The dynamic gas fee computational model on the Ethereum Network compelled users to pay gas as high as $100 for a transaction. Therefore you can imagine the state of the user when he/she has to pay such a high gas to send $100 to a third party. So the scenario very well justifies the state of the crypto market and the reason for the recent surge in the layer 2 solutions crypto prices, especially Polygon. But users want a seamless experience while keeping the crypto in a wallet that helps them connect to layer 2's in a flash. Wouldn't that be so satisfying if there exists something which can do so?

Token Pocket is the name in case you are looking for such a fast gateway to keep everything sorted in the crypto sphere. Having said that, let’s deep dive to know about this wallet and how we can set it up on our preferred layer 2’s to send money in a flash with marginal fees.

Token Pocket is a multi-chain wallet that supports a wide range of cryptocurrencies. However, that’s a humble introduction to the ecosystem. But when we dive deeper, the token pocket ecosystem does quite a lot of things in the crypto space starting from working as a Dapp store to a handy blockchain kit to a complete crypto shop that proudly showcases everything which is crypto. Having said that, if you are among most of the users feeling the burden of high gas cost on Ethereum Network and you wish to switch to Polygon, this tutorial has everything that you need to get started with. 

? Buy Polygon Here?

Polygon is an interchain blockchain that runs on its own consensus mechanism; however, it establishes a bridge for the parent chain to function at its full potential. With that said, when Polygon works as a network infrastructure or side chain for the parent chain, it dramatically increases its adaptability, scalability,

and throughput. With the help of the Polygon side chains, those blockchains which are known to process very fewer transactions could increase their network potential by a significant margin. 

Open the Token Pocket App

On the upper left-hand side, you can see a wallet image as shown in the image. Click on it and once you do, it will ask you to switch the wallet by clicking the add wallet button. Here as you can see Polygon is highlighted on the extreme left side at the bottom of the image. Click on the Add wallet button to move the process further.

Once you do, it will show a create widget as shown in the left-hand image given below. Once you click on it, it will show another option on your device screen asking to create a wallet as shown in the image on the right-hand side.

Set the wallet name and assign a password for future use. Make sure to mark the Terms and Services and hit the create wallet button. A note of caution in between, make sure to write down the pneumonic phrase on a piece of paper and store it someplace safe. At no point in time, you should share this pneumonic phrase with anyone else. If you do so ever, it will make your wallet vulnerable since anyone can hit the forget password and restore the wallet with the phrase and withdraw all your funds. 

In this step, verify the wallet with your pneumonic phrase and click on confirm. Once you do that, Viola! You have just created Polygon Matic successfully.

To transfer funds from the Ethereum Blockchain to the Polygon chain, you need a bridge. Across all layer 2’s the bridge acts in a uniform manner, which is locking the asset and exiting the same when the user wants it. On Polygon, it follows the same model. The Polygon chain either uses the Plasma Bridge or the POS Bridge for transferring assets to the parent chain. Since Plasma provides full proof security, it takes more days to withdraw the funds at the time of the exit to the main/parent chain. On Plasma, it usually takes 7 days. Whereas, if you perform the same function on a POS bridge, it will complete the same in only 3 hours. 

Moving forward, we will take the POS bridge since we need funds at the earliest in this example. 

You need to click the discover button as shown at the bottom of the Polygon Wallet. On the discovery search console, input the keyphrase Polygon bridge. 

Click on Polygon Bridge. 

Once you do, it will take you to a page that would ask you to connect a wallet. In this example, we are using the Metamask wallet. Confirm the information inputted and hit the confirm button as shown in the below image. 

Once you have done this step, you need to click on the back to wallet option shown on the upper left side as mentioned below. 

Choose the token of your choice that you wish to move to the Polygon chain. In this example, we are taking USDT(Tether). 

Enter the token amount that you wish to transfer. You can either pick the max or the amount of your choice. Once you have inputted that, hit on the transfer button that transfers the amount. 

Confirm the transaction that is happening from the Ethereum Chain to the Polygon Chain. Once you do that, click on the continue button. 

In the deposit process, there are two transactions visible (1) Approve Deposit (2) Complete Deposit. Click on continue. 

Double confirm and click on the continue button. 

Confirm the approved transaction and click on continue to approve the deposit. 

Once you click on continue, it will transfer the asset. However, it may take a little time. So, please wait patiently and after a few minutes, you can see your Polygon Wallet balance updated successfully. 

The cryptocurrency market entered recently a consolidation mode. After Bitcoin prices reached an all-time high price of around USD 68,000, its prices retraced back to a previous consolidation delimited between 50K and 60K. On the other hand, we witness occasional good news regarding certain altcoins, bringing their prices higher. In this article, we look at Polygon Matic Price, which recently shot around 8% while other cryptos retrace.

Polygon is a project that aims to bring Ethereum’s blockchain to the masses. In order to do so, it provides an easy “plug-and-play” solution to crypto projects. This not only increases the demand for Ethereum but also for the entire crypto industry. Using Polygon, one can create optimistic rollup chains, ZK rollup chains, stand-alone chains, or any other kind of infrastructure required by the developer.

Polygon effectively transforms Ethereum into a full-fledged multi-chain system. That’s why it was given the attribute of the “Internet of Blockchains”. This multi-chain system is related to other projects such as Polkadot, Cosmos, and Avalanche with the advantages of Ethereum’s security, smooth ecosystem, and openness.

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While Bitcoin and most altcoins retrace, Polygon MATIC's price shot 8%. This comes after MATIC was recently listed on 21Shares as a crypto exchange-traded product or ETP. Layer 2 solutions are garnering huge attention lately, and Polygon is one of the leading projects in this realm. Investors are seeing many other projects launching on the Polygon infrastructure, which is faster and less expensive than other blockchains like Ethereum.

Following this listing news, MATIC prices soared by 17%. Prices increased from USD 1.79 all the way towards the psychological price of USD 2.1. Prices did retrace due to profit-taking towards the current price of USD 1.95 and are still up by around 8%.

Zooming out and looking at the macro price-action of MATIC, we can clearly see in figure 2 how MATIC prices breached the upper triangle formation. This technical formation was key to estimating a future increase in prices. Technical traders often wait for such price-action to open trades.

On the other hand, if the crypto market continues to retrace lower, MATIC should turn back lower, especially looking at how technical traders reached their targets and are ready to close their positions.

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Rudy Fares

The decentralized finance sector is one important sector in the crypto industry. This is because traders can carry out a wide variety of activities in this sector. Ranging from lending to borrowing and yield farming, traders are open to various options to earn rewards. The main platform of DeFi, Etherum, has seen a vast increase in protocol and users across the years.

With this, the network has been overly stretched transactions on it takes time before they are processed. Asides from that, users have to pay exorbitant fees to complete their transactions on the network. This is why some Layer 2 scaling such as Arbitrum and Optimism have taken that burden off Ethereum. In this article, we will be looking at Optimism and moving the crypto sector forward.

Optimism is a layer 2 scaling solution that is used on Ethereum. The main feature of Optimism is to make transactions on Ethereum applications very cheap. Optimism moves transactions away from the blockchain to another blockchain. With this, gas fees are drastically reduced, and throughput increases. Optimism provides Ethereum developers with the opportunity to use all available tools on Ethereum without the need for changes. According to the Optimism developing team, traders will pay a 10x reduced cost as gas fees. To tackle fraud and invalid state transition, Optimism makes use of Optimistic rollups.

Optimism allows fast Layer 1 to Layer 2 transfers from Ethereum mainnet to Optimism. However, all transfers from Optimism to Ethereum take up to 7 days. This is because it uses the waiting period to verify transactions against fraud. To bridge between Optimism and Ethereum, users can use the Optimism Gateway. To bridge between both chains, a user needs to enter the gateway and connect his wallet. The next step requires you to choose your type of wallet and make your deposit.

Once the contract acknowledges the tokens that you sent in, your tokens will be bridged over. The bridging process is swift, and it takes about 5 minutes from start to finish. After the tokens are bridged on Optimism, users can make transactions just like they do on Ethereum. Also, Optimism has the same security and resistance that the Ethereum mainnet has. Optimism supports wallets such as Coinbase, Metamask, Rainbow, and Token, among others.

Optimism is a chain for the future due to the so many advantages that abound on the network. All these advantages and other features are why Optimism will help Ethereum achieve more scalability. Optimism will provide users with a faster transaction with cheap fees while providing Ethereum's security. Also, it is noteworthy that the data-infused determines the performance of Optimism on Layer 1. This means that users can compress as much data as possible and have a large and cheap data layer. Optimism is also hoping that it can seduce more apps onto its chain due to its features. With that, more users will be on the blockchain.

Lightning Network has been heavily promoted again recently as Bitcoin's most promising solution to scale globally and become the world's largest micropayments network. As Bitcoin's base layer (like most L1s) has high fees and longer waiting times, it's not suitable for small payments. Naturally, it makes sense to find out the limitations of the Lightning Network to understand if LN can indeed scale for billions of users worldwide. It's our understanding that the best source for finding out the capacity limits would be the LN Whitepaper itself. Fortunately, it has the answer.

If we presume that a decentralized payment network exists and one user will make 3 blockchain transactions per year on average, Bitcoin will be able to support over 35 million users with 1MB blocks in ideal circumstances (assuming 2000 transactions/MB, or 500 bytes/Tx).

This is quite limited, and an increase of the block size may be necessary to support everyone in the world using Bitcoin. A simple increase of the block size would be a hard fork, meaning all nodes will need to update their wallets if they wish to participate in the network with the larger blocks.

Block Size Increases and Consensus - Lightning Network Whitepaper

The section 10 of the LN whitepaper titled "Block Size Increases and Consensus" concludes that because of the current Bitcoin block size of 1 MB, Lightning Network can support just over 35 million users, assuming that each of them are performing 3 transactions per year on average. It's further stated that even this capacity is only possible under ideal circumstances (2000 tx / MB or 5000 bytes / tx), which is of course not always the case.

