$MATIC: 37,000+ dApps Run on Polygon, Which Is 4X the Number at Start of 2022

The Polygon team announced on Wednesday (August 10) that according to data from Web3 development platform Alchemy, there are currently over 37,000 decentralized applications (dApps) powered by Polygon.

Polygon is “a decentralised Ethereum scaling platform that enables developers to build scalable user-friendly dApps with low transaction fees without ever sacrificing on security.” The Polygon Lightpaper describes Polygon as “a protocol and a framework for building an connecting Ethereum-compatible blockchain networks.”

On 18 May 2021, Independent Ethereum educator, investor and advisor Anthony Sassano took to Twitter to clear up some of the confusion around Polygon (e.g. some people refer to Polygon as a sidechain to Ethereum, while others call it an L2 blockchain). Below are a few highlights from that Twitter thread:

• “There is the Matic Plasma Chain and the Polygon PoS chain. The vast majority of the activity is happening on the PoS chain.“
• “The PoS chain is what people refer to as a ‘sidechain’ to Ethereum because it has its own permissionless validator set (100+ who are staking MATIC) which means it doesn’t use Ethereum’s security (aka Ethereum’s PoW).“
• “The PoS chain goes beyond a standard sidechain and actually relies on and commits itself to Ethereum (what some people may call a ‘commit-chain’). It relies on Ethereum because all of the validator/staking logic for the PoS chain lives as a smart contract on Ethereum.“
• “This means that if the Ethereum network went offline, the Polygon PoS chain would also go offline. Secondly, the PoS chain actually commits/checkpoints itself to Ethereum every so often.“
• “This has 2 benefits: it provides Ethereum-based finality to the PoS chain & it can help the chain recover in case of catastrophic event. This also means that Polygon is paying Ethereum to use its blockspace (in ETH) & paying for it to secure the contracts & checkpointing.“

According to Polygon’s blog post, “the number of monthly active teams, the most direct measure of developer activity on the Polygon PoS chain, clocked over 11,800 at the end of July, up from just over 8,000 in March. Furthermore, Alchemy data “shows that 74% of teams integrated exclusively on Polygon, while 26% deployed on both Polygon and Ethereum.”

Polygon’s blog post went to say that “with over 142 million unique user addresses and $5 billion in assets secured, Polygon PoS has processed more than 1.6 billion transactions till date.” It also mentioned some of the more notable Web3 projects currently using powered by Polygon’s PoS chain, namely Aave, Uniswap V3, and OpenSea.

On Tuesday (August 9), Polygon announced that South Korea based online game publisher Neowiz Games will be using Polygon to power its next generation Web3 gaming platform Intella X: