Original title: "MATIC officially changed its name to "POL", Polygon announced that the mainnet upgrade will be launched on 9/4, what are the highlights of the new token?"
Original author: Zhang joy, BlockTempo
Ethereum scaling solution Polygon released a new proposal in June last year, planning to upgrade the original main chain Polygon PoS to zkEVM Validium, and proposed a major update towards 2.0 the following month, proposing to upgrade the native token MATIC to POL to support the ecological protocols Polygon PoS, Polygon Supernets and Polygon zkEVM.
Polygon community agrees to upgrade MATIC to POL
Just yesterday evening (18th), Polygon officially announced on the social platform X that the community has agreed to the proposal to upgrade MATIC to POL, and the upgrade is scheduled to be officially launched on the mainnet on September 4th.
Polygon officials added that they had launched a testnet upgrade on July 17 to identify and fix potential issues.
At the same time, the official reminds users that MATIC holders on Polygon PoS do not need to take any action in this upgrade
However, users who hold MATIC on Ethereum, Polygon zkEVM, and exchanges, including stakers, delegators, and LST holders, may need to take action to upgrade MATIC to POL. The specific operation method can be found in the official announcement of Polygon.
What is POL used for?
Regarding this upgrade, Polygon officials said earlier this month that POL will be the next generation of Polygon's native token and governance token, with the goal of protecting, coordinating and developing the Polygon ecosystem. POL's utility will cover all Polygon protocols, including Polygon PoS, zkEVM and Supernets:
It allows the scale of protocol participants (i.e. roles) to scale to support thousands of Polygon chains without sacrificing security.
The redesigned protocol architecture will make the Polygon network infinitely scalable, and users and developers will have a frictionless experience between any of the protocols in it.
In addition, pledging POL in the future can also bring three different rewards, including protocol rewards, transaction fees, and additional rewards. In addition to verifying 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 biggest changes for validators are the following two points:
Validators can validate multiple chains.
Each chain can offer multiple roles (and corresponding rewards) to validators.
In the upgrade announcement, Polygon emphasized that in the initial stage of upgrading MATIC to POL, POL will replace MATIC as the native Gas and staking token of Polygon PoS; in the subsequent stage, POL will play a key role in AggLayer, a core component of Polygon 2.0 that focuses on blockchain interoperability.
MATIC fell 5.94% in the past 24 hours
However, after Polygon released the token upgrade announcement, the performance of its token MATIC in the past 24 hours was not ideal. Overall, it continued to decline along with Bitcoin. At the time of writing, it was reported at $0.514, down 5.94%.
On the other hand, MATIC faced heavy regulatory pressure from the US SEC as early as mid-June last year, and was repeatedly classified as a security by the SEC, causing its price to collapse at the time. Although the official response stated that Polygon was developed and deployed outside the United States, it remains unknown whether MATIC can escape the pressure of US regulators after upgrading to POL.
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