Polygon cements its place as the preeminent layer 2 leader after recent merger with Hermez Network

With Ethereum aiming to become the default settlement layer over all the competing layer one blockchains, Polygon (formally Matic) appears to be making the right moves to continue to be its go-to layer 2 scaling solution. Polygon’s acquisition of the highly thought of, decentralised roll-ups platform Hermez Network puts it even further ahead. 

According to Nansen.ai, Polygon’s daily transactions exceed those on Ethereum. On top of this, the Polygon daily gas fees never cost more than $10,000. On Ethereum, users can pay up to $7 million in daily gas fees. 

It would appear that transactions on Polygon are now exceeding the transactions of any other blockchain in the space. One other metric is that developers are adopting Polygon over any other blockchain. In short, Polygon is where most Ethereum transactions will take place. 

The announcement on Friday that Polygon had merged with Hermez Network was an amazing addition to the Polygon ecosystem. The $250 million deal will see Hermez fully integrated with Polygon, including the entire Hermez team, technology, and the $HEZ token (holders will be able to exchange 1 HEZ to 3.5 MATIC). 

Hermez Network is currently the only decentralised blockchain to be using zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup technology, and its integration into the Polygon ecosystem will be welcomed by Polygon holders, users and developers alike. 

According to Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, even with Eth 2.0 in place, the demand in transactions will far exceed the projected 50x increase in capacity of the Ethereum blockchain. 

In fact, he believes that the demand from the likes of blockchain gaming, NFTs, and Wall Street’s incursion into the space, will see a 1000x demand on what Eth 2.0 can provide. In a recent Yahoo Finance interview, he stated: 

“Demand is already orders of magnitude higher than the potential increased capacity of Ethereum, even if it increases by a 100x, the demand still is hundreds of orders of magnitude more than that” 

Mergers in the crypto sector should become far more prevalent in the months and years ahead, as projects seek to gain synergies from each other, enabling them to share technology and ideas, thereby giving them far more of a competitive edge in what is an ultra-fast-moving space. 

A recent Crypto Daily article on this subject told how Unifi Protocol, a leading DeFi platform, merged and integrated with Sesameseed, in order to become the first DeFi platform to offer blockchain node staking as part of its offering. Unifi now operates nodes on seven blockchains, including IoTeX, Icon, Ontology, Harmony, Tron, Waves, and Polygon. 

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.