Polygon Labs Announces MATIC Token Will Officially Rebrand to POL in September Amid Massive Technical Upgrade

The development team behind layer-2 scaling solution Polygon (MATIC) says they will be officially renaming the ecosystem’s native asset to POL after the network goes through a major upgrade later this year.

In a new blog post, Polygon Labs says that starting on September 4th, MATIC will be replaced by POL as the blockchain’s native gas and staking token.

“As the upgrade to MATIC, in the initial phase, POL will become the gas and staking token of Polygon proof-of-stake (PoS). In subsequent phases, the community can decide to expand the utility of POL to serve a crucial role in the AggLayer.”

The AggLayer is a project by Polygon that aims to unify liquidity.

According to Polygon Labs, holders of MATIC on the Polygon network will have to take no action. However, users who hold the token on Ethereum (ETH), Polygon’s Ethereum Virtual Machine and in centralized exchanges may have to go through a migration process.

The developers go on to detail POL’s long-term and short-term potential as the ecosystem’s main token.

“In the long term, the current community consensus proposes that POL will support broader roles in the Polygon staking hub (to be released in 2025), including block generation, zero-knowledge proof generation, and participation in Data Availability Committees (DACs)…

Following [the proposal], consensus was reached that Polygon PoS validators must stake POL to earn protocol rewards and transaction fees in POL. That means every single transaction that takes place on Polygon PoS, starting 9/4, will use POL as the native gas token. That’s the short-term utility.”

The token rebrand was first proposed last July as a means of supercharging the growth of the network. Weeks later, Polygon Labs founder Sandeep Nailwal explained that the proposal was a part of the blockchain’s transition to Polygon 2.0.

As stated by Nailwal at the time,

“POL delivers the benefits of multi-chain staking without the added risks of restaking. With the Polygon 2.0 proposal, the Polygon ecosystem will expand from a single chain to an ecosystem of L2s (layer-2s) that can easily interoperate and share liquidity with each other.”

MATIC is trading for $0.531 at time of writing, a 3.5% increase during the last 24 hours.

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