Polygon Becomes the Defacto Platform for Metaverse

Polygon Becomes the Defacto Platform for Metaverse

In raw numbers, Polygon’s ecosystem growth surges 170% YTD with over 19,000 dApps deployed. Data from Alchemy, the world’s leading Web3 developer platform, shows the number of applications running on Polygon has nearly tripled in just five months. 

Polygon, an Ethereum scaling platform onboarding millions to Web3, now supports over 19,000 apps*, an increase of 170% from 7,000 in January. This advance comes as part of an impressive adoption growth cycle over the past 12 months across the metaverse, gaming, Defi, and NFT spaces.

Figures also show the monthly active teams building on Polygon grew from 3,000 to 8,000 in the last five months alone. Moreover, many teams have opted to build solely on Polygon. Alchemy data shows that 65% of the projects have integrated exclusively on Polygon, compared to 35%, which have also deployed to Ethereum.

Polygon is now positioned as the network of choice for multiple Web3 project requirements, with its suite of ethereum scaling solutions now supporting major NFT, Metaverse, and Defi projects and onboarding Web2 firms to the sector.

The network provides solutions for a host of verticals, including luxury brands like Dolce & Gabbana and industry-leading marketplaces OpenSea and Lazy.com.

Renowned metaverse project Decentraland has thrived from its Layer 2 integration with Polygon, offering users low, sustainable gas fees for microtransactions on the platform’s builder and marketplace. Likewise, within Megacryptopolis, players enjoy zero fees for many in-game transactions following their Polygon integration in 2021, with their own metaverse project Megaworld already underway.

Play-to-earn games like Neon District and Cometh, digital horse racing platform Zed Run, Skyweaver, the free-to-play (F2P) NFT based trading card game, Aavegotchi, an open-source, community-owned NFT gaming protocol, and the NFT-based game building DAO Decentral Games have all leveraged Polygon’s low fee functionality and developer-friendly build mechanisms to offer unique creative gaming experiences to their users.

The network has also onboarded multiple Web2 companies into Web3, including Opera, DraftKings, and Adobe’s Behance, which chose Polygon due to the network’s unrivaled integration technology, robust security features, scalability, and transactional affordability.

There was also considerable growth in the Polygon based DeFi ecosystem, including blue chips like lending platform Aave, liquidity aggregator and developer platform 0x, automated trading platform Balancer, and top decentralized exchanges (DEXs) like Curve, Uniswap, and 1inch, all benefiting from Polygon’s broad range of scaling options and low transaction rates.

Polygon was also the obvious choice for PayBolt’s launch this month of its Web3 multi-chain payment gateway, giving merchants worldwide the unprecedented functionality to accept Polygon-based tokens for payment, including $MATIC, $USDT, $UDSC, $DAI, and $QUICK.

Most recently, liquidity aggregator Arrakis announced its partnership with Polygon, offering incentives to Uniswap V3 Liquidity Pools (LPs) on the Matic chain via Arrakis Finance tokenized LP vaults. This came as part of a $3M program incentivized by Polygon to encourage the migration of liquidity to the Polygon ecosystem and further cement its position as the network of choice for users looking to stake and trade with low fees and high rewards.

The growth surge seen since the Alchemy crossover in June 2021 is also linked to the improved developer experience for those building on Polygon since the network partnered with Alchemy.

Mike Garland, Alchemy product manager, said, “Developers can spend thousands of hours maintaining backend infrastructure when they could be innovating and building their applications. We work hand-in-hand with the Polygon team to resolve and mitigate network-level incidents, and Alchemy’s platform enables developers to build products on Polygon in ways they couldn’t before.”

Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, said, “The reliability and scalability of Alchemy’s comprehensive developer platform — from infrastructure and tooling to enhanced APIs and monitoring systems — is best in class. Alchemy gives Polygon developers the infrastructure they need to grow, evidenced by the unprecedented Polygon transaction volumes, with high throughput and low fees.”

Polygon adoption insights show the network gearing up to become the protocol of choice to power the booming Web3 ecosystem, relaying 3 million transactions per day — more than double that of Ethereum. Adoption of the Polygon and Alchemy stack among developers continues to surge, with Polygons’ scaling solutions and Alchemy’s unrivaled infrastructure offering everything that a cutting-edge Web3 project needs to excel.