Polygon (MATIC) to POL Transition Will Go Live on September 4, 2024

Polygon Labs has announced Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain Polygon's technical upgrade for MATIC to POL will go live on September 4, 2024.

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Polygon MATIC Price Drops Despite Upcoming Technical Upgrade: Here’s What It Means for Holders

The Polygon (MATIC) price experienced a decline on Thursday, March 2, despite the announcement of an upcoming technical upgrade that will see the native MATIC token transition to POL. However, the losses were also attributed to the broader bearish sentiment in the cryptocurrency market.

At the time of writing, MATIC is trading at an average price of $1.43, down by 2.48% in the past 24 hours and showing a 7-day loss of about 12.3%, according to data from CoinGecko.

In the past 24 hours, the cryptocurrency experienced a price range of between $1.38 and $1.47. Despite the recent decline, MATIC still ranks 11th on CoinGecko’s list of top cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, which currently stands at an average of $13.1 billion.

Polygon’s transition from MATIC to POL is an upgrade that was first announced in July last year and put up for community governance via PIP-17 in September.

In the proposal, the main idea is the replacement of MATIC with a new token that will be used for gas and staking. This upcoming upgrade is a step that follows the POL ERC-20 contract implementation in October 2023.

On Thursday, Polygon Labs made the official announcement for the upgrade to POL, revealing the initial phase as one that will see POL replace MATIC. Later on in the upgrade, POL will take on more network functionality, including in the AggLayer.

The AggLayer is a decentralized protocol with a common bridge and ZK-powered mechanism designed to solve issues of blockchain fragmentation through sovereign chains and shared liquidity.

“But even as the aggregated Polygon network emerges, POL will have immediate utility on the widely adopted Polygon Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network that exists today: POL will be the native gas and staking token of Polygon PoS—and fundamental to Polygon network security,” wrote Polygon Labs in a blog post.

What does it mean for MATIC holders?

According to Polygon Labs, those who hold MATIC on the Polygon PoS chain don’t have to do anything as the upgrade from MATIC to POL will be automatic.

However, for holders with their MATIC tokens on other chains and platforms may have need to take certain actions. These other chains include Ethereum and Polygon zkEVM as well as centralized exchanges (CEXs).

In this case, when the upgrade date rolls in, those ready to migrate MATIC to POL will need to use a migration contract.