Daily devouring crypto content using every resource imaginable can be enlightening but can also get downright discouraging at times. You always come across the All-Stars on Team Twitter who proudly pound out tweet after tweet informing the world of their crypto conquests. I came across one such post today, a personal praise-fest of the tweeter’s uncanny ability to choose all the right cryptos at just the right time.
The message shared with the universe via social media how this shrewd investor had not only picked the projects that turned out to be some of the biggest and best, but he also got in on each of them while they were still on the ground floor. He found Fantom (FTM) at $0.02, and it did a 100x. He ascertained the awesomeness of Avalanche (AVAX) when it was only $3.00, only to see it do a 40x. Most magnificent of all, he plucked Polygon Matic out of the crypto bargain bin for the ridiculously low price of $0.01, only to see it soar 29,000% at its height all the way to $2.92 on December 27, 2021.
I wish that I could tell you that I picked my pack of Polygon up for a few pennies, but that would be disingenuous. My Pathway to Polygon was anything but a smooth, straight line; it was littered with some wrong turns, unexpected detours, and a harrowing year-long experience trapped in a Car (dano).
To briefly fill in some of my backstory, I am originally from the United States. If you listen to my voice, you may detect a slight Southern drawl. I became a teacher right out of college and have absolutely loved teaching, coaching, and working as an administrator. One drawback to teaching the 3 R’s is that your weekly salary is usually stuck in 3-digits as well. I always made enough to get by, but I longed to have additional income to invest.
About 10 years ago, I took the plunge and decided to become a financial adviser as somewhat of a side hustle. I passed the Series 63 and Series 7 exams and became a bona fide financial manager, complete with certificates to hang on my office wall. Bitcoin had burst on the scene about two years prior to my arrival in the financial world, and it was still looked upon by most with scorn and contempt. “It’s a scam…a Ponzi scheme…it’s just a way for criminals to conduct illegal business.” On and on the narrative went.
I didn’t give digital currency even a passing glance during my short two-year stint in the financial sector, focusing instead on the tried-and-true stock market and its “amazing” track record of averaging 10% annual returns over time (cue the sarcastic laugh here). When I moved to Asia in 2016 to pursue my dream of teaching abroad, I was an ex-financial adviser who desperately needed financial advice. It came to me from a most unlikely source.
I just so happened to share an office space with a man from Texas who had three passions in life: booze, broads, and Bitcoin. He often came to work still red-eyed and hung over from one too many tequila shots the night before, but his conversation, even if his speech was slurred, always found its way to Bitcoin. He was heavily invested in this digital asset and spent countless hours imploring me to do the same. “It’s the future,” he would confidently say, I simply thought his mind was warped by too much alcohol. There was no way I was going to shell out $400 per coin for this “fake” Fiat.
We went our separate ways after that school year, and I lost track of him. I’ve often pictured him now sitting in a lounge chair on some idyllic beach, sipping martinis out of a coconut shell. He was so right, and I was so wrong.
In 2020, I got the investment itch again, and decided to research cryptocurrency. I finally took my old friend’s advice and bought some Bitcoin. I also was educated on the efficacy of Ethereum, the #1 altcoin, and began to accumulate as much as I could, as it was trading well below $1,000 at that time. Later in 2020, a friend of mine who had only been in the crypto space a few months longer than I, began to extol the virtues of another Layer 1 project called Cardano, whose native token is ADA.
Before I knew it, I had drunk the Cardano Kool-Aid and emptied my savings, accumulating ADA at an astounding pace. I reached the target goal for my bag and sat back, determined to HODL as I listened to “Pastor” Charles Hoskinson, the Founder of Cardano, preach the gospel of how ADA would save the world, beginning in Africa. I bought his words hook, line, and sinker, and my excitement was only heightened as I daily listened to the ADA Moon Boys on YouTube give the EOY price targets for the coin. I would be a millionaire, could buy a Lambo if I so desired (I don’t!), and my life would change for the better…all because of this Car (dano) I had chosen to ride in.
After the leadup to the Alonzo hard fork in September boosted ADA’s price to all-time high, the Car (dano) skidded off the road and struggled to get back on track. Before this Cardano crash, I already had my eyes on another investment vehicle that I was convinced was a superior ride: Polygon Matic.
I subscribe to the Palm Beach Daily, the newsletter by crypto expert Teeka Tiwari and the Palm Beach Research Group, and Teeka began to pound the Polygon drum back during the summer, piquing my interest and leading me to take a deep dive into the fundamentals of the project. Tiwari has a great track record in predicting cryptos, and he had been bullish on Matic for some time.
