Date of foundation: 2017
Market capitalisation December 2024: 2.8 billion USD
Outstanding amount December 2024: 9.5 billion of a total of 10.8 billion.
Polygon is the native currency of the Polygon blockchain. A native currency is the basis of every blockchain; in particular, the transaction fees of the respective blockchain are paid in the native currency. A blockchain consists of an association of many individual small to large servers, all of which have stored the same data packages (blocks = blockchain). The information of the respective moment is stored in the respective data blocks. This could be transactions or ownership, for example. The polygon blockchain generates a new data block approximately every 2 seconds and therefore realistically processes an average of 3.5 million transactions per day.
What makes Polygon special is that it is a layer-2 blockchain and is based on the Ethereum blockchain. The idea of layer-2 blockchains is to use the existing resources and infrastructure of a blockchain and supplement these with your own systems. The advantage of this is that the speed of transactions, the costs per transaction and the energy requirement per process can be massively reduced or increased - the principle of shared infrastructure in its purest form. The average 3.5 million transactions per day on Polygon cost the equivalent of 25,000 USD, while the same number would cost 14 million USD via Ethereum. Similar ratios also apply to the energy consumption per transaction.
Polygon's price-performance ratio between transaction costs and transaction speed is so attractive that Polygon is one of the most popular networks for new systems, projects and decentralized financial infrastructure. In total, there are an estimated 49,000 individual tokens on Polygon and 475 million wallets. A token always represents some form of cryptocurrency, and a wallet is the equivalent of a bank account on the blockchain. The utilization of the Polygon network averages 50%, with approximately 60,000 new smart contracts being uploaded to Polygon every day. A smart contract is an automated, unchangeable program that carries out certain predefined actions independently. An example of the use of smart contracts are decentralized exchanges, so-called DEX.
Overall, Polygon is a mid-cap currency and ranks 30th worldwide with a market capitalization of 4.4 billion USD.
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