Polygon History: From Matic Network to POL
2017: Matic Network — a Fix for Slow, Expensive Ethereum
Polygon began in October 2017 as Matic Network, a project by three Indian developers — Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, and Anurag Arjun. The idea was simple: Ethereum was already suffering from slow, expensive transactions, and Matic proposed a sidechain Layer 2 solution that runs on top of Ethereum, processing transactions faster and far more cheaply.
In 2019, Matic ran a token sale on Binance Launchpad at around $0.0026 per token — one of the earliest projects to launch that way.
2021: Rebranding to Polygon and Explosive Growth
In February 2021, the project rebranded as Polygon to reflect broader ambitions — not just one sidechain, but a whole ecosystem of Ethereum scaling tools. 2021 was a turning point: amid the NFT and DeFi boom, MATIC gained over 14,000% for the year, reaching an all-time high of roughly $2.92 in late December 2021.
Major brands began choosing Polygon specifically for its low fees — Starbucks, Reddit, and Nike all launched Web3 projects on the network.
2024: The Move from MATIC to POL
As part of the "Polygon 2.0" upgrade, the team announced a migration from the MATIC token to a new POL token, swapped 1:1. The goal is to make POL the base token not for a single chain, but for Polygon's entire connected ecosystem of blockchains via its AggLayer technology.