The first Polygon Guild Seoul Meet-Up was held last Thursday, April 28 and hosted a series of talks about Polygon and various projects that are building on the chain. Polygon is committed to fostering a community of builders and users here in South Korea and has shown its initial commitment to achieving this through sponsoring such events as Meta NFT Korea 2022 as well as monthly guild meetings.
What is Polygon?
Foreseeing that Ethereum had incredible network effect and security but would have issues scaling in the future, Polygon (formerly Matic) was launched in 2017. A ‘layer2’ built to work with Ethereum, a ‘layer1’; Polygon aims to address Ethereum’s slow processing and high transaction fees. Despite the bear market lasting roughly from 2018 until 2020, the usage of cryptocurrency is continuing to increase year after year. Especially with the advent of the pandemic, as people are having to become savvier to retain their wealth in the face of unprecedented rates of inflation globally. However, until the Pandemic had arrived in 2020, Ethereum’s pain points weren’t really understood outside a relatively small group of hardcore DeFi or NFTs users — words that were mostly foreign to most before but largely household names now.
Users seeking to utilize crypto to use such services were essentially shut out by slow speeds and extremely high transaction fees. This problem continues to persist and even as recently as the weekend users hoping to purchase Bored Ape Yacht Club “Otherside” metaverse land on Open Sea faced fees of over 1.25 ETH or upwards of US$3,500!
Network Growth
Faced with these issues, it is no surprise Polygon is taking more of more of Ethereums market share daily. As fees essentially ‘price out’ the average retail user, the market is becoming more aware of this and are developing on different blockchains such as Polygon. Just last week according to data from Alchemy, Polygon announced a milestone of 19,000 applications on the network — up from 3,000 in October 2021. It’s not just the new projects that are onboarding to Polygon, it is old projects too. A few recent examples of this is Unstoppable Domains offering free minting on Polygon or projects like the Sandbox moving over to the sidechain in 2022.
With an increase in projects deploying on the network, coupled with Polygon push support community growth globally, it is no surprise to see successful events such as Polygon Guild Seoul Meet-Up where several projects building upon the network were able to share their projects with each other.
Polygon Projects at the Polygon Guild Seoul Meet-Up
David Ham of MINTWAY hosted the night in a friendly and fun manner. A crypto OG who bought Bitcoin when it was less than $1, he has seen the space evolve tremendously over the last decade and as the Guild Mage for Polygon Seoul, he is building MINTWAY on Polygon. MINTWAY aims to become the worlds first NFT specialized portal site by creating a portal site that connects and promotes numerous NFT markets and various Dapps, moving towards the Googlelization of the NFT world. There have been several partners to the project already announce and more information can be found on the MINTWAY website ⇒ https://mintway.io/index.html
Kent Kim presented the two projects that he is working on — Miliverse and Deother. Miliverse is aiming to become a strategy game that parallels the military in the real world with ownership of land, vehicles and more in the form of NFTs. War strategy games are enormously popular and Miliverse hopes to become a leading game where players can engage in friendly online wars in their interpretation of the metaverse — with a military theme.
Deother or pronounce ‘the other’, but de-centralized has a more familiar feel to it. As an anime/human avatar, you are able to engage with other people within your age bracket globally in 3d cyberspace. In order to keep the game social, every player starts out in a dorm in order to facilitate social interaction in the game world. More information can be found on their website ⇒ https://deother.me/
Another interesting project that caught our eye was Paeta Meta. As mentioned with Miliverse and Deother, there will be many iterations of the metaverse, each with its own different flavors and styles. Look at the hugely successful The Sandbox for example, with their pixelated 3d take. This is in stark contrast to the metaverse depicted in the cyberpunk feeling of Blocktopia or many others. Recognizing this fact, Yujin Min of Paeta-Meta elaborated on the need for different stylings of fashion for different metaverse characters. Paeta-Meta converts clothing designed in the real world to the metaverse that users are hoping to dress their avatars in. PetaMeta creates your digital twin in the virtual world and helps you prove ownership of digital assets through NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) technology using blockchain technology. More information can be found on their website ⇒ https://paeta-meta.com/
The first Polygon Guild Seoul Meet-Up went off without a hitch and is scheduled as a monthly event in central Seoul. As Polygon continues to go from strength to strength and support communities and builders, there will surely be plenty of innovative projects be announced at the monthly event moving forward. To keep up to date on the guild and connect with others, feel free to follow the Telegram group at https://t.me/polygonkorea
References
- The Sandbox Game Is Migrating to Ethereum Sidechain Polygon and Launching A DAO in 2022. https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/the-sandbox-game-is-migrating-to-ethereum-sidechain-polygon-and-launching-a-dao-in-2022/
- Unstoppable Domains Joins Polygon to Enable Users to Mint and Manage NFT Domains for Free. http://www.koreaittimes.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=109116
- Polygon Hits 19,000 DApps Milestone, Sixfold Growth in Half a Year. https://blog.polygon.technology/polygon-hit-19000-dapps-milestone-sixfold-growth-in-half-a-year/
- Crypto users paid thousands in Ethereum gas fees thanks to the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Here’s what happened. https://mashable.com/article/ethereum-gas-fees-skyrocket-bored-ape-yacht-club-otherside-nft-launch
- 34 Million US adults own cryptocurrency. https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/us-adults-cryptocurrency-ownership-stats/#:~:text=By the end of 2022,having surpassed 10%25 last year.
- Miliverse on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnkHruHAPrw
- Deother on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHcA5Eeg2M
- Paeta-Meta. https://paeta-meta.com/
