Polygon Labs, the main developer firm behind the layer-2 network Polygon, said Wednesday that it will be performing the technical upgrade that swaps out its MATIC token for its new POL token starting on September 4th. The migration comes as a part of Polygon’s planned revamp laid out last year in its “Polygon 2.0” roadmap. The change was initially proposed in July 2023 to its community, and would make POL the main token for all Polygon networks.
The switch will consist of a technical upgrade that will allow POL to become the native gas and staking token for Polygon’s main proof-of-stake (Polygon PoS) chain. In the next stages of the upgrade, POL will also begin to secure other blockchains on Polygon’s wider “aggregate” network, including AggLayer.
According to the Polygon team, MATIC holders on the Polygon PoS chain will not have to do anything for this upgrade and their tokens will appear in POL. Those using MATIC on Polygon’s zkEVM package, centralized exchanges, or the Ethereum blockchain will have to go through various steps, as Polygon details in its blog. As part of the network migration, Polygon planned to test the token upgrade on July 17th in a test network environment to identify or resolve any issues before POL goes live on the mainnet.
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