The development team behind Polygon (MATIC), a two-layer scaling solution, has announced that the ecosystem’s native asset will be officially renamed to POL after a major network upgrade later this year.
Polygon Labs announced in a new blog post that starting September 4, MATIC will be replaced with POL, the blockchain’s native gas and staking token.
“As an upgrade to MATIC, POL will initially be the gas and staking token for Polygon Proof-of-Stake (PoS). In later stages, the community may decide to expand the utility of POL to play a significant role in AggLayer.”
AggLayer is a project from Polygon that aims to unify liquidity.
According to Polygon Labs, anyone holding MATIC on the Polygon network will not need to take any action. However, anyone holding tokens on Ethereum (ETH), Polygon’s Ethereum Virtual Machine, or centralized exchanges may need to go through a migration process.
The developers elaborate on how POL has both long-term and short-term potential as the ecosystem’s primary token.
“In the long term, the current community consensus suggests that POL will support a broader role on the Polygon Staking Hub (scheduled to launch in 2025), including block production, zero-knowledge proof generation, and participation in the Data Availability Committee (DAC)…
As per the proposal, we have reached a consensus that Polygon PoS validators should stake POL to earn protocol rewards and POL transaction fees. This means that starting from 9/4, all transactions that occur on Polygon PoS will use POL as the native gas token. This is the short-term utility.”
The token rebranding was first proposed in July last year as a means to accelerate network growth. A few weeks later, Polygon Labs founder Sandeep Nailwal explained that the proposal was part of the blockchain’s transition to Polygon 2.0.
As Nailwal said at the time,
“POL provides the benefits of multi-chain staking without the added risk of re-staking. With the Polygon 2.0 proposal, the Polygon ecosystem expands to a Layer 2 (L2) ecosystem where single chains can easily interoperate with each other and share liquidity.”
At the time of writing, MATIC is trading at $0.531, up 3.5% over the last 24 hours.
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