Polygon ‘Becoming Independent of Ethereum’ as dApps Grow 100x Over Past Year

Popular Layer-2 scaling solution Polygon is inarguably on a growth trajectory. The number of decentralisation applications (dApps) running on its scalable network has significantly risen in the past 12 months and most of those dApps were natively launched on the network, meaning Polygon is becoming less dependent on Ethereum, according to recent data from Alchemy. 

Polygon Growth 2x Ethereum

The data revealed the rate of adoption for Polygon is increasing 2x faster than Ethereum at a comparable time in its history. For context, the number of protocols launched on Polygon has increased to about 3,000, which represents 9,900 percent or 100x growth on the previous 30 recorded in October 2020. 

More interestingly, 62 percent of all the dApps are Polygon-native, meaning they are only hosted on top of Polygon. QuickSwap is one such platform, a fork of Uniswap that was natively launched on Polygon to harness its properties for quick and cheap trades. The remaining 38 percent, which includes SushiSwap, Curve, Aave, Balancer and others, exists on both Polygon and Ethereum. 

Growth Strategy Relies Less on Gas

Polygon employs several solutions to enable developers to scale their projects on Ethereum. The growing number of Polygon-native dApps simply points out that more developers are confident and are relying on the layer-2 network more than Ethereum, which suffers expensive gas prices following the frenzy in the non-fungible token (NFT) and Decentralised Finance (DeFi) markets.

We can expect the number to skyrocket from here, as Polygon recently announced plans to onboard the next 100 million users into its DeFi ecosystem. To achieve this, Polygon has committed about US$100 million to develop a decentralized autonomous organisation (DAO) to also improve the DeFi experience.