Polygon’s native cryptocurrency MATIC witnessed an huge surge in its gas fees. They surged more than 1,000% to a staggering $0.10.
The surge can be credited to users who flooded the network to mine Bitcoin Ordinals-inspired tokens called POLS. It functions on the PRC-20 protocol. POLS typically mirrors the Bitcoin Ordinals-derived BRC-20 token.
As per data from Ethereum Virtual Machine provider EVM, 18,100 owners claiming the token and only 8.7% of the total POLS supply has been minted.
What happened?
Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal expressed surprise at the heightened transaction activity. He speculated that it could be linked to the launch of an NFT collection on the Polygon network.
As per Dune Analytics, the surge in POLS minting coincided with a massive use of over 102 million MATIC tokens. Gas fees for these minted tokens were close to a whopping $86 million in total.
Polygon’s gas fees surged at the peak of the excitement. However, they have since returned to normal levels, stabilizing at around 882 gwei.
To give a rough idea, 1 gwei is roughly equivalent to 0.000000001 MATIC. This metric shows how huge this surge was; from 0.000000001 MATIC to 0.10 MATIC.
Polygon’s troubles
In October, Polygon co-founder Jaynti Kanani revealed that almost six months ago he departed from the India based blockchain network. Kanani is currently his “new adventures” but said that he remains bullish on Polygon 2.0.
He has joined the long list of executives that have departed from prominent crypto projects in the last few months. Troubled have only mounted for Polygon as on November 14 whales including Tron founder Justin Sun withdrew over 764,740 MATIC from Binance, valued at around $750k.
Demand for Bitcoin Ordinals also pushes BTC gas fees
Polygon’s surge echoes the prolonged activity spike witnessed by Bitcoin (BTC) in May when the Ordinals protocol was released. Polygon clearly draws parallels with Bitcoin’s experience.
The launch of BTC Ordinals allowed users to mine NFTs directly onto the Bitcoin blockchain. It causes fees to skyrocket.
Critics have criticized the this type NFT protocol and token standard as wasteful. However, The impact of projects like POLS on Layer-2 solutions such as Polygon remains a subject of fascination.