Ethereum scaling solution Polygon released a new proposal on the 21st of last month to upgrade its original mainnet, PolygonPoS, to zkEVM Validium and stated that the upgrade will run on the mainnet by the end of the first quarter of 2024.
Recently, Polygon has once again announced relevant news to the market: the project proposes to upgrade the name of its native token #MATIC to #POL to support its ecosystem protocols: Polygon PoS, Polygon Supernets, and Polygon zkEVM.
According to the official statement, POL is the next generation native token of Polygon, aimed at protecting, coordinating, and developing the Polygon ecosystem.
The utility of POL will cover all Polygon protocols, including Polygon PoS, zkEVM, and Supernets.
"It can allow the scale of protocol participants (i.e. roles) to expand, support thousands of Polygon chains without sacrificing security."
However, upgrading from MATIC to POL requires approval from the Polygon community.
The official claims that if the upgrade proposal is approved, the redesigned protocol architecture will give the Polygon network unlimited scalability, and users and developers will be able to have a frictionless experience between any of its protocols.
According to the official explanation, staking POL in the future can bring three different rewards, including protocol rewards, transaction fees, and additional rewards.
In addition to validating multiple chains, validators can also play multiple roles on a single chain, including generating zero-knowledge proofs and participating in the Data Availability Committee.
The two biggest changes for validators are:
Validators can validate multiple chains.
Each chain can provide validators with multiple roles (and corresponding rewards).
-How will the transition from MATIC to POL be made in the future?
The official statement indicates that an upgrade smart contract will be released. Users can send their MATIC tokens to the contract, and an equal amount of POL will be automatically returned. If the community reaches a consensus to support the proposal, the transition is expected to begin in a few months.