Polygon’s Journey in First Half of 2022: Developer Recap

Seasons change, and the familiar comforts of one’s routine give way to new habits while the weather around us shifts.

Perhaps the usually optimistic GM in your feed feels a little glum. Maybe the energy in your squad is running on a low current. We know the last few weeks have been hard for developers, creators, and builders who work in Web3. Speculative capital has exited the macro markets at a historical volume, making clear we’ve entered a harsh new climate.

Polygon has embraced this new turn by focusing on what matters most – building. We’ve entered the season of building for the future.

Things move fast in Web3. A single week can feel like a year, and six months can feel like an eon. If you blink, you end up missing a lot. So for this post, we’ll become archeologists and dig through on your behalf to bring out the greatest hits of the last six months. But we’re also here to celebrate developers who’ve embraced and enriched our ecosystem.

Looking back at the first six months of the year, Polygon’s Head of Strategy Sanket Shah remarked on the deep reservoir of talent and creativity that’s ready to build on Polygon. He highlighted how the team has been building grassroots-level connections with developers and supports them with education and resources.  

Polygon Bets Big on Builders  

Here’s an overview of how Polygon has advocated for builders so far this year.

• Total funds Polygon invested in hackathon bounties and Gitcoin commitments: $2 million
• Number of apps running on Polygon: Over 19,000 as of April (up from about 7,000 in January)
• The average number of monthly transactions: 90 million
• Cumulative contract creators: 153,000 and growing
• Expanding the potential creative energy of developers building #onPolygon: Unbounded.

Whether you are a newbie entering the space with a golden idea, or a hackathon-traveled master of Web3 dark arts, Polygon has always made an effort to support your vision. It’s still the early days of Web3, and without the best builders, even the most superior technology could go obsolete. So we have poured time and energy into making a strong community of builders.

Polygon Guilds was launched in January this year and has gone from strength to strength since. Guilds embody our collaborative, squad-it-up spirit where builders get to meet one another at events across the globe to become Web3 explorers. Check out a guild near your, or spin up your own here.

We’ve also launched our free online school, Polygon Academy, to remove any barrier to entry in learning how to build in Web3 on Polygon. Simultaneously, we grew PolygonDAO, the backbone of our community, and added more citizens to Polygon Village, a full stack ecosystem to help devs build and grow.

Polygon Village has teamed up with esteemed partners to offer a cool $100,000 in grants to mature our tech stack while also setting up WAGMI Job Drops in partnership with Devfolio to connect world-class talent with Web3 projects. Our ecosystem job board has exploded with more than 500 open positions currently.

Polygon also loves getting out to meet developers one-on-one. IRL and online, we found you at workshops, hackathons, incubators, jams, Twitter Spaces, #WAGMIonPolygon huddles, and more.

Here are some key moments that stood out in the last six months for us:  

• Polygon set you on the #RoadtoWeb3 with ETH Global at the beginning of the year;
• Starting last December, Polygon committed $1 million to fund public goods on GitCoin, including $100,000 for the most recent round;
• Launched Polygon Fellowship, Class of 2022, with 10,000 applicants for 50 spots;
• Hosted 15 hackathons, leading to hundreds of projects built #onPolygon;
• Helped you succeed at major hackathons, like ETH Denver, ETH Amsterdam, and more. And you showed out for us! At ETH NYC, for instance, 140 projects out of 249 chose to build on Polygon;
• Launched our flagship, online Polygon #BUIDLIT Hackathon, with $500,000 in bounties and prizes.

And there’s still more to come. So keep an eye out for major announcements about our newest initiatives to help you do what you do best: build.

Polygon Goes Green in 2022

Any developer looking to launch a project on Polygon should know we’re authentically committed to fighting the climate crisis.  

Earlier this year, we committed to offsetting Polygon’s cumulative carbon emissions from inception, in order to become climate positive heading into the future. Every NFT minted, every DeFi transaction, any and all gas fees for bridging assets: we’re accounting for the entirety of the network’s energy and CO2 consumption, then offsetting our collective emissions.

