Decentraland’s MANA Token Now Available on Polygon

Platforms continue to flock to the Polygon sidechain in an attempt to escape Ethereum’s constantly high fees, with the latest being decentralized virtual world Decentraland.

According to a Thursday blog post from the NFT gaming platform, a new token bridge will enable users to move Decentraland’s native token, MANA, to the Polygon side chain and back. This new integration will help Decentraland scale its services, and provide the platform’s developers and users with the “speed, affordability and usability” to make common, everyday actions. The community and events lead at Decentraland, Samuel Hamilton, said in a statement:

“Ethereum’s popularity and usage is increasing at an incredible rate, but this added demand on the network means users are forced to pay higher and higher gas fees in order to make sure their transactions are successful. This is unsustainable for any dapp that makes use of thousands of microtransactions.”

The new bridge, however, is only the first phase of a significantly larger migration, as Decentraland plans to enable all of its decentralized applications, including Builder and Marketplace, to conduct transactions on Polygon’s network. The platform expects to enable users to claim, buy, sell and trade wearables entirely on the Polygon platform sometime in May.

Decentraland further said it will make all transactions on Polygon completely free for its users — even though they usually cost a fraction of a cent — by leveraging Biconomy.io’s meta-transactions. The platform will also enable its users to purchase MANA tokens directly with debit and credit cards on Polygon through an integration with crypto on/off ramp Transak.

More and more platforms are moving to the Polygon network to escape the high transaction fees currently present on the Ethereum network. On Wednesday, decentralized lending platform Aave also announced a Polygon implementation in order to scale its DeFi platform beyond the Ethereum blockchain.