2024 Was Web3's Big Breakout Year, Led by Projects on Polygon PoS

Polygon dApps had a breakout year in 2024.

While your uncles and grandmother were tracking the US presidential race on Polymarket, a predictions market that accurately called the election, your cousins were playing MATR1X FIRE, a play and earn mobile shooting game. Courtyard.io digitized collectibles, like a first-edition Charizard, by putting them onchain (and in a Brinks vault). And Assetera's MiFID-compliant platform began collaborating with Backed Finance to enable blockchain based trading of traditional securities (beginning with Nvidia, Coinbase and S&P 500).

This is just a taste of what it feels like to go mainstream—with support from the Polygon Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network.

Polygon PoS helps builders breakout with high-quality user experience and bleeding-edge features like account abstraction—all combined with the stability of low fees and fast finality. Some data about Polygon PoS to chew on, compared to the end of 2023 (and pulled from onchain analytics tools, like Dune):

• Nearly 55M active wallets (+66%)
• 1B+ txns (+17%)
• NFTs: ~57M txns (+150%) and $18.4B (+125%)
• RWAs: $539M market cap (+26% and top 3) 
• Gaming: 223M txns (+950%) and 10.6M wallets (+698%)

Network usage alongside the growth of major breakout moments.

But maintaining a stable, secure, and low-fee platform that scales Ethereum takes constant innovation. This year saw major upgrades, like the Napoli and Ahmedabad hardforks, which improved user experience, stabilized the network, and added new Ethereum features before Ethereum. 

Let’s look at ten breakout moments on Polygon PoS that helped turn 2024 into a banner year for crypto—then pivot to where Polygon PoS is going in the future. 

Top breakout moments on Polygon PoS in 2024

• Polymarket helped crypto go mainstream: Polymarket became a case study in how much maligned Web3 user experience can be jiu-jitsued into the best front-end prediction market platform in the world. With 26.2M transactions and $8.8B in volume by the end-of-year, traditional political analysts and economists along with millions of everyday users were turning to the platform to peek into the future. ‍
• Stablecoin integrations translated to realworld use cases: Stablecoins and payments on Polygon PoS were core integrations that drove real world adoption. But don’t just trust us; verify. The data shows that 2024 was an important year for stablecoin integration on Polygon PoS, with volume that exceeded major chains like Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Base.

• Games built on Polygon PoS went exponential: With more than 4.7M downloads and 138M transactions, MATR1X FIRE showed the world what Web3 gaming adoption can look like. Wilder World ended 2024 in the top 10 most wishlisted games on the Epic Games Store, dropping a trailer that ensures 2025 is going to be even bigger for this team, while Gas Hero, from the team behind STEPN, launched in January 2024 with great expectations and execution. Finally, Planet IX continued to grow its dedicated gamer base with its fusion of gaming and staking. 

• Courtyard.io put more than 500k physical collectibles onchain: With more than 1.9M transactions, Courtyard.io shook up traditional collectible marketplaces by allowing users to mint NFTs, digitizing physical objects and securely vaulting them with Brinks. A lot of eyes are turned on a first edition Charizard, with seamlessness of crypto rails. 
• DEXes neared $60B in volume, while Quickswap integrated across chains: Polygon DEX volume hit $59B, with Uniswap and Pancakeswap leading the way. But major traffic continued to flow to Quickswap, a leading DEX across chains built with Polygon CDK. 
• Spiko entered the chat with tokenized treasury bills: Spiko is rebuilding capital markets infrastructure with crypto rails—starting with money markets. Since launch last April, Spiko has seen net flows of more than €244M in tokenized treasury bills for Eurozone countries and $47M in tokenized U.S. treasury bills.
• Verify by Fox Corporation teamed up with TIME as first publishing partner: Verify, built by Fox Corporation, is an open source protocol to prove the origin of registered media. After it registered 106k articles and 300k pieces of content on Polygon PoS, Fox announced in 2024 that Verify would build a dedicated chain using Polygon CDK. More sovereignty, more media, more adoption. 
• Mintstars gave adult entertainment content creators more power: Putting crypto rails on an OnlyFans-like platform has a ton of advantages. No chargebacks, sex positive, and with creators keeping 100% of their earnings, Mintstars is disrupting a huge global industry. Check out this profile of the company by the London School of Economics. 

The future of Polygon PoS is aggregated 

Early last year, the community began discussing a proposal for connecting Polygon PoS to the Agglayer using SP1, the general purpose zkVM built by Succinct Labs with Plonky3 under the hood. 

Connection through the Agglayer means all dApps on Polygon PoS also tap into the liquidity and user bases of every other connected chain.

As the number of chains grows, so will the arena in which dApps on Polygon PoS—and beyond-–can reach escape velocity. 

2024 was a stepping stone; 2025 is the year of aggregation.

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