Polymarket announces the launch of its own L2, is Polygon's ace gone?

Dec 23, 2025 21:44:01

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Original Title: The Economic Calculations Behind Polymarket's Departure from Polygon

Original Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily

On December 22, a dynamic regarding the leading prediction market Polymarket attracted widespread attention in the market—Mustafa, a member of the Polymarket team, confirmed in the Discord community that Polymarket plans to migrate from Polygon and launch an Ethereum Layer 2 network called POLY, which is currently the project's top priority.

An Unanticipated "Breakup"

Polymarket's choice to leave Polygon is not surprising; one is a hot application layer representative, while the other is a gradually declining old layer, and there is a mismatch in market heat and value expectations between the two. As Polymarket gradually grows into a new giant, Polygon's unstable network performance (the latest failure occurred on December 18) and relatively weak ecosystem have objectively limited the former.

For Polymarket, building its own portal means a win-win choice in both product and economic dimensions.

In terms of product, in addition to seeking a more stable operating environment, building its own Layer 2 network allows Polymarket to customize underlying features based on its platform needs, thereby adapting more flexibly to future upgrades and iterations of the platform.

The more significant meaning lies in the economic aspect. Building its own network means Polymarket can consolidate the economic activities and surrounding services derived from its platform into its own system, preventing related value from spilling over to external networks and instead gradually solidifying as its own systemic advantage.

Explicit and Implicit Economic Contributions

As an application layer, Polymarket's explosive growth has brought objective direct economic contributions to Polygon. Data compiled by analyst dash on Dune shows:

Polymarket's active users this month are 419,309, with a historical total of 1,766,193 users;
The total number of transactions this month is 19.63 million, with a historical total of 115 million transactions;
The total transaction volume this month is $1.538 billion, with a historical total transaction volume of $14.3 billion.

As for how to assess Polymarket's contribution to the economic ecosystem of Polygon, Odaily Planet Daily found a rather coincidental ratio while compiling data from both.

First, in terms of locked funds, Defillama data shows that the total value of positions across the Polymarket platform is approximately $326 million, accounting for about a quarter of Polygon's total locked value of $1.19 billion;
Second, regarding gas consumption, Coin Metrics reported last October that transactions related to Polymarket were estimated to consume 25% of the gas on the entire Polygon network;
Considering that this data is somewhat dated, we checked recent changes, and data analyst petertherock on Dune showed that transactions related to Polymarket consumed approximately $216,000 in gas in November, while Token Terminal reported that the total gas consumption on the Polygon network that month was about $939,000, with a similar proportion close to a quarter (around 23%).

While there may be coincidences due to statistical criteria and time windows, the cross-dimensional similar results can also serve as a reference for estimating Polymarket's economic significance to Polygon.

In addition to quantifiable indicators such as active users, locked funds, transaction volume, and gas contributions, Polymarket's economic significance to Polygon is also reflected in a series of more difficult-to-measure yet equally real implicit contributions.

First is the activation of stablecoin liquidity. All transactions on Polymarket are settled in USDC, and its high-frequency, continuous trading behavior has objectively significantly increased the demand for circulation and use cases of USDC on the Polygon network; second is the ancillary behavioral value of retained users. Beyond the prediction market itself, these users may also turn to use other products in the Polygon ecosystem, such as DeFi, for convenience, thereby enhancing the overall ecological value of the Polygon network. These contributions are difficult to quantify with specific data but constitute the "real demand" that underlying networks value most and is also the most scarce.

Why Now? The Answer is Not Hard to Guess

In fact, just from the perspective of user scale, data performance, and market volume, Polymarket has fully established the confidence to stand on its own. This is no longer a question of "whether to leave," but rather "when to leave."

The choice to begin migration at this moment is primarily due to the impending Polymarket TGE. On one hand, once Polymarket completes its token issuance, its governance structure, incentive system, and economic model will become relatively fixed, and the cost and complexity of subsequent underlying migration will significantly increase; on the other hand, upgrading from a "single application" to a "full-stack system of application + underlying" inherently means a change in valuation logic, and building its own Layer 2 undoubtedly opens up a higher ceiling for Polymarket in terms of narrative and capital.

In summary, Polymarket's departure from Polygon is essentially not just a simple underlying migration but a reflection of structural changes in the crypto industry. When top applications begin to possess the ability to independently carry users, traffic, and economic activities, if the underlying network cannot provide additional value, it will inevitably be "backstabbed."

Nothing more than the pursuit of profit.