Oh, the Sights We’ll See in Polygon Network Land
Side chain or layer two? Who cares, let’s check it out. Polygon, formerly Matic, is not the first scaling solution for Ethereum, but it was the first one to gain significant adoption. It now has the third largest on chain volume after Ethereum and Bitcoin on most days. There are an incredible number of things to do on polygon.
You can use your MetaMask wallet in this ecosystem, so I do. There are several bridges in to and out of the polygon world. Zapper has a bridge from eth you can use. Allbridge has an incredible bridge. There’s the official Matic foundation bridge and Coinbase even allows direct withdrawal of funds from their exchange on to the Polygon network.
The Etherean will find much familiar with the dApps available here. Many the DeFi blue chips from Ethereum are now available here. Certainly, more Ethereum defi primitives are on poly than any other L2 or side chain solution. Obviously, there is sushi here. Those folks always seem to be one of the firsts to deploy on a scaling solution or new chain. Them and curve that is, which both have LM incentives live on polygon. You will also find Aave, Balancer, Tokensetts, Kyber, 0x, 1inch, frax, badger and many others. If you are comfortable with any of these protocols, I suggest adding liquidity to them on polygon.
Of particular interest are balancer and Tokensetts. Either of these will allow you to make or invest in a polygon native fund. This could have eth and Matic as well as chain native things like qi and quick. Of these, balancer currently has LM incentives live. There is still comparatively less money on these platforms here than on Ethereum and you can thus find higher yields at times to LPs.
What is new and original name on this chain? How about Quickswap. That is the first AMM to deploy on polygon and it is still the largest. I suggest adding liquidity here as the dominance of this dex on this chain makes their LP tokens invaluable Legos. Dinoswap is another interesting dex of note here. Qi DAO is one of the more exciting polygon native primitives. It started out as a maker clone to mint debt out of Matic.
You can still mint stable debt (Mai) from them, but they have also added several other products and defi primitives. Their stable coin has gained such wide adoption among DeFi protocols that it is now incorporated into protocols on other chains. I just this morning minted some Mai and sent it over to my Solana wallet so I can use it on saber there. The bridge I used for this was from Allbridge and it was an absolute joy. It was the fastest and cheapest bridging experience I had ever had. Coming back to poly land for a bit, there are also lots of yield aggregators here. Adamant is an interesting polygon native protocol for this.
They offer vaults to auto-compound your LP positions across other polygon protocols. For deploying these LP tokens to their protocol, you will be rewarded both in their adamant token and wMatic. They have a complicated situation going on with their native token adamant. You can stake, lock, or vest this thing. I am not going to pretend I know the difference, or that I don’t have some money spread out across this complicated partially time locked system.
Do with that what you will, it’s an interesting platform. A few months ago, there was a wee spot of bother over one of their larger LPs. Alameda had a bunch of money in there and everyone was worried they were going to dump their token when they could. They did and it affected their token price greatly. It has rebounded since this. I think the drama was dumb. The incentives you put in place should apply to every manner of market participant.
This is an issue which has come up several times with small protocols that offer attractive yields. One large position can boost the TVL dramatically. This in turn lends legitimacy to the project so many small positions ape in. Since these systems are always super reflexive, and made more so by a pool two scenario, the native token gets more expensive.
Eventually this party has to exit, and they sell a great deal of the token, dumping the price. Protocols should assume all investors will behave only in their best interest and design their protocol rewards accordingly. Another interesting polygon native farming opportunity is polycrystal finance. In addition to traditional vaults, they have a hidden gems section. This is an extra high-risk way to farm brand new tokens. There is a fork of pool together, the no loss lottery protocol from Ethereum. This is called Daddy’s pancakes here on polygon for some reason.
It is not all DeFi and seriousness over here with the Polynauts. This chain has a lot of games and NFTs. The first time I bridges any fund over on to what was then Matic was to try to buy an Aavegotchi. I did not end up being able to snag one in time. Aavegotchi is a cool collectible project. It was originally devised for Ethereum but was moved to Matic once block space became expensive. An Aavegotchi is a collectible digital pet. The interesting thing about these pets though is that they have an interest-bearing token incorporated in to them.
The name might make a bit more sense now. Aavegotchi, like Aave the protocol and Tamagotchi the things we played with in the nineties. I have not heard much from this project in a bit, and I should probably check back in on them. Not surprisingly, many PFP projects have a knock off version on this chain as well. There’s PolyPunks for an example of that. Marc Cuban seems to be betting on polygon as a leading scaling solution as it has been integrated in to his new NFT platform lazy NFT. Polker is building a poker gaming ecosystem on polygon. Derace is about to launch as a ZedRun competitor in the virtual horse racing arena.
There is a great deal of things being built on Polygon. You can even afford to go try them out there. The polygon team has announced a hackathon and their liquidity mining incentives are still flowing freely. There are many good reasons for builders and consumers alike to pay attention to polygon. Dolce and Gabbana just dropped something or other on polygon.
That means something to lots of people, I guess. Arbitrum just rolled out this week and it is looking lovely. This is technically a different solution, but it competes with polygon for the right to scale Ethereum. Only time will tell who wins the chain wars of 2021. Position yourself to win from their battling, and not from a particular outcome. By this I mean, use all the chains you can to harvest any yield you can get.
