Polygon (MATIC) in the last 48 hours has recorded its highest level in gas fees and transaction volume due to PRC-20, a new token standard that operates similarly to the Bitcoin Ordinals-derived BRC-20 token standard.
According to data from Polygonscan, daily transaction volume on Polygon has jumped from 2-2.5 million transactions per day over the past several weeks to 6.1 million transactions on Nov 15, then continued to rise to 16.4 million transactions on Nov 16 – the highest level in Polygon’s 3-year history, surpassing the record of 9 million transactions in July 2021.
Meanwhile, gas fees on Polygon on Nov 16 sometimes rallied to 7,000 gwei, many times the normal level of 200-300 gwei. Token swaps on this blockchain once rose to $5 before reducing to $0.5.
The drive force for these increases, as we mentioned above, come from PRC-20, a new token standard that is similar to Bitcoin Ordinals’ BRC-20. Many users have been minting PRC-20 tokens named POLS, a token that is intended to replace the ecosystem’s current token, MATIC.
Similar to BRC-20, PRC-20 has an “inscription” mechanism that uses transactional calldata on the Polygon blockchain to store images or data into each block, turning them into unique NFTs. It is still unknown who is behind PRC-20, but most PRC-20 updates on Twitter X come from the Chinese crypto community.
Polygon Polygon has been taking preparatory steps to upgrade Polygon 2.0, including replacing MATIC tokens with POL, implementing a re-staking mechanism, upgrading Polygon PoS chain to layer-2 zkEVM, and more. The project recently also announced a $90 million fund for ecosystem development. It also partnered with other organizations including OKX to build layer-2, developing the zkWASM solution for NEAR Protocol and supporting social network Web3 Lens Protocol deploy V2 upgrade.
MATIC this week once surged to $0.98, the highest threshold since late April 2023. It is trading around $0.86.
