Polygon’s Breakthrough Year: 2021 in Review

Polygon Labs

January 3, 2022

Welcome to 2022! This is shaping up to be another amazing year for the Polygon ecosystem. But after an absolutely breakthrough 2021, it's got big shoes to fill.

Over the past year, Polygon made big strides toward accomplishing its mission of bringing the next billion users to Ethereum. The network’s low-fee infrastructure attracted some of the biggest projects in decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), including Aave, SushiSwap and OpenSea. Adoption soared with unique addresses topping 120 million. And the core development team is making sure the growth will continue into the foreseeable future by assembling an unrivaled collection of zero knowledge efforts under one roof.

Let's take a look back at everything our community has accomplished in the past 12 months.

January

Avegotchi chooses Polygon to power its DeFi staked NFT ecosystem.

February

Rebrands from Matic Network to Polygon with a mission to become the premier scaling solution for Etherem.

March

Tesla’s Elon Musk jumps into the NFT fray minting a Tweet on Valuables, a Polygon-powered platform operated by Cent.
Twitter founder and then-CEO Jack Dorsey sells an NFT of the first-ever Tweet for $2.9 million on Valuables.
The number of unique addresses on Polygon PoS tops 200,000.
Daily transactions top 300,000.

April

Curve launches on Polygon.
Aave goes live on Polygon.
Decentraland, a 3D virtual world platform, chooses Polygon as its scaling solution.

May

SushiSwap goes live on Polygon.
Unveils Polygon SDK, a go-to framework for building Ethereum compatible blockchains, sidechains and general scaling solutions.
Polygon blockchain dataset is made available in Google BigQuery.
Mark Cuban, a legendary investor and one of the sharks on ABC’s Shark Tank, invests in Polygon.

June

Announces Polygon Avail, a general-purpose, scalable data-availability solution.
Sandbox, a Metaverse project where players can play, build, own, and monetize their virtual experiences, chooses Polygon as a scaling solution.
OpenSea, the world’s biggest NFT marketplace, integrates with Polygon.
Daily transactions of Polygon PoS reach a record at 9 million.

July

Balancer, a decentralised asset management platform, goes live on Polygon.
Launches Polygon Studios, a Web 3 gaming and NFT arm.

August

Hermez Network joins Polygon to accelerate development of a zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine.
Establishes $1 billion strategic fund dedicated to ZK-related efforts.

September

Coinbase announces plans to integrate Polygon PoS as their first scaling solution.
Dharma, an Ethereum wallet that lets users invest in DeFi with U.S. dollars, goes live on Polygon.
Teams up with EY to co-develop Polygon Nightfall, a privacy-focused scaling solution aimed at enterprises.
Mina Protocol comes to Polygon to enable privacy-preserving applications.

October

DraftKings announces plans to build an NFT marketplace on Polygon
The number of decentralized apps (dApps) developing on Polygon reaches 3,000 from 30 a year earlier.
Polygon PoS unique addresses count crosses 100 million.

November

Announces Polygon Miden, an upcoming STARK-based, EVM-compatible rollup.

December

RECUR taps Polygon as the official blockchain partner for primary minting.
Announces a $400 million deal with pioneering ZK startup Mir and the creation of Polygon Zero.
Launches $200 million initiative with Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six to back projects at the intersection of social media and Web3.
Uniswap comes to Polygon! All V3 contracts go live on Polygon PoS mainnet.

And there’s much in store for 2022. EIP-1559 is bringing a much-requested upgrade to the network that will introduce burning of MATIC tokens and better fee visibility. Polygon Hermez and Polygon Miden launch public testnets in the second and third quarter respectively. The Opera browser will integrate on Polygon, potentially onboarding millions of new users. And much much more. This is just the beginning!

So tune it to our blog to keep up with the most recent developments for Polygon.

Let’s bring the world to Ethereum!