Polygon's MATIC, a Layer 2 solution for the Ethereum network that promises the fast execution of complex smart contracts for lower gas fees, has been on a roll these days. I believe part of it is because of the sky high Ethereum fees. If you are confused about why Polygon's token is MATIC, it is because the network used to be called Matic and just got renamed (rebranded)
If you read my previous posts, you would know that I have been playing with BSC just because of the fees are pretty reasonable. The drawback of BSC is it is not really a very distributed network as there are only 21 validators and Binance has an outside influence on it.
I decided to give Polygon a try and at the start I want to accumulate some MATIC tokens and put them in the network. There is a way to get those through the Ethereum network by going through Uniswap. But I don't like that route as it costs too much gas fees.
Below are the steps I went through and the fee I spend is just a few bucks.
1. Start from Binance.US and buy some USDT. This process is pretty straight forward. Just ACH some US$ in and use the trade interface to buy. The cost is around 0.1%.
2. Move the purchased USDT to BSC. You can follow my previous post (https://www.publish0x.com/crypto-notebook-us/enhance-returns-from-stable-coin-on-bsc-and-stake-bnb-xzwxpvz)
3. Setup your metamask wallet for the Matic network. I found the easiest way to do it is to go to https://quickswap.exchange/, it will prompt you to add the Matic network. You can also manually add it by following the official guide: https://docs.matic.network/docs/develop/metamask/config-matic/
4. Go to https://www.xpollinate.io/, it has a Cross-Chain Bridge. Select BSC from the left and Matic at the right, it should auto populate your wallet address once connected. and click on SWAP.
5. Once done, you should be able to see your USDT under the Matic network. If not, you need to add a custom token for USDT. To find the contract address. Go to https://explorer-mainnet.maticvigil.com/tokens search for USDT and copy and paste into the custom token.
6. Use https://quickswap.exchange/#/swap to swap USDT to MATIC. This is very similar to how Uniswap or PancakeSwap work. Transaction is very fast and cheap.
Now you have MATICs in your wallet and you can go ahead to explore.
Disclaimer
Nothing I wrote can be interpret as any advise (financial or otherwise) I wrote this blog just to capture my experience moving alone. DYOR (do your own research) and never play with anything you cannot afford to lose.
