Polygon Scores Deal with Reddit for New NFT Marketplace

If building your project during hard times is the true test of DeFi, then Polygon is off to a good start in this bear market as it solidifies its position as a leading Ethereum scaling solution.

On July 7, Reddit, the popular social networking website, launched an NFT marketplace for online avatars that is powered by the Polygon PoS Chain, Polygon’s commit chain and flagship Ethereum scaling solution.

Licensing Rights

Reddit has created 90 designs for its early-access series of nonfungibles with the total number of tokens going on sale tipped to total “tens of thousands.” The NFTs come with licensing rights allowing them to be used as avatars on other online platforms and will exhibit a “glow-like effect” next to comments posted on Reddit.

Reddit’s NFTs are currently available to members of the subreddit r/CollectibleAvatars, and will be made available to all users via its avatar builder page over the following weeks.

The nonfungibles will be purchasable via credit or debit card and can be stored in Reddit’s proprietary wallet, Vault, meaning users do not need to have experience with cryptocurrency to use the marketplace. The tokens are purchasable at fixed prices ranging between $9.99 and $99.99.

On the same day, the investment app Robinhood launched support for withdrawals and deposits for the ERC-20 version of Polygon’s native token, MATIC.

Leading Team

Polygon is a leading team working on Layer 2 scaling solutions for Ethereum. Its PoS Chain ranks as the sixth-largest smart contract network with a total value locked (TVL) of $1.64B, according to DeFi Llama.

In August 2021, Polygon announced a strategic pivot and allocated $1B towards research and development for zero-knowledge-based scaling solutions.

Rollup Solution

Zero-knowledge (ZK) protocols enhance the privacy of transactions by only disclosing the time and date at which they occur on the blockchain, with only counterparties able to access further data relating to a specific transaction.

In May, Polygon launched the mainnet beta version of Nightfall, a hybrid ZK and optimistic rollup solution — which batches and settles transactions on a separate chain before rolling them up into a single transaction for validation on the Ethereum mainnet — developed in partnership with ‘Big Four’ financial services firm, Ernst & Young.

The deployment came three months after Polygon unveiled a ZK-based identity solution that will underpin a forthcoming wallet app from the team.

On July 6, Hamzah Khan, Polygon’s head of DeFi, tweeted that Polygon’s ZK-based Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible rollup solution, Hermez, is “almost here.” He added that a testnet is currently “brewing.”

Massive Turning Point

Khan emphasized that existing ZK-based rollup solutions are not EVM-compatible, noting that dApps launched on rival ZK-based solution StarkNet must be written in the coding language Cairo rather than Ethereum’s native Solidity.

“Releasing a ZK rollup that is EVM compatible is a massive turning point for the scalability and adoption of Ethereum secured rollups. dApps will be easily able to deploy their existing applications from Polygon POS chain or Ethereum mainnet onto Polygon Hermez,” Khan said.

Token Down

The MATIC token has taken a beating amid the recent bear trend despite Polygon’s development activity. Although the token is up 10% over the past 24 hours in response to news of the Reddit marketplace, the token is still down 80% from its late December all-time high of $2.92, according to CoinGecko.

The PoS Chain’s TVL is also down more than 84% since peaking above $10.5B last June.