Polygon, a layer-2 network atop the Ethereum blockchain, will trigger an upgrade on Wednesday that swaps out its longstanding MATIC token for a brand-new POL token, permitting more versatility on issuance of brand-new supply.
While the prepared switchover has actually been well-telegraphed, the changeover might be carefully kept an eye on, given that the token is extensively held throughout crypto financier portfolios; it's the 13th greatest by market capitalization in the CoinDesk 20 index of big digital properties, at about $3.8 billion. For numerous users, the swap will happen instantly.
The migration comes as a part of the job's prepared revamp set out in 2015 in its “Polygon 2.0” roadmap, to make POL the native token of its primary chain, the Polygon PoS chain, along with ultimately other chains in its environment.
According to Polygon, in the preliminary stage of the migration, “POL changes MATIC as the native gas and staking token for the Polygon PoS network. In subsequent stages, POL will serve a vital function in the AggLayer.” The AggLayer is another staple in the roadmap, basically a system for aggregating associated blockchains constructed utilizing Polygon innovation.
The Polygon neighborhood has actually proposed that “POL will support wider functions in the Polygon staking center (to be launched in 2025), consisting of block generation, zero-knowledge evidence generation and involvement in Data Availability Committees (DACs).”
POL migration
The migration from POL to MATIC will likewise generate some tokenomics modifications. Polygon shared that the token will have a brand-new emission rate of 2% yearly, where part of the supply goes to validators on Polygon PoS for benefits, and the other part to the neighborhood treasury, “a self-sustainable environment fund that can support the above activities.”
“The most significant reason that the upgrade was required from a technical point of view, is that the MATIC upgrade secrets were burned really deliberately years earlier. Which generally indicates that we can't make modifications to that token,” stated Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, in an interview with CoinDesk. “So among the important things that we desired was to present emissions that method. We might utilize it for the neighborhood, we might utilize it for development. It was actually difficult to do that otherwise.”
Boiron repeated that presenting emissions is expected to assist the Polygon neighborhood environment by presenting a grants program as part of the neighborhood treasury, enabling them “some type of control by the neighborhood over the funds so that you can grow the environment.”
“And then the 2nd one is a method for, efficiently, validators to get emissions,” Boiron included. “Effectively, if you think about these brand-new chains that turn up, what's going to occur is that with time, they're going to wish to decentralize. Therefore rather of simply having a central sequencer, they're going to require to incentivize individuals to in fact run a decentralized group or a decentralized prover. And if they do not have a token, or if they do not wish to introduce a token yet,