Our Green Manifesto describes our commitment to a future worth living. It is a protocol-wide acknowledgment that all economics begins with healthy, functioning ecosystems within a livable climate. So we’re pledging $20 million to fund outstanding community initiatives and projects developing technology to fight global warming.

As a first step, we spent $400,000 in April on high-quality carbon credits and in June offset the equivalent of 104,794 tons of CO2 emissions. We’ll be selectively retiring offsets that meet our strict criteria of additionality and positive environmental impact in the coming months.

Read more: Green Blockchain Summit: Recap & Path Forward

Polygon Leads in Tech and Partnerships

Polygon has been iterating and upgrading its tech stack with a singular vision this year. And we have some revolutionary breakthroughs to share with you.

The $1 billion wager we made on zk-rollups last year has come to fruition with the launch of zkEVM. In the interim, we’ve also made massive, ecosystem-changing strides across a number of fundamentals.

All of this is great news for builders. Each one of our recent technical upgrades deserves a deep dive. The tl;dr is that Polygon is building out infrastructure to make a modular, Ethereum-secured ecosystem thrive. We’re laying the groundwork for use cases that haven’t yet been envisioned.

• Polygon ID
• A self-sovereign identity solution powered by zero-knowledge cryptography that brings huge potential for DAO governance.
• Polygon Avail
• A modular, data availability-focused blockchain that decouples execution from data availability.
• Polygon Nightfall
• Decentralized private transactions for enterprise, built with bleeding edge Optimistic-Zero Knowledge tech that gives businesses a network with privacy.
• Polygon Edge
• Allows out-of-the-box tooling for projects to spin up their own app-specific, EVM-compatible chain.
• Polygon Supernets
• Edge enhanced. Opt-in to shared security, maintenance, and upgrades, with help from Polygon.
• Polygon zkEVM
• The first open-source zk-Rollup providing complete EVM opcode equivalence for a frictionless user experience and the security of Ethereum.

The last six months also saw a dizzying number of huge Web2 and Web3 names announce they’re building on Polygon: from Meta to Flipkart, the NFL to eBay, the love was real, with more to come.

We’re happy they’ve chosen to integrate with our ecosystem and even more excited by the opportunities for developers. Only on Polygon can builders make connections and build with tools that span so many big names in Web2 and Web3—onboarding more users in the process.

Polygon in the Second Half of 2022

We have big plans for the next six months focussing on three key areas – Product, Events, and Accelerators – to onboard a million developers to Polygon’s ecosystem.

1. Product. Major breakthroughs in our product will give developers more power to create the project of their dreams. Stay tuned for Polygon’s revolutionary announcements, particularly in the zk space that will change the entire industry.

2. Events. We also know that supporting you means meeting you in the places you live, hang out and work. Find us in the next six months at major meetups around the world, like ETH Seoul, ETH Mexico, ETH Lisbon, Devcon, and many, many more. Our calendar is event-heavy because we’re more committed to uplifting your building journey than ever.

3. Accelerators. To that end, we’ll be announcing accelerators to hyper-charge the brightest projects in our ecosystem. Significant partnerships in the coming months will sync builders with some of the best minds in the business, supporting you from idea to execution and through the lifecycle of your project.

Ultimately, we want to help developers across the experience spectrum, from those just starting to Web3 masters already well-traveled and iterating projects.

Polygon knows that our success depends on a robust ecosystem of tinkerers, builders, creators, artists, and developers. It’s not enough to have the best technology in this space—though we believe we do!—but we also need the best builders out there, working to make their vision a reality. Our success depends on your success, too.

If you want to learn more about the Polygon ecosystem, tune into our blog or drop us your queries directly at info@polygon.technology. Also, check out our repository and join our Discord server.

Let’s bring the world to Ethereum!

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