Through the past year, layer 2, Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) based solution Polygon (CRYPTO: MATIC) has grown significantly and was named "Crypto Project of the Year" by Decrypt.

Polygon recently published a year-end report summarizing its growth in 2022 and providing projections for 2023. In the introduction, Polygon developers stated: “We are on a relentless pursuit of mass adoption for public blockchains, creating an infrastructure so essential that access to it will be considered a basic human right.”

Here are a few highlights:

Polygon in 2022

Polygon released the following statistics for 2022, citing their internal data and the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute as sources:

• 778,000 smart contracts deployed on Polygon, which is a 152% growth over 2021
• 234,000 contract creators, which is up 637% year-over-year
• 200,000,000 total unique addresses, which is a growth of 54% over 2021
• 960,000,000 successful transactions processed.
• 60,953 tons of carbon were eliminated from the Polygon network’s annual CO2 footprint by Ethereum’s Merge.
• Polygon zkEVM, which Polygon calls the “ultimate scaling solution” entered a testnet phase.

Polygon formed partnerships with some of the biggest companies in the world including Adobe, Disney, Reddit, Facebook (Meta), the NFL, NuBank, Reddit, Robinhood, and Starbucks. Some details of these engagements include:

• Reddit’s digital collectibles, powered by Polygon, led to Reddit users minting more than 5 million Collectible Avatars, raising over $10 million in revenue. Redditors created more than 4 million blockchain-based Vault wallets.
• Meta began testing digital collectibles on Instagram, allowing users to share NFTs.
• Robinhood selected Polygon as the network of choice for launching their Web3 wallet Beta.
• Starbucks announced it has partnered with Polygon to launch Starbucks Odyssey, a rewards and loyalty program which allows people in the U.S. to earn and purchase digital collectible stamps as NFTs.

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Trends for 2023

Polygon has declared that it is “on the front lines of developing new use cases for blockchain” and that token sales will be useful for more than fundraising going forward.

• Big focus on GameFi – Polygon developers stated that 2023 announcements will include a game development studio. Some anticipate the project to be similar to WAX and WAX Studios.
• The All-Mighty User ID – A portable, sovereign identity. Polygon ID seems to be a mix of the impulse of a soul-bound token with the lure of a single sign-in.
• Protecting Your User Data – Lens Protocol promises to let you take control of your social media platform – unfortunately, near-term this only seems to apply to Web3 data and virtually no one is using Web3 social media.
• Also Monetizing your User Data – “Acentrik, a strategic initiative by Mercedes-Benz, is building a decentralized data marketplace that will make it easy for enterprises to share and monetize data across domains.” Since Polygon doesn’t acknowledge a possible conflict with the previous point made, it remains to be seen what this will really mean long-term.
• Polygon is Going Big on Defi – Based on the “financial shocks” of 2022, Polygon is expecting the sentiment to swing to a greater focus on decentralization. Polygon listed possible new entrants to their DeFi ecosystem including: Lemon Cash, Gains Trade, Teller, Ovix, Timeswap, Atlendis, Clearpool, Quickswap V3, and Synquote.
• Polygon believes 2023 will be “the year of ZK technology” – zkEVM is anticipating mainnet release in Q1 and Polygon Zero, and Miden plans to launch in 2023.
• Polygon goes hard on “Not your keys, not your crypto!!” – Developers say self-custody is the obvious choice to unnamed centralized exchange disasters. FTX (CRYPTO: FTT) is a prime example of the collapses witnessed in 2022.

Polygon stated, “Innovation and awareness of non-custodial wallets, ZK scaling, on-chain credit, and stablecoin adoption (LATAM, Africa) are critical building blocks that will propel DeFi to new heights.”

Polygon concludes by declaring the next 12 months will continue the trajectory of 2022, stating: “2022 was Polygon’s breakout year. Polygon brought some of the largest Fortune 500 companies to Web3 and laid the technical foundations for future growth.”

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