According to Coinbase, more than a million of its wallet users also use DeFi protocols such as Compound, Aave, Uniswap not to mention popular NFT marketplaces such as Zora and OpenSea.
Now a publicly traded company, Coinbase announced on its blog that its wallet platforms would now support the Polygon Network (an Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution) in amove to advance towards an app store experience for decentralized applications.
In its announcement, Coinbase acknowledged the high transaction fees and long confirmation times that have been prevalent on the Ethereum ecosystem with long waiting periods as the workload on the Ethereum networks increases.
Skyrocketing dApp fees
Everything decentralized finance-related has been having a moment recently with the emergence of lucrative DeFi protocols like Uniswap, Aave, and Compound allowing users to earn rewards from providing liquidity or lending and borrowing.
As a result, fees on the Ethereum network have skyrocketed with emerging incidences of people paying as high as $100 per transaction.
Polygon has since emerged as one of the leading scaling solutions to the bloated Ethereum network.
Polygon, a layer 2 scaling solution, is creating ‘side channels’ on the Ethereum network, enabling multiple transactions to take place off-chain with optimized transactional throughput.
The platform also has a new developer interface that is expected to make it easier for developers to implement Polygon into their DApps, providing an alternative solution for high gas fees and long wait times associated with Ethereum.
In theory, this would allow for innumerable micro-transactions between two participants in a P2P manner within an Oracle-based framework thus lowering fees significantly on the Ethereum mainnet.
The future of DeFi
With the addition of the Polygon network on Coinbase Wallets and mobile apps, users will be able to perform faster and cheaper transactions while having easier access to dApps on the Polygon network.
Developers will also have an easy time integrating the Coinbase wallets into their dApps thus adding efficiency and speed to the user sign-up processes. This will create a huge boost to DeFi apps and applications on the Ethereum mainnet.
So far, Polygon has been developing positively with an ever-increasing number of developers showing interest in the platform.
With Coinbase’s support, other major institutional players will likely be encouraged to dip their feet in the development and advancement of DeFi going forward.
The addition of Polygon’s Matic to the Coinbase wallet is also a plus for the centralized exchange as it brings the idea of an app store for decentralized applications much closer to reality.
With the billions worth of economic activity running on dApps, the move by Coinbase will allow the company to tap into a growing ecosystem of dApps.
Matic Price action
Despite the bullish news, the Matic token (Polygon’s native cryptocurrency) has not seen any significant positive price movement as the token has continued on a sideways trend. In unison with other tokens in the entire crypto space, Matic fell from its all-time high price above $2.4 per token to a 50% drop at its current price of about $1.2. Matic’s token total supply is set at 10 billion tokens with a current market capitalization of $6.472 billion.
