Smol panda, who is 4, seen me withdraw cash from a cash machine for the first time today
He thinks it is now either a magic box on the wall that grants free money or some sort of slot machine
Either way he has a terrific job experience and wants to play again
@DerekBarrera Absolutely. @CryptoRocky always called it DeFi Lego where people would build cool stuff, then people build cool stuff on top of the cool stuff.
I don’t want to live in a world without Lego’s
Really interesting to see all the smaller chains shift to a “we’ll build it ourselves so we get all the revenue” mindset
Totally opposite of the last cycle, where people realised that tens or thousands of builders brought users and more dev attention to your chain. Flywheel gone
the easiest way to farm engagement on CT is to become a chain maxi, you defend everything no matter what 24/7 but eventually you stop learning.
it becomes harder to admit another ecosystem did something better, learn from competing ideas or explore new tech objectively.
“The market never priced in Polymarket” is a very strange argument when Polymarket + related contracts became such a huge part of Polygon’s actual activity footprint.
And while we’re all making assumptions here, it’s probably worth asking: Where would Polygon PoS metrics actually be today if Polymarket hadn’t existed over the last few years?
Because I keep seeing this contradiction where Polymarket activity counts when defending Polygon’s numbers but simultaneously its departure supposedly barely changes anything from a valuation perspective. That doesn’t really make sense.
If a chain loses one of its largest sources of:
• fees
• bridged liquidity
• stablecoin movement
• active users
• mindshare
…then yes, markets eventually price that in whether people consciously realise it or not.
And to be clear, I’m not saying payments/stablecoin abstraction is useless. Polygon are seemingly building important infrastructure. Nobody is denying that.
I’m saying it’s one of the hardest verticals in crypto to monetise meaningfully because the txs are extremely gas-light and every chain can support stablecoins by default.. and if the tertiary parts of it cost too much, it’s no better than tradfi.
You’re kind of proving my point though.
1, Even your own wording historically was that Polymarket takes “some” fees/activity from Polygon. In reality it’s clearly a substantial amount especially once you include the downstream effects from bridges, stablecoin movement, routing contracts, etc.
2, I actually agree TVL is mostly a vanity metric. But optics matter too. Markets absolutely react when bridged TVL, active addresses and ecosystem activity fall off.
3, Exactly. Most Polymarket users don’t even realise they’re using Polygon because it’s abstracted away through bridges and third-party infra. Which also means if that activity disappears, a huge amount of associated contract interaction/revenue disappears with it. The users don’t even need to buy POL for gas.
4, And this is where Polygon’s situation is harder than most chains. Most chains still lean heavily into traders/speculators because that’s what actually generates meaningful fees and has gas intensive tx’s. Polygon has spent years pushing that crowd away from PoS. Most Polygon-native altcoins/projects have already died, left, or are in survival mode at this point.
Payments/stablecoin abstraction is useful tech, but it’s also probably the hardest vertical in crypto to monetise meaningfully because it’s extremely gas-light by nature and every chain can do it by default. Sending USDC around just does not produce the same economic activity as an active onchain trading/speculation ecosystem.
5, As above, polygon has spent meaningful resources in actively discouraging traders, memecoins, games.. really anything outside of payments.
The knock on effect is that the speculators, projects pairing their tokens with POL, builders and everyone else what would go buy POL to use it on polygon, buy tokens on polygon or really do anything with POL except hold a little for gas (if it’s not being abstracted!) are being shipped off with them.
I was moreso talking about the “many other metrics”, TVL would drop maybe 80% between those two, active addresses would follow, bridged TVL would take a huge hit..
There are substantial knock on effects, even down to bridges for folks trying to use polymarket.
Moreso pointing out that right now, only about 2% of the chain revenue is via stablecoin transfers — the literal cheapest standard tx to do.
Pretending polymarket etc leaving wouldn’t have a substantial effect on the network is just keeping your head in the sand