NEWSLETTER
Gas fees on ethereum Layer-2 Polygon surged more than 1,000% to peak at $0.10 as users flooded the network with minting Ordinals-inspired tokens called POLS.
In a post on (nft) based on Polygon. collection.
What’s going on? @0xPolygon Point of sale chain? 6 million transactions in the last 24 hours. 170 TPS on average. 1mn+ MATIC burned by the protocol. The chain ran smoothly, gas rates went crazy, but there were no reorgs or 0 blocks etc.
I heard there’s a Baby Shark launch game, could that be it…?
-Sandeep Nailwal | deep. polygon (@sandeepnailwal) November 16, 2023
The reason for the increase in network activity and the sudden increase in gas fees seems to come mainly from a frenzy of enthusiasm to mint the new POLS token.
Data from Dune Analytics showed that the flurry of POLS minting activity coincided with more than 102 million MATIC tokens (MATIC), worth $86 million at current prices, being used as gas.
The POLS token is based on a protocol called PRC-20, which works similarly to the BRC-20 token standard derived from bitcoin Ordinals.
According to data from ethereum data provider Virtual Machine EVM, only 8.7% of the total POLS supply has been minted, with just over 18,100 holders claiming the token.
Related: bitcoin Ordinals See Binance Listing Resurgence
At the time of this publication, Polygon gas rates have returned to their usual levels, settling at around 882 gwei. Gas fees quantify the amount of computing effort required to perform a transaction on a given blockchain, where 1 gwei is approximately equivalent to 0.000000001 MATIC.
The bitcoin network witnessed a similar, albeit longer, surge in activity in May of this year following the launch of the Ordinals protocol, which allowed users to mint NFTs directly on the bitcoin blockchain.
The resulting frenzy over Ordinals nft and BRC-20 tokens saw bitcoin fees reach levels not seen since April 2021, a development that saw more traditionally-minded Bitcoiners like Samson Mow and Adam Back dismiss the nft protocol and the token standard as a waste.
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