Original Title: “The Economic Calculus Behind Polymarket’s Departure from Polygon”
Original Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
On December 22, news about leading prediction market Polymarket sparked widespread market attention—Mustafa, a team member of Polymarket, confirmed in the Discord community that Polymarket plans to migrate from Polygon and launch an Ethereum Layer2 network called POLY, which is the project’s current top priority.
A Not-So-Surprising “Breakup”
Polymarket’s decision to leave Polygon is not entirely unexpected. One is a red-hot application-layer representative, while the other is a gradually declining old base layer; the market enthusiasm and value expectations between the two have long been somewhat mismatched. As Polymarket grows into a new behemoth, Polygon’s relatively unstable network performance (the latest outage occurred on December 18) and its relatively weak ecosystem objectively impose limitations on the former.
For Polymarket, building its own portal represents a win-win choice in both product and economic dimensions.
On the product side, beyond seeking a more stable operating environment, building its own Layer2 network allows Polymarket to tailor underlying features according to its platform needs, enabling more flexible adaptation for future upgrades and iterations.
The more significant aspect, however, lies in the economic dimension. Building its own network means Polymarket can consolidate the economic activities and peripheral services derived from its platform into its own ecosystem, preventing related value from spilling over to external networks and gradually accumulating as its own systemic advantage.
Explicit and Implicit Economic Contributions
As an application layer, Polymarket’s explosive popularity once brought substantial direct economic contributions to Polygon. Data compiled by analyst dash on Dune shows:
· Polymarket’s active user count this month is 419,309, with a historical total of 1,766,193 users;
· Total transactions this month are 19.63 million, with a historical total of 115 million transactions;
· Total trading volume this month is $1.538 billion, with a historical total of $14.3 billion.
Regarding how to assess Polymarket’s contribution to Polygon’s ecosystem economy, Odaily Planet Daily discovered a rather coincidental ratio while compiling data from both.
· First, in terms of deposited funds: Defillama data shows that the total position value across Polymarket’s platform is approximately $326 million, accounting for about one-quarter of Polygon’s total locked value of $1.19 billion;
· Second, regarding gas consumption: Coin Metrics reported in October last year that transactions related to Polymarket were estimated to consume 25% of Polygon’s total gas;
· Considering the age of that data, we examined recent changes: Statistics compiled by analyst petertherock on Dune show that in November, transactions related to Polymarket consumed approximately $216,000 in gas, while Token Terminal reported Polygon’s total gas consumption for that month at about $939,000—again close to one-quarter (approximately 23%).
While this may be coincidental due to statistical methods and time windows, the similar results across dimensions can serve as an estimation reference for gauging Polymarket’s economic significance to Polygon.
Beyond quantifiable metrics like active users, deposited funds, transaction volume, and gas contributions, Polymarket’s economic significance to Polygon also lies in a series of implicit contributions that are harder to measure directly but equally real.
First is the revitalization of stablecoin liquidity. All Polymarket transactions are settled in USDC, and its high-frequency, continuous trading activities objectively enhance the circulation demand and usage scenarios for 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 other products like DeFi on the Polygon ecosystem for convenience, thereby boosting the overall ecological value of the Polygon network. These contributions are difficult to quantify with specific data but constitute the “real demand” that base-layer networks value most and find scarcest.
Why Now? The Answer Isn’t Hard to Guess
In fact, based on user scale, data performance, and market presence alone, Polymarket is fully capable of standing on its own. This is no longer a question of “whether to leave” but rather “when to leave.”
The core reason for choosing this moment to initiate the migration likely lies in the approaching TGE of Polymarket. On one hand, once Polymarket completes its token issuance, its governance structure, incentive system, and economic model will become relatively fixed, making subsequent base-layer migration significantly more costly and complex; on the other hand, upgrading from a “single application” to a “full-stack system of application + base layer” inherently implies a change in valuation logic. Building its own Layer2 undoubtedly opens a higher ceiling for Polymarket in terms of narrative and capital.
In summary, Polymarket’s departure from Polygon is not merely a simple base-layer migration but a microcosm of structural changes in the crypto industry. When top-tier applications begin to independently support users, traffic, and economic activities, base-layer networks that fail to provide additional value will inevitably be “backstabbed.”
Nothing more, just profit-seeking.
