Polygon Gas fees are rising amid the Arrangement-inspired token craze

Gas fees on Ethereum layer 2, polygon (Matic), rose more than 1,000% to a maximum of $0.10, when users flooded the network to mint Ordinals-inspired tokens for Bitcoin, called POLS tokens.

In a post published on November 16 about polygon-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

what is going on @0xPolygon Point of sale series? 6 million transactions in the last 24 hours 170TPS on average. 1mn+ MATIC was burned by the protocol. The chain worked smoothly, gas charges went crazy but no reorganization, 0 blocks, etc.

I heard there’s a Baby Shark game being released, could this be it…

—Sandeep Nailwal | Sandeep. Polygon (@sandeepnailwal) November 16, 2023

The reason for the spike in network activity and sudden spike in gas rates seems to come primarily from the frenzy of excitement over the minting of the new POLS token.

Data from Dune Analytics showed that the flurry of POLS minting activity coincided with the use of more than 102 million MATIC tokens — worth about $86 million at current prices — as payment for gas fees.

The POLS code is based on a protocol called PRC-20, which works similarly BRC-20 token standard Derived from Bitcoin arrangements.

According to data released by Ethereum virtual machine data provider EVM, only 8.7% of the total POLS supply has been minted, with just over 18,100 holders claiming the token.

At press time, gas rates at Polygon were back to normal levels, at around 882 GJ. Gas rates quantify the amount of computing effort required to perform a transaction on a given blockchain, with 1 gwei roughly equivalent to 0.000000001 MATIC.

The Bitcoin network saw a similar, albeit longer, spike in activity in May of this year. After the launch of Ordinals Protocolwhich allowed users to mint NFTs directly on the Bitcoin blockchain.

The ensuing frenzy over NFT Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens caused Bitcoin fees to reach levels not seen since April 2021, a fact that caused… More traditional-minded Bitcoiners like Samson Mow And Adam Back will dismiss the NFT protocol and the token standard as wasteful.

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