Polygon Co-Founder Dismisses Claims That Solana Has More Traction Than Polygon

Earlier this week, Polygon’s co-founder Sandeep Nailwal took to Twitter to spurn the notion that rival protocol Solana has better traction than Polygon.

The former is a high-performance layer one blockchain that has attracted investors and users alike because of its high throughput and corresponding low cost. Polygon, on the other hand, is a layer-2 scaling Ethereum solution built to overcome the challenges (high gas fee and comparatively low throughput) facing Ethereum.

Sandeep Nailwal dispels the ‘Solana has more traction than Polygon’ talk

On Sunday, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal responded to a December 13 tweet by crypto analyst Spenser Noon. Noon had posted that while Web3 proponents feel Solana is the most used smart contract platform, data does not support that assumption.

Noon pointed out that Polygon enjoyed a significantly higher number of active users than rival platform Solana. Polygon’s Nailwal, in his response, agreed with Spenser Noon’s opinion. He pointed out that the narrative that Solana leads Polygon in traction is common among Web3 newcomers as the misleading US institutional marketing guides them. Notably, Polygon is based in India, while Solana is based in San Francisco, California.

The Polygon co-founder further pointed out that in reality, Solana has 180k daily active users in comparison to Polygon’s 270k. He added that Polygon also beats Solana in active development, with 2000 to 3000 active teams versus Solana’s 200 to 300. Blockchain data compiled by Polygonscan shows that Polygon has averaged more than 300k PoS chain addresses each day since December 26^th

Going on the offense, Nailwal added to his thread a user tweet claiming most of Solana’s active users are bots. He also referenced a tweet by a user who said that Solana measures its user statistics differently, making it difficult to distinguish between accounts and wallets. This is not the first time a user has noted the lack of a direct listing for Solana active users.

Polygon showed weakness after Sunflower Farmers tested the blockchain

Sunflower Farmers, a play-to-earn, recently exposed weaknesses in the Polygon blockchain. The blockchain game became popular among users as a crypto video game in which they could earn tokens from planting and harvesting crops.

Over the main part of last week, users on social media were on the rant, complaining of significantly reduced performance and cases of failed transactions as the number of farmers surged. For context, the clog’s effect on the ecosystem was orders higher than Ethereum-based CryptoKitties had in 2017.

Gas fees went through the roof as the game became more popular. More than 70% of the network’s resources were tied to Sunflower Farms, with the average gas price peaking at 763.6 Gwei last Wednesday. The network stabilized over the weekend, with Monday’s gas fees averaging at 153.5 Gwei, according to Polygonscan data.

A chart of daily average gas prices on Polygon PoS chain

Several users lost money and even suggested that the game should ideally get shut down because it was technically mimicking a denial of service. Further, a Delphi Labs developer argued that such games as Sunflower Farmers should be built around an application-independent chain or layer two protocol to prevent competition for blocks with other dApps.

Polygon will remain permissionless despite the recent Sunflower Farmers swarm

In a thread posted on Twitter last Friday, Polygon provided an update to the community, offering a few recommendations on how members were to go about their business then. The update was in response to multiple reports of failed transactions and reduced performance.

The blockchain ecosystem first assured the community that Polygon PoS remained permissionless and was functioning as expected. The team then noted the exploding activity due to high numbers of farming bots but observed that transaction fees at the time were still low ($0.1 – $0.5).

Polygon said its teams were working on several solutions to improve the bl0ckchain’s abilities in response to the issue. First, the implementation of EIP-1559 is expected to better the fee market. The thread highlighted the impact of PoS v3 on architecture, zero-knowledge-related solutions to scale throughput, and Polygon SDKs to establish app-discrete chains.

Further, Polygon urged developers to run their own nodes, use dedicated RPC accounts, or alternatively employ the RPC aggregator. The team also asked community members to be more responsible in using the blockchain, as it will remain permissionless.

To learn more about this token visit our Investing in Polygon guide.