MATIC will be upgraded to "POL", what are the highlights of the new token?

2024-07-19 11:51

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Original title: "MATIC officially changed its name to "POL", Polygon announced the launch of the mainnet upgrade on September 4, what are the highlights of the new token?"

Original author: Zhang joy, BlockTempo

Polygon, the Ethereum expansion solution, released a new proposal in June last year, intending to upgrade the original main chain Polygon PoS to zkEVM Validium, and proposed a major update to 2.0 the following month, proposing to upgrade the native token MATIC to POL to support the ecological protocols Polygon PoS, Polygon Supernets and Polygon zkEVM.

Polygon community agrees to upgrade MATIC to POL

Just yesterday evening (18th), Polygon officially announced on the social platform X that the community has agreed to the proposal to upgrade MATIC to POL, and the upgrade is scheduled to be officially launched on the mainnet on September 4.

Polygon officials added that they had launched a testnet upgrade on July 17 to identify and fix potential problems.

· At the same time, the official reminds users that MATIC holders on Polygon PoS do not need to take any action in this upgrade

· However, for users holding MATIC on Ethereum, Polygon zkEVM and exchanges, including pledgers, delegators and LST holders, they may need to take action to upgrade MATIC to POL. The specific operation method can be found in the official announcement of Polygon.

What is the use of POL?

For this upgrade, Polygon officials said earlier this month that POL will be the next generation of Polygon's native token and governance token, with the goal of protecting, coordinating and developing the Polygon ecosystem. POL’s utility will span all Polygon protocols, including Polygon PoS, zkEVM, and Supernets:

It will allow the scale of protocol participants (i.e. roles) to scale, supporting thousands of Polygon chains without sacrificing security.

The redesigned protocol architecture will make the Polygon network infinitely scalable, and users and developers will have a frictionless experience between any of the protocols in it.

In addition, staking POL in the future can also bring three different rewards, including protocol rewards, transaction fees, and additional rewards. In addition to verifying multiple chains, validators can also play multiple roles on a single chain, including generating zero-knowledge proofs and participating in the Data Availability Committee. The biggest changes for validators are the following two points:

· Validators can verify multiple chains.

· Each chain can provide multiple roles (and corresponding rewards) for validators.

Polygon emphasized in the upgrade announcement that in the initial stage of upgrading MATIC to POL, POL will replace MATIC as the native Gas and staking token of Polygon PoS; in the subsequent stage, POL will play a key role in AggLayer, the core component of Polygon 2.0 that focuses on blockchain interoperability.

MATIC fell 5.94% in the past 24 hours

However, after Polygon released the token upgrade announcement, its token MATIC did not perform well in the past 24 hours. Overall, it still followed Bitcoin in a downward trend. At the time of writing, it was reported at $0.514, a drop of 5.94%.

On the other hand, MATIC faced heavy regulatory pressure from the US SEC as early as mid-June last year, and was repeatedly classified as a security by the SEC, causing its price to collapse at the time. Although the official response stated that Polygon was developed and deployed outside the United States, it remains unknown whether MATIC can escape the pressure of US regulators after upgrading to POL.