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 named 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 representative of the application layer, while the other is a gradually declining old infrastructure layer; the market enthusiasm and value expectations between the two have long been somewhat mismatched. As Polymarket gradually grows into a new giant, Polygon’s relatively unstable network performance (the most recent outage occurred on December 18) and its relatively weak ecosystem have objectively become constraints on the former.
For Polymarket, building its own platform represents a win-win choice in both product and economic dimensions.
On the product side, aside from seeking a more stable operating environment, building its own Layer2 network allows Polymarket to customize underlying features according to its platform needs, enabling more flexible adaptation to 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 into its own systemic advantages.
Explicit and Implicit Economic Contributions
As an application layer, Polymarket’s explosive popularity once brought substantial direct economic contributions to Polygon. Data history compiled by analyst dash on Dune shows:
· Polymarket’s monthly active users this month are 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.
As for how to assess Polymarket’s contribution to Polygon’s ecosystem economy, Odaily Planet Daily discovered a rather coincidental ratio when comparing 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 also 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 that month at about $939,000—again close to one-quarter (approximately 23%).
While coincidences may arise from statistical methods and time windows, similar results across dimensions can serve as a reference for estimating Polymarket’s economic significance to Polygon.
Beyond quantifiable metrics like active users, deposited funds, trading volume, and gas contributions, Polymarket’s economic significance to Polygon also lies in a series of harder-to-measure yet equally real implicit contributions.
First is the activation 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 additional 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 increasing 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 find scarcest.
Why Now? The Answer Isn’t Hard to Guess
In fact, judging solely by user scale, data performance, and market influence, Polymarket already has the confidence to stand 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 migrate likely lies in the approaching Polymarket TGE. On one hand, once Polymarket completes its token generation event, its governance structure, incentive system, and economic model will become relatively fixed, making subsequent underlying migration costs and complexity significantly higher. On the other hand, upgrading from a “single application” to a “application + infrastructure” full-stack system 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 underlying migration but a microcosm of structural changes in the crypto industry. When top-tier applications begin to independently support users, traffic, and economic activities, underlying networks that fail to provide additional value will inevitably be “backstabbed.”
Nothing else—just profit-seeking.