I began to shift my focus to Matic and slowly began to pack Polygon into my bag. I wanted more Matic, but I had one problem: much of my money was now trapped in Cardano. After topping $3 in September, like a slow leak in a tire, ADA’s price gains gradually were lost. When Cardano crashed to $2.25, I decided to bail out, selling my entire bag and immediately going all in on Polygon. I’m so glad that I did.
Polygon Matic, in my opinion, will one day be a Top 5 crypto. Here are five reasons that Matic will make it to the top.
1. Stability
There are some good Layer 1 projects out there like Solana, Cardano (yes, I do think ADA has potential), Avalanche, Polkadot, and Terra Luna, to name a few. Ethereum, however, is in a class of its own, and Polygon is a Layer 2 that functions as a platform for building and connecting Ethereum compatible blockchains networks.
When all the smoke clears and the dust settles from these early Layer 1 wars for market share, no doubt there will be projects that don’t survive. There is little doubt, however, that Ethereum will stand the test of time and will be one of the last men standing, so to speak…and Polygon is built upon the most stable Layer 1 platform.
2. Scalability
Are you old enough to remember dial-up internet connections? Waiting what seemed like an eternity for each page to download was tolerable in the early days of the internet, but people today crave speed and efficiency, While Ethereum is stable and secure, it is painfully slow and unable to handle a large volume of transactions in a timely manner.
Ethereum can currently only handle 30 transactions per second (TPS), a turtle-like pace. Polygon, by comparison, can reach speeds of up to 10,000 TPS. Vitalik Buterin, one of the founders of Ethereum, claims that ETH 2.0 may eventually scale to as many as 100,000 transactions per second using sharding and other tactics. This, for now, is just talk, and there is no definite date for the launch of this ETH upgrade. Recent chatter has even cast doubt if ETH 2.0 will be released in 2022. With every passing day, Ethereum’s snail-like platform is losing market share to speed merchants like Polygon.
Polygon’s scalability makes it a winner. Dimitar Bogdanov gave his perspective. “This is, without a doubt, the main goal of every Ethereum scaling solution, and Polygon really shines in that area. Thanks to Polygon’s capacity for supporting dedicated blockchains and scalable consensus algorithms, by using the platform both projects and users can benefit from faster transaction times.”
3. Sale
I use the word “Sale” to remind you that in comparison to other platforms, Polygon seems to always be running a sale on their gas. Not only is Ethereum very slow, it is also super expensive. ETH gas prices averaged a ridiculous $46 in a recent week. Can you imagine going to an ATM and paying $46 to transfer or withdraw YOUR assets?
What is the solution to combat these incredibly high prices? The answer is to use a Layer 2 to handle the transaction, and the most cost-efficient Layer 2 is Polygon. While ETH was handing its users a bill for $46, those who chose Matic paid only $0.25, the lowest cost by far of any Layer 2.
It’s no wonder that Polygon adoption has skyrocketed in the past year. On January 1, 2021, there were only 180 Matic addresses on popular blockchain platforms. By the end of the year, this number had ballooned to 129,444,295, an astounding growth of 71,913,397%!
4. Sentiment
The overwhelming sentiment for Matic has been excitement, optimism, and bullishness. It’s not only Polygon People that have been positive and passionate about this project; many movers and shakers have hopped aboard the Matic Express.
Multi-billionaire Mark Cuban, the owner of the NBA Dallas Mavericks and avid crypto enthusiast, is sold on Matic. “Polygon is the first well-structured, easy-to-use platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development,” commented Cuban. He has put his money where his mouth is, investing in Matic. Cuban told Cointelegraph that he regularly uses Matic and hopes to integrate Polygon into his non-fungible token (NFT) gallery called Lazy.com.
Billionaire investor Kevin O’Leary also is enamored with Polygon. He spoke glowingly about its potential:
“I’ve seen this movie before. I was an investor in software engineers twenty-two years ago at the Learning Company when we made educational software. The way I used to do it then is the way I’m doing it now. If I want to invest in Polygon, I want to meet the engineering team, which I did in Dubai. I met the team, heard the vision of what they’re doing, looked at the economic reality at the outcome, the potential of it. First is team. If I check the box on team – smart guys, good engineers, good strategy, good group – I’m interested.
Here’s the second test. What economic value are they creating? In the case of Polygon, aggregating transactions to reduce gas fees on Ethereum is a smart idea. You have an economic reason to pursue that. You save money. Transaction fees are less. I think the potential of that is large.”
