If you know me at all, you will know that I mostly talk about bitcoin. It is the coin that I'm most knowledgable about, passionate and what I believe in the most. With that said, I am here to carve out financial freedom for myself and to do that we must all remain open-minded as investors. If you have a closed-mind, you will miss out on future great investing opportunities. Thankfully this allowed me to get into ethereum relatively early as well. But, ethereum is looking much different than it did at the beginning of the year. Sure, it has appreciated incredibly throughout the year in-terms of price. But it's movement has been much less than other up and coming smart contract blockchains such as Solana, Avalanche and Luna. ETH has become expensive to use, too expensive for many regular people to use and because of that, the ETH ecosystem has suffered. Of course by suffered, I mean the price of coins. Anything DeFi, or any coin that trades primarily on decentralized dex's has suffered. So much so, that some of these coins have branched off to other L1 chains, and users have followed as well. But this suffering could soon be coming to an end. Something is about to happen that will give a giant boost to the ethereum ecosystem that will also boost the price of ethereum, and potentially re-start the next portion of the bull run.
I'm talking about Polygon. Polygon is a side chain for ethereum that makes transactions much faster, scalable, and cheaper. While Polygon has been around for awhile now, there have been two major things happening that could be the catalyst that ethereum needs. The first is integration with Uniswap.
As I'm writing this article, there is a vote happening on Uniswap on whether they will integrate Polygon to v3 of Uniswap. And just look at the current vote totals, it looks like it will be passing overwhelmingly. This will be a game changer. A current swap on Uniswap using Ethereum as gas could cost you anywhere from $80 if you're lucky, to hundreds of dollars. Once Polygon is integrated, these swaps will cost only a small fraction of that. Things are about to get exciting. While this is not investment advice; it is very likely this will give a very nice boost to coins on DEX's, anything DeFi and of course Polygon and Ethereum. Think back to the summer of 2020, this was called DeFi summer. Anything and everything related to DeFi, and farming went crazy. I'm expecting that to potentially happen again.
On to the next recent bullish news story. Polygon acquired ZK-rollups startup Mir Protocol for $400 million dollars. Mir is an Ethereum scaling startup that utilizes zero-knowledge proof (ZK-proof) technology. A ZK-proof is a cryptographic tool that can be used to create ZK-rollups. ZK-rollups enable transactions to be processed but don’t require all transaction data to be posted on Ethereum. This helps to reduce the block space used on Ethereum — enabling it to scale — and reduces gas fees. ZK-rollups are the future of ethereum, and possibly smart contract blockchains in general, and now Polygon is at the top with this technology and will be applying it on ethereum. This is very bullish news.
The reasons above are only a few of the reasons why we have seen Polygon soar in value recently and is approaching the top 10 in-terms of market cap. I think it will soon enter the top 10, and potentially could even enter the top 5. As I mentioned before, recently a lot of the hype has been focusing on the other alternative L1 smart chains. But, I think we could soon see a reversal. There is a huge hype storm that will be coming back towards Ethereum. First we have this news with polygon that will make the ethereum ecosystem usable for many again, all-the-while giving a boost to coins in the ecosystem. Then we have the continued burn of ethereum via EIP 1559. Also, ethereum 2.0 is soon approaching and ETH 1 and ETH 2 will be merging in a few months time. And something that many people are forgetting to mention is that ethereum's issuance rate will soon be dropping as well. With EIP 1559 coming into effect, and with the issuance drop, it has been referred to as ethereum's double halving event.
While bitcoin is still the king that controls the market with its price magnet. When BTC goes up or down, the rest of the market moves in the same direction. Recently ethereum has been forming its own price magnet, and has helped to move the market. This upcoming ETH hype movement could be the catalyst for the next leg up for this bull run.
What do you think? Are things about to get bullish for ethereum? With the use of Polygon and other layer 2's to make fees cheaper, will you come back and use ethereum?