Polygon (Previously Matic), has been the second Ethereum compatible chain after BSC that has taken off. It had a big growth back in the summer of 2021, and in the recent weeks we are seeing some nice price action again.

One of the key things that has happened on the Polygon ecosystem is the plan for adapting a zero knowledge proof (ZKP) rollups. This technology is debated a lot in the Ethereum ecosystem and should provide answer to the scaling issues that Ethereum is facing.

Polygon is now also getting into the ZK rollups arena with a recent acquisition of a ZK startup worth $400M.

ZK-rollups enable transactions to be processed but don’t require all transaction data to be posted on Ethereum. This helps to reduce the block space used on Ethereum — enabling it to scale — and reduces gas fees.

Let’s take a look at the data on the Polygon network and see what has been happening in the last period.

The data presented here is mainly from polygonscan charts.

We will be looking at:

• Number of Addresses
• Active Addresses
• Daily Transactions
• Fees
• Contracts

The period that we are looking into is from the beginning of 2021.

Number Of Addresses

One of the key metrics for crypto projects is the number of wallets.
First the overall number of wallets.

As we see from the chart the number of addresses increased a lot in the year. The growth started in June 2021 and it has been almost linear since then. The highest growth of addresses has been in September, and a small slow down in the recent months.

At the moment Polygon has 120M wallet addresses and most of them were created in the year. An unprecedented growth! For comparison Ethereum at the moment has 180M wallets and that is the highest number of wallets a blockchain has in all the crypto space.

If we take a look at the new daily wallets we get this.

We can notice the spikes in daily created wallets since the summer and the record reached in September 2021. A slow down since then and a few spikes again in the recent days.

At the peak there was more then 2M wallets created per day.

Active Addresses

What’s more interesting in times like this is how many wallets are transacting. Volatility should increase the numbers of active wallets. How many of those 120M addresses are actually active?

A steady growth in the number of active wallets here with some spikes in September. At the moment the number od active wallets is around 300k, although on occasions it has reached more then 1M.

Again, for comparison ETH has somewhere between 500k to 700k active daily wallets at the moment.

Daily Transactions

The activity on the network is mostly represented by the number of daily transactions.

An explosive growth back in June, and a downtrend since then. The number of daily transactions has reached a record high of 9M per day in the summer, while in the recent period it is around 4M.
ETH has been around 1.2M in the period.

Fees

Polygon is known for its very low fees, that has been the lowest in the industry to under one cent, lower then BSC. Here is the chart.

The above are the total daily fees in MATIC.

A steady constant growth in the fees. At the moment the fees are around 50k MATIC per day, which is around 100k USD. Back in the day they were around 10k, so they have grown quite a lot. Still much lower than the ETH fees that are counted in dozen of millions per day.

Contracts

Polygon as Ethereum is a smart contract platform so here is the chart for verified contracts per day.

The number of daily contracts has been steady around 200 per day.

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Polygon seems to be making a second wave after the first initial one in the summer. Meanwhile a lot of native ETH apps have moved to Polygon as well. Apps like Aave, Curve, Sushi and the no.1 NFT market Opensea. There have been a lot of smart contract platforms emerging this year, due to the high ETH fees, but I found a lot of them missing with dApps and an overall ecosystem. Polygon seems to catch up on the ETH apps and together with BSC are still one of the best ETH alternatives IMO.

All the best @dalz

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