On Sunday (January 9), highly popular New Zealand based crypto analyst and influencer Lark Davis explained why he is so bullish on Polygon’s $MATIC token.

What Is Polygon ($MATIC)?

Polygon is “a protocol and a framework for building and connecting Ethereum-compatible blockchain networks”; it aggregates “scalable solutions on Ethereum supporting a multi-chain Ethereum ecosystem.”

On 18 May 2021, Anthony Sassano, who joined Polygon as an advisor earlier this year, took to Twitter to clear up some of the confusion around Polygon (e.g. some people refer to Polygon as a sidechain to Ethereum, while others call it an L2 blockchain). Below are a few highlights from that Twitter thread:

  • “There is the Matic Plasma Chain and the Polygon PoS chain. The vast majority of the activity is happening on the PoS chain.“
  • “The PoS chain is what people refer to as a ‘sidechain’ to Ethereum because it has its own permissionless validator set (100+ who are staking MATIC) which means it doesn’t use Ethereum’s security (aka Ethereum’s PoW).“
  • “The PoS chain goes beyond a standard sidechain and actually relies on and commits itself to Ethereum (what some people may call a ‘commit-chain’). It relies on Ethereum because all of the validator/staking logic for the PoS chain lives as a smart contract on Ethereum.“
  • “This means that if the Ethereum network went offline, the Polygon PoS chain would also go offline. Secondly, the PoS chain actually commits/checkpoints itself to Ethereum every so often.“
  • “This has 2 benefits: it provides Ethereum-based finality to the PoS chain & it can help the chain recover in case of catastrophic event. This also means that Polygon is paying Ethereum to use its blockspace (in ETH) & paying for it to secure the contracts & checkpointing.“

Furthermore, Sassano took this opportunity to talk about the two bridges that exist between Ethereum and Polygon:

  • “There are 2 bridges – the Plasma bridge which is secured by Ethereum and the PoS bridge which is secured/operated by the PoS chain validator set.“
  • “Of course, for the PoS bridge, 2/3 of the validators could theoretically collude and try to steal the bridge funds but there’s $3.4 billion at stake so this is risky. If this attack did happen, the checkpointing & social coordination could be the only recourse.“

He also commented on multi-sigs for Polygons contracts:

  • “The multi-sigs exist to allow the contract to be upgraded in case of a bug/exploit which is a practice used by many existing projects (especially those within DeFi).“
  • “However, Polygon’s multi-sigs are 5 of 8 which is definitely not ideal and not decentralized and the plan is to greatly improve this in the near future.“

Finally, he said that Polygon is “committed to building & deploying L2 solutions like rollups in the future” and this is what he is “most excited about.”

Why Lark Davis Is So Bullish on $MATIC

In a video released on his YouTube channel on January 9, Davis explained his bullishness on $MATIC, the price of which he behieves is headed to $10.

According to a report by The Daily Hodl, Davis said:

“Of the129 million accounts that have used Polygon over the last eight months, only 15% have addresses on Ethereum. That means 85% of the new Polygon users are Polygon natives...

“If you’ve ever tried to buy an NFT on Ethereum you know it can be a painful process. If you’ve ever tried to claim an NFT drop on Ethereum you know it’s a very expensive process.

“We’ve seen Polygon really picking up in the number of NFTs sold. We can see from July, when we had 50,000 Polygon-based NFTs sold, to now where we have… 1.99 million NFTs sold in the month of December on Polygon on OpenSea. That’s absolutely massive, massive growth for the Polygon ecosystem...

“In the last year, we’ve seen: Aave, which is one of the biggest DeFi [decentralized finance] protocols, OpeaSea, the biggest NFT marketplace, [and] The Sandbox, which is one of the biggest metaverses. All this stuff coming over to Polygon because it’s a great user experience.…

“I believe that a $10 MATIC is inevitable. I think it’s going to come. I think it’s going to happen. It’ll be glorious…

“Looking at the network statistics, I’m seeing a network that’s taking off in a serious way. Users are piling in. Money’s piling in. Developers are piling in. Tokens are going to be burned. $10 is coming. MATIC will be a top-10 coin by the end of the year is my prediction.”

Polygon Team Introduces ‘Plonky2’

In a blog post published yesterday, the Polygon team introduced “Plonk2”, which they called “the world’s fastest ZK scaling technology.”

Here is how they described the recently-formed group Polygon Zero’s mission: “to use zero-knowledge proofs to scale Ethereum to a billion users, without compromising decentralization or security. “

They went on to say that “achieving this requires fast and efficient proof systems”, which is why they were excited to announce Plonky2.

The blog post mentioned that “Plonky2 is a recursive SNARK that is 100x faster than existing alternatives and natively compatible with Ethereum.” Apparently, it “combines PLONK and FRI for the best of STARKs, with fast proofs and no trusted setup, and the best of SNARKs, with support for recursion and low verification cost on Ethereum.”

Here is what the Polygon team said about Plonky2 on Twitter yesterday:

DISCLAIMER

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.

IMAGE CREDIT

Featured Image by “RoamingPro” via Pixabay