Polygon, formerly known as MATIC, is a blockchain founded by three software engineers Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal and Anurag Arjun in 2017. It is built to answer some of the challenges faced by Ethereum blockchain like high gas fees, poor user experience and low transactions per second. Also Polygon aims to create a multi-chain ecosystem of blockchains that are compatible with Ethereum.
What is Polygon Bridge?
Polygon Bridge allows users to transfer tokens across Polygon blockchain & Ethereum blockchain with a trustless two-way channel. Users can move their ETH or ERC20 tokens from Ethereum network to Polygon network using Polygon Bridge and use them on several dozens of popular Defi apps like Sushiswap, Aave, OpenSea, etc.
Also this bridge helps to transfer the tokens back to Ethereum network from Polygon network. Here is a video that helps you understand how to use Polygon Bridge
How much ETH & USDC is crossing the bridge?
Here are two charts that show the amount(in USD) of ETH & USDC is moved through Polygon Bridge on both directions. The first chart shows ETH’s daily inflow, outflow as well as net inflow into Polygon network and the second shows the same details for USDC.
The following two charts show the cumulative inflow of ETH & USDC tokens in to Polygon Network for the past 1 years.
Observations
Here are few observations
- Volume of USDC transferred into Polygon network outweighs ETH by about 20x.
- Most of the ETH transferred into Polygon network is staying in the network while USDC is criss crossing the network at a higher rate.
- By July 15th around $2.9 Billions of USDC was transferred into Polygon Network and since then it started flowing back to Ethereum Network.
- 350K USDC was transferred into Polygon on July 12 and it stands out as the day with most amount of USDC transferred into Polygon Network
- 178K worth of ETH token were transferred into Polygon Network on May 7th