MATIC: Skyrocketed by necessity

PoW technology is beginning to age, and fees are becoming a growing pain not just for BTC, ETH, but for BSC as well. When PoW and PoS were the dominant approach to verifying transactions on the blockchain, since then many altcoins have managed to sustain their blockchain operations without penalizing every transaction that goes through with creative means.

Case in point, this is the cumulative worth of all the gas fees committed over many years of transactions on ETH:

This is huge. Granted, very few avidly trade this much in gas fees, but the fact remains that for a majority of people, HODLing rather than burning ETH on gas would've retained much of our wealth if it wasn't for those atrociously high fees.

The realization that you missed out on a 100x investment is one thing, the fact that the collective of the penalties attached to every transaction you make on the network could one day exceed your worth is another.

But developers and users alike were caged at the time. The Ethereum network offers something no other coin does, which is the ability to execute decentralized application underlayered by smart contract functionality. The subsequent boom in volume raised the gas prices to astronomical highs, and as a consequence the average wealth of the common user had to adapt.

In other words, there are no fishes in the barrel, only whales.

Then BSC came along, and the rest is history. In record time, BSC was able to topple the ethereum network without remarkable effort other than the fact BSC fees were cheaer to operate on, but the desire for less and less did not fade away.

Enter MATIC (now POLYGON)

Propelled upwards by the DeFi, NFT and blockchain gaming craze, Polygon managed to onboard much of the daily volume from even BSC to Matic, which offers near-feeless transactions on a network able to run smart contract functionalities with transactions going through getting confirmed and verified as quickly as the ones through ETH. No compromise was involved at all.

That's it.

That's it, there is no other unique gizmos it offers in this network. It can boast about how eco-friendly it may be, or how many transactions per seconds it can clock in in comparison to BTC or how sustainable it claims to be. The only leg up it has over all the previous networks I've mentioned is how low Polygon's fees are.

It's not even a blockchain in it's own right. as an analogy, it's simply a set of side roads as compared to the main road of Ethereum.

Is the charade going to come down?

It's reasonable to think that, once Ethereum layer 2 drops, fees are going to become less hard-hitting on the value of your transaction. And at that point, the necessity of POLYGON becomes moot. The side roads become unnecessary and the main one becomes more appealing with less gas to cruise along.

Credit where it's due, though. MATIC managed to achieve mass interoperability on such a scalable level without suffering from massive congestion all the while maintaining a constant fee of 1/10 of a cent per txn. But as I said, it'll all fall flat soon.

A look back...

I remember during the bullish summer of 2017, ICOs were all everyone was talking about. As I wasn't as heavily invested in Bitcoin as I am now, I didn't partake in any of those offerings, but many of my friends did and lost big time as the smokescreen came down and the bull run came to an end. They had no intrinsic value, and so did not even stand the test of time.

Today, DeFi, NFTs and blockchain gaming seem to also be all the craze that is waving and propelling the market. Unlike the ICOs rampant in their own time, they have actual use cases.

DeFi provides loaning/burrowing, farming and auto-farming and flash loans, for as much people like to hate on flash loans, they all have legitimate, real-world impacting use-cases that are much more valuable over simply taking a long position on one of those ICOs

NFTs take advantage of the inherent immutability and irreversibility of the blockchain when it comes to proving ownership of an art piece.

blockchain gaming, especially in the gambling sector, provides a trustlessly fair environment with the added benefits of what NFTs use the blockchain for.

These are all legitimate use-cases. This is why cryptocurrencies are becoming a huge, 2-trillion market that is constantly growing in size. I bet Jeff Bezos would bet his wealth on this industry just as hard as he did betting on the internet.

Point is: every 4 years after a halving event, there is a pattern. And that pattern is heading towards the right path of constructing impactful use cases with the use of the blockchain.

What's next? Blockchained social media?

If social media is next, could HIVE be catapulted to the top-10 list?

Is HIVE next?

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