For the last few months, Polygon (MATIC) has been in the news for all the right reasons as it has been projected as the alternative to Ethereum as it resides on the same network and hence has all the advantages of Ethereum built into it but at the same time, with much lesser fees.
This has been a very good selling point for the Polygon network and has helped it to gain traction among the developers and users so much so that it has been able to surpass the number of daily transactions that happen on the Ethereum network. We have also been seeing the prices of the MATIC skyrocket over the last few months and the token being listed on multiple exchanges, including Coinbase recently.
The Polygon network does have its share of complaints that include concerns over the security of the network and also the customer support as well. But all this has been sidelined as the gas fees on the network has been very low (by over 1000 times) when compared to the Ethereum network and with Ethereum also having some scaling issues (which are expected to be solved with its version 2.0), the Polygon network was able to grab a lot of attention as the biggest Layer 2 protocol.
But as the number of transactions on the network increases, we are seeing that the gas fees on the Polygon network have also been rising slowly and steadily. Over the last few weeks, we have seen the gas fees increase from $0.0005 to $0.002, a rise of 400% though the gas fees on ethereum have been pretty much steady during this period. Though this continues to be very low as compared to the Ethereum gas fees, we have to see whether it is a precursor to things to come as the traffic increases on the network. To add to the woes, as the price of the MATIC token increases, the gas fees would also be affected as well. Recently, we have also seen Biconomy integrating Chainlink to manage gas fees on Polygon and Ethereum networks.
Ethereum started similar to the Polygon network with low gas fees when the transactions on its network were low, congestion was less and the value of Ethereum was also very low. But with increased traffic comes increasing issues like network congestion, security, and higher gas fees and it remains to be seen whether Polygon would be up to that challenge and what solution it has to control the gas fees when the network traffic increases in due course of time. The answer for this would come with time and the verdict would have to wait till that time.