Public sentiment, even after a hacking scare in December 2021, remains overwhelmingly positive.
5. Success
In the crypto space, projects eagerly await the next catalyst that will propel the coin’s price upward. For many projects, these catalysts are few and far between; not so for Polygon Matic.
It seems that every day Polygon People wake up to more exciting news.
- On 1 April 2021, Decentraland dApps suite rolled out an account portal allowing users to move their MANA from Ethereum to Polygon (and back).
- On 14 September 2021, Ernst & Young (EY) and Polygon announced a joint project to develop and implement scaling and enterprise solutions for the Ethereum ecosystem. As part of this initiative, “EY and Polygon will work on Polygon Nightfall, a public, privacy-focused Rollup. In addition to this, EY will offer its other flagship blockchain products on Polygon and jointly develop new Polygon-based blockchains for enterprise use.”
- On 20 October 2021, San Francisco-based digital asset management company Bitwise Asset Management announced the launch of its Bitwise Polygon Fund (MATIC). According to the company’s press release, the Fund will serve as a professionally managed investment vehicle that will give wealthy Bitwise clients access to MATIC, Polygon’s own cryptocurrency.
- On 18 November 2021, Shares, the issuer of a crypto exchange-traded product (ETP), listed a product linked to the performance of Polygon on the Six Swiss Exchange. On 1 December, it listed its Polygon ETP on the Euronext exchanges in Paris and Amsterdam.
- On 20 November 2021, Polygon proposed to the DeFi protocol, Uniswap, that it deploy to Polygon PoS. The UNI community agreed, so the move is now expected shortly. Other major protocols such as Aave and Sushiswap have already migrated to Polygon in a bid to avoid Ethereum’s relatively high transaction fees and slow speeds, and congested network.
- On 30 November 2021, IDEX, the decentralized exchange, announced that it was launching v3 of its exchange on the Polygon network, claiming it is the world’s first hybrid liquidity DEX.
- On 7 December 2021, Polygon announced a strategic partnership with decentralized blockchain interoperability solution, Wanchain to “drive further adoption of Layer 2 cross-chain bridges and accelerate the development of interoperable blockchain technology as a whole”.
- Polygon said on 8 December 2021, that it will feature on ClayStack, a decentralized liquid staking platform, when it launches its Malawi Testnet this month. ClayStack’s platform allows users to stake their crypto assets while maintaining their liquidity as they receive an equivalent liquid derivative token that remains fungible and transferable and earns daily rewards – in this case the csMATIC which can be used within Polygon’s DeFi ecosystem.
- On 9 December 2021, Polygon announced that Mir, a startup in ZK (zero knowledge) cryptography technology, had been acquired in a $400m deal. Mir engineers will now be part of the team that will use this technology to help build Polygon Zero, a “highly-scalable, Ethereum-compatible ZK Rollup”.
- On 20 December 2021, Polygon announced that Uniswap, the protocol for exchanging cryptocurrencies, is now live on Polygon. “All Uniswap V3 contracts are now deployed to the Polygon PoS mainnet, and Polygon is already supported in the official Uniswap interface” said the statement.
- On 30 December 2021, The Sandbox metaverse revealed plans to migrate to Polygon.
- On 10 January 2022, Polygon revealed Plonky2, what it called a major milestone for zero-knowledge cryptography. Plonky2 is a recursive SNARK (a cryptographic proof that one user has some specific information without having to reveal what that information is) that is “100x faster than existing alternatives and natively compatible with Ethereum.”
- On 21 January 2022, Italian luxury fashion house Prada and sportswear giant Adidas joined forces to launch an NFT project built on Polygon that will allow fans to contribute their own designs.
- On 26 January 2022, YouTube’s Head of Gaming, Ryan Wyatt, Leaves to Join Polygon Studios as CEO.
From the Metaverse to NFTs, Polygon has sprinted ahead of its competitors.
Summary
Polygon has Stability, Scalability, is always Sale priced, enjoys overwhelmingly positive Sentiment, and is enjoying one Success after another. POLYGON IS A WINNER!
Luke Lango and Charlie Shrem, editors of the Crypto Investor Network Newsletter, put it best in their recent appraisal of Polygon Matic. “We firmly believe that the best of this growth narrative is yet to come, and that when all is said and done, Polygon has a chance to be one of the most valuable cryptocurrencies in the world. And that’s why — if you have the patience and are willing to see the Blockchain Revolution to its end over the next decade — you may want to consider taking a long-term, buy-and-hold position in Polygon coin today.”
DO YOU HAVE MATIC IN YOUR BAG???
