The Polygon Network ecosystem also includes some dApps with massive userbases, such as Aave, Celsius or 1inch and each day more and more large-scale players branch over to offer their services to their users that want to utilize the Polygon Network. At this point just about every category is well represented, from Memecoins such as Polydoge, with its aim to be the Dogecoin of the purple themed Polygon Network, to even projects focused on NFT’s.
Are NFT’s on Polygon?
As NFT are exploding in popularity, it’s only natural that they would choose to come over to Polygon as it offers fast transaction speeds and lower gas fees. As a result, fan favorites The Sandbox and Decentraland are available via Polygon Network, offering their world to anyone who wants to explore them. Also Opensea, the world’s first & largest NFT marketplace can now trade assets and NFTs on the Polygon blockchain, opening the entire NFT meta verse to Polygon Network users. Exciting times are ahead for NFT enthusiasts on the Polygon network as the blockchain has announced unprecedented development in this field in the next quarters.
One very intriguing project that recently emerged, and mentioned earlier, is PolyCrystal. PolyCrystal is a decentralized yield farm that runs on Polygon and uses the ApeSwap Polygon Exchange. PolyCrystal is an official partner of ApeSwap and benefits from the legendary ApeSwap reputation, and liquidity, offering investors one of the best options for yield farming on Polygon Network. PolyCrystal offers a plethora of LP farming options from stable-coins like USDC to memecoins like Polydoge and everything in-between, as well as their Pools, where they have a staggering 24 pools to stake CRYSTL and earn partner tokens. Users can stake CRYSTL and earn popular tokens such as BNB, ETH, USDT, and more at over 400% APR!
What I really love about PolyCrystal is their Gems pools, which allow users to earn CRYSTL from staking single assets such as USDT, ETH, MATIC and BANANA, while circumventing any impermanent loss risk from needing to creating liquidity pairs. As they continued to innovate, they discovered a glaring need for new Polygon Network users, the initial MATIC needed to pay for gas, when migrating over to the Polygon Network. To help that issue, the team created a MATIC faucet, that gives users free MATIC, enough to make around 100 transactions, by simply going here. The faucet helps assuage any fear or anxiety one may have when using a blockchain for the first time.
This was a brief overview of the entire Polygon Network ecosystem and we’d encourage users and potential investors to do their own research and dig deeper into this incredibly innovative and exciting blockchain and its plentiful and ever-growing network of dApps.