If you’ve been following the top 50 coins by market cap, you might have seen the rise of MATIC (Polygon network tokens). From mid march to a few days ago, it’s been stuck between $0.2 and $0.4 but in the last couple days it's shot up to $0.7, what’s the reason behind this?

What is Polygon (MATIC)

MATIC started off a Layer 2 solution that used Plasma technology. However, as consensus for what is the ‘right’ Layer 2 technology to use shifted away from Plasma, MATIC re-banded itself as Polygon and announced that they’ll look to implement zkrollup and optimistic rollup (two other Layer 2 solutions that are gaining momentum right now)

Why is it taking off right now?

I think now is the time for Polygon because it’s ecosystem has finally gotten to the point that enough things are on there that people want to transact. It serves as an alternative to BSC chain where you can still be on the ETH network and still have low fees.

dAppradar has a list of dApps on Polygon network, some notable ones are:

Defi

Aave is on here (click on the right most market icon), it doesn’t have all of the tokens that Aave v2 has but the major stablecoins are there. The pools are currently being heavily incentivized too!

QuickSwap is your Uniswap clone. Since it’s only been up and running for under a month, there’s incentives going on in specific pools for their governance token (QUICK). This token has also risen quite a bit with the rise of MATIC

If stablecoins and double digit returns on liquidity pooling sound boring to you, Polywhale is your Pancake clone with super high APR and the twist that part of the fees go into a lottery. They also take 4% on stake to encourage people to keep assets staked.

Lastly, ComethSwap is a Uniswap clone that focuses on game tokens (see next section)

Games

There are a couple of games that are transacting using Polygon:

Cometh is a 2d galaxy exploration game

Decentral Games is similar to Second Life (3D game where you have avatar that walks around world that's built by other placers) with more gambling. Since space is limited, you can buy plots of land and even create and sell 3d items: https://market.decentraland.org

How do I get in on Polygon?

On the Polygon network, you’ll need MATIC tokens (instead of ETH) to pay your gas fees.

You can bridge your tokens over using MATIC bridge: https://wallet.matic.network/bridge

After bridging over you'll be given 0.001 MATIC to start with but it’s a good idea to head over to QuickSwap and trade for more MATIC to make sure you have enough to pay for the gas fees

Words of caution

Things are still early and the platform hasn’t been around for very long. Already one of the exchanges (Easyfi) has had a security incident. Please keep in mind that while some dApps are migrating to Polygon because of the lower gas fees and have a much longer history on ETH chain, others are brand new and often just clones of apps on ETH network. Chances are there will be a run pull with anything this new and gaining so much in popularity.

Good luck and happy farming! (or whaling!)