Polygon (MATIC) Appreciation Post

I'm making this post because I think as of late with all the Loopring hype a lot of people really seem to be discounting other L2 solutions for Ethereum. Not to say Loopring is a bad project and it has plenty of bullish momentum with its possible partnership with Gamestop, but the purpose of this post is to talk about Polygon specifically.

Polygon (with native token MATIC) has been well ahead of the game for a long time now as a side chain for Ethereum, with multiple scaling solutions offered for Ethereum. It has allocated $1 billion of its treasury to Zero-Knowledge Technology which will play a massive role in Ethereum scaling. In the past three months, it recently joined with/acquired a zkRollup called Polygon Hermez a ZK EVM (Vitalik has said zkRollups are the future of Ethereum and the important thing about Hermez unlike Loopring's implementation of block production is that while Loopring can extract all the MEV from transactions on chain Hermez uses a decentralized auction based system to decide who creates new blocks) which saves more than 90% on fees, Polygon Nightfall a privacy focused Rollup, and in the last few days Polygon Miden an advanced ZK-STARK based Ethereum scaling solution which is EVM compatible that is supposed to address the issues of network congestion on the Ethereum blockchain as it will simplify and accelerate the validation of DeFi apps and cryptocurrencies enhancing the speed and scale of the Polygon ecosystem (more to the point, STARK is closed source, but Miden will be open source a new production-grade, open-source, and transparent proving system built with privacy by design) and not only that but the head of the project Bobbin Threadbare was the core developer of Facebook's Winterfell Team. On top of what I previously said about Miden, perhaps even more importantly: what sets it apart from other ZK rollups is that for any program executed on the VM a STARK-based proof of execution is automatically generated. This proof can then be used by anyone to verify that a program was executed correctly, without the need for re-executing the program or even knowing what the program was. With Miden VM, it becomes somewhat straightforward to build a ZK Rollup that can execute any transaction and program, including those currently living on Ethereum. There's also Polygon SDK and Polygon Avail with Polygon's main goal being to provide a whole suite of solutions.

Then there's Polygon's larger focus on security and transparency even though people claim it isn't as secure since in its current form it doesn't inherent Ethereum's security directly as a sidechain. In fact, Polygon has paid the largest bug bounty ever paid in the DeFi space. Their bug bounty program on immunifi is offering up to 2 million per bug. This is huge when it comes to making the chain as secure as possible and not enough chains do this. It goes a long way in making web 3.0 more resilient. Polygon is also improving a ton on Ethereum's base layer. All of their focus is on security and transparency. Polygon is using security as a service. Secured chains offer high level of security, with the tradeoff of sacrificing a portion of independence and flexibility.

Polygon allows dapps to be built and run on it, so Defi is possible with dapps like AAVE, Balancer, Curve, and Sushiswap which are all deployed on Polygon. There are multiple dapps on Polygon with plenty of total value locked (TVL) on their own projects, AAVE $16.5 billion, Curve $21 Billion, etc. which funnels a lot of money into Polygon. It has integrated Chainlink price feeds and Chainlink VRF to help smart contract developers building on Polygon to outsource their DevOps tasks to Chainlink Keepers serving as highly reliable and trust-minimized automation bots that perform regular smart contract maintenance tasks on their behalf, something that makes it far easier to develop on the network.

Ever since Dharma rolled out on Polygon we can get DeFi tokens straight from our bank account with zero network fees. Alchemy Pay (ACH) is soon also going to bring direct Fiat on-ramps to Polygon which will provide even more options for getting DeFi tokens straight from a bank account. It has bridges to many other popular chains, is getting direct fiat on ramp with Alchemy Pay (ACH) to circumvent ETH gas fees entirely sometime later this year.

It has a bunch of partnerships/deals/projects with NFL ticketmaster ticket stub NFT's (building, minting, and trading NFT's on Polygon which is huge), Macy's Thanksgiving Parade NFT balloons, ETF's in Switzerland, direct recognition from Vitalik in a tweet in the last few days saying that Polygon has been doing an amazing job and that he's really excited to see Polygon taking full trustlessness this seriously, and that he's looking forward to the rollup driven highly scalable future of Ethereum, Uniswap V3, investing in social NFT platforms, NEXO listing, Polygon added to Webull, Brave is working with Polygon in the near future, Malaysian Trading Firm Enegra chose Polygon to tokenize all of its $28 Billion equity to let shareholders digitally exercise their dividend, voting, and governance rights, Crypto dot com matic support for Ethereum deposits and withdrawals, rumors of an NFT digital marketplace with COINBASE, strategic partnership with Portal to boost Bitcoin usability in Defi, a bunch of new projects coming in all the time and sees more activity than all other Ethereum L2's combined.

And on top of everything else, you can also stake MATIC for more than 10.45% APY.

TLDR: Polygon has an insane amount of stuff going on all the time, every single day, and keeps doing more crazy stuff, and it is undervalued and will almost certainly moon sooner or later.