In a blog post, Polygon recalled the highlights of the previous year, 2021, while announcing three major developments for 2022.
The year 2021 saw Polygon add six new solutions: SDK, Avail, Hermez, Nightfall, Miden and Zero, with its focus on ZK (Zero-Knowledge) cryptography.
In a $250 million deal, Polygon announced its merger with roll-up platform Hermez Network in August 2021. Hermez was eventually assimilated into the Polygon ecosystem and became a component of Polygon's solutions under the name Polygon Hermez.
Likewise in November, Polygon Miden, a STARK-based, EVM-compatible rollup, was born. Polygon Miden's primary component, Miden VM, a STARK-based virtual machine, aims to solve the difficulty of ZK rollups in enabling arbitrary logic and transactions, including those of the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine).
According to the Layer 2 platform, 2022 will see Polygon Hermez and Polygon Miden launch public testnets in the second and third quarters, respectively.
In mid-December 2021, the Opera browser announced its integration with Polygon, a partnership that might bring millions of new users to the platform.
The integration will give Opera users in-browser access to the Polygon network's over 3,000 dApps. Some of the most popular dApps will be available, including Sushiswap, Curve and Aave, as well as blockchain games and NFT platforms like Decentraland, OpenSea, Sandbox and Decentral Games.
In the first quarter of 2022, Opera will incorporate the Polygon blockchain into its Web3-ready browser and built-in crypto wallet for Android.
Lastly, the EIP-1559 upgrade aims to progress in 2022. U.Today reported on Polygon MATIC launching a burn mechanism similar to Ethereum. Polygon had initiated EIP-1559 upgrades on its network that will introduce burning of MATIC tokens and better fee visibility, with a testnet release in December.
MATIC, the native asset of Polygon blockchain, was trading at $2.44 at press time and ranked 14th largest cryptocurrency, according to CoinMarketCap.