Polygon commissions skyrocket by 1000%

On November 16, gas prices on the Polygon network jumped nearly 1,000% to levels of around 5,000 Gwei (~$0.1) as users began actively creating Ordinals-inspired POLS tokens.

Blockchain activity also increased sharply, with the number of transactions increasing from 2.89 million to an all-time high of 16.5 million.

Number of daily Polygon transactions. Data: Polygonscan.

At the same time, commissions at Polygon, even during peak load, did not exceed those of Ethereum. The transfer fee in the second largest blockchain by capitalization reached $30.

At the time of writing, Polygon gas prices have stabilized to the standard 1000 Gwei.

The surge is driven by the popularity of the recently launched PRC-20 standard, which allows for the creation of non-fungible tokens similar to Ordinals on the Bitcoin network.

According to the dashboard Dune, since November 15, over 102 million MATIC (~$87.5 million) have been spent on minting POLS. The most popular collection is Baby Shark.

The amount of gas spent on creating POLS. Data: Dune.

PRC-20 works almost identically to BRC-20, however the Polygon engine uses transaction call data to generate NFTs.

Polygon co-founder Sandeep Naival responded to the situation. He noticed that the number of transactions per second at a certain point reached 170.

What is going on @0xPolygon POS chain? 6m transactions in last 24 hrs. 170 TPS on average. 1mn+ MATIC burnt by the protocol. The chain worked smoothly, gas fees went crazy though but no reorgs or 0 blocks etc.

I hear there is some game Baby Shark Launching, could that be the…

— Sandeep Nailwal | sandeep. polygon 💜 (@sandeepnailwal) November 16, 2023

Previously, the Polygon team launched a smart contract on the Ethereum mainnet for the new Polygon Ecosystem Token (POL), which is intended to replace MATIC. Details of the coin replacement proposal emerged in September.