After a record-breaking day in terms of transactions on the Polygon (MATIC) network, transaction fees have skyrocketed. The reason for this craze seems to lie in POLS, the new PRC-20 protocol supposedly inspired by Ordinals.
Fees on Polygon soar after record transactions
With cryptocurrencies soaring in recent weeks, one token has benefited greatly from the favorable atmosphere: Polygon’s MATIC. But on the bangs of this rise, activity on the network has gone so wild in recent days, that even Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal wondered what could be going on:
What is going on on @0xPolygon POS chain? 6m transactions in last 24 hrs. 170 TPS on average. 1mn+ MATIC burnt by the protocol. The chain worked smoothly, gas fees went crazy though but no reorgs or 0 blocks etc.
I hear there is some game Baby Shark Launching, could that be the…
– Sandeep Nailwal | sandeep. polygon (@sandeepnailwal) November 16, 2023
Such is the transaction peak, that the day of November 16 far exceeded the bull run levels of 2021, reaching almost 16.45 million transactions, where the previous record was 9.18 million :
Figure 1 – Daily transactions on Polygon
Sandeep Nailwal reported an average of 170 transactions per second and more than a million MATICs burned by the burn system, but that despite this strain, the network continued to operate normally.
Faced with this influx, fees exploded on the blockchain, reaching as high as $0.10 for a single transaction. At the time of writing, the price of gas was even higher than normal, ranging from 600 to 1,000 Gwei.
Research by our colleagues at Cointelegraph suggests that the reason for this craze seems to lie in a new protocol called PRC-20 and its POLS token. This protocol is said to be inspired by Bitcoin’s Ordinals (BTC), to report the principle on Polygon.
While this is still unclear at present, Dune’s data shows that the 10% mint of the total POLS offering was responsible for 102.7 million MATIC spent on gas fees :
Gas spent on POLS mint
On the other hand, the price of MATIC is currently $0.84, down 6.6% over the last 24 hours. With a capitalization of $7.9 billion, the token ranks 12th in the cryptocurrency rankings.
