Decentraland announces layer-two MANA token transfers, plans for full migration

Just a day after two decentralized finance powerhouses announced layer-two integrations via the Polygon sidechain, a major nonfungible token and gaming title has today followed suit.

In a blog post this morning, NFT-powered virtual world and video game Decentraland announced a token bridge enabling users to move native MANA tokens to Polygon and back. At the time of publication, MANA is the 80th ranked token by marketcap and has risen 3750% on the year to $1.01, per Coingecko.

This is just the first step in what will be a significantly larger migration, as the project intends to enable all Decentraland dApps, including their Builder and Marketplace contracts, to conduct transactions on Polygon.

In addition to brisk settlement times, the integration will also make all transactions completely free for users. While Polygon normally charges a transaction fee priced at fractions of a cent, Decentraland said that they will also be leveraging Biconomy.io meta-transactions. This will enable users to “claim, buy, sell, and trade wearables for their avatars entirely on Polygon, with no transaction fees.”

Finally, the integration will allow users to purchase MANA tokens directly with credit and debit cards via a Polygon integration with crypto on/offramp Transak.

The migration is yet another win for Polygon in a multi-horse race to provide scalability solutions to Ethereum’s chronic gas costs. Polygon — which rebranded from Matic, a former would-be competitor to Ethereum whose “sidechain” claim is somewhat strained — has been taking particular advantage of competition falling asleep at the wheel, such as when rollup platform Optimism pushed back their release by three months.

Yesterday, Aave and Zapper both announced Polygon implementations, giving the project two top-100 marketcap wins in under a week. There could be more competition coming in the scaling wars, however, as last week Starkware raised $75 million.