The latest version of Lightning Network whitepaper was released way back on 14 Jan, 2016 and little has changed on the Bitcoin base layer, since then. The Segregated Witness Consensus Layer (SegWit) was the most significant upgrade after the LN whitepaper release, resulting in the Bitcoin protocol being able to increase the number of transactions that it could process by removing the witness data, reducing tx size and raising the number of tx that can be included in the block.

It was introduced in Aug 2017 and according to the data obtained from Blockchain.com, the number of transactions that can be included in a single block now expand upto 2,500 tx / block under high load, against the 2,000 tx / block capacity, mentioned in the whitepaper. Assuming the same conditions, it means that the Lightning Network can now support just over 43.75 million users with the same 3 tx / year average.

The data shows that Lightning Network doesn't solve Bitcoin's scaling solution, the currently popular Strike and Chivo Wallets operate off-chain for the most parts and don't seem to use LN, in any true manner. Noting that the world's population is well over 7.8 billion and it's unlikely that each person can make only 3 transactions in a year, Bitcoin needs to increase its block size for the Lightning Network to work for everyone and fulfill its purpose in a truly decentralized manner.

Ethereum is fast becoming the epitome of culture. TikTok, Twitter, Playboy magazine and now the nostalgic teen favorite Counter Strike! They are all rushing to capitalize on the latest NFT trend. ESL Labs - the world's largest esports organization announced on Oct 28 that it plans to launch a "next generation NFT collectibles platform" on Ethereum's Layer 2 solution Immutable X for Counter Strike Global Offensive (GO) fans.

According to the official source "The ESL NFT platform, in partnership with Immutable X, will enable esports and Counter-Strike enthusiasts around the world to be able to buy, sell, and exchange NFT assets within the ESL Pro Tour". However, this won't be Counter Strike parent ESL first foray into the NFT world. It previously launched the IEM Cologne POG Collection on OpenSea in this year's August!

This is encouraging news as it shows that NFTs are here to stay and are fast gaining cultural approval. It's understandable that other major game developers are going to follow in ESL's path and likely to incorporate some form of NFTs / shared game items in the future, to stay relevant in the fast changing landscape. This is the way.

Counter-Strike (CS) is a series of multiplayer first-person shooter video games in which teams of terrorists battle to perpetrate an act of terror (bombing, hostage-taking, assassination) while counter-terrorists try to prevent it (bomb defusal, hostage rescue). The series began on Windows in 1999 with the release of the first game, Counter-Strike.

At the end of each round, players are rewarded based on their individual performance with in-game currency to spend on more powerful weapons in subsequent rounds. Winning rounds results in more money than losing, and completing objectives such as killing enemy players gives cash bonuses. Uncooperative actions, such as killing teammates, results in a penalty - Wikipedia

Ethereum Layer 2 solutions are being deployed left, right and center. Since necessity is the mother of invention and gas fees on the base layer have gotten high, there is no surprise that the dev teams have sped up their schedules. However, they are still in the initial testing phase and still being tested / tweaked. It’s advisable to proceed with caution until they are mature enough to handle Layer 1 level loads. How to see the fees on them though? Meet L2 Fees.

Another brand child of Ethereum developer David Mihal - the creator of Crypto Fees (tracking protocol fees generation) and Money Movers (tracking the protocol value settlements), L2 Fees tracks the fees across the operational Ethereum Layer 2 solutions. It also classifies the cost of various basic transaction activities, namely the cost of sending Ethereum, cost of sending other tokens and the cost of completing a swap on the networks.

Each Ethereum Layer 2 solution has it's own strengths and drawbacks, including trust assumptions, degree of decentralization, emergency response, stage of maturity, tx speed, withdrawal time, so do your research before jumping on the bandwagon. Arbitrum and Optimism on the list have reduced speed / tx limit to test the system.

They are not operating at maximum capacity currently and the team will increase it gradually, once the protocols are tested further and more mature. Ethereum Layer 2 solution Aztec Protocol, on the other hand, ensures private transactions, so operations on the protocol are even higher than Ethereum.

The Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solutions are decentralized protocols that increase the processing capacity of the Ethereum blockchain (hence scaling) and as a result, relieve congestion on the network. They work by delegating the network processing “off-chain” to their own chain, processing it there, before settling the final balances on the base layer mainnet. It’s extremely necessary that big exchanges like Coinbase, Binance, etc. integrate them, so average users can benefit from increased throughput and more capacity on blockchains.

The Ethereum Layer 2 season is underway. Major scaling solutions will become live on the DeFi protocol. Currently, devs are trying to onboard them in a bid to scale the Ethereum blockchain and provide low-cost/fast processing tx. The latest to join the party is the liquidity aggregator 1inch. It is the leading decentralized exchange that integrates its services with the O? mainnet - the Optimism L2 solution.

Initially, the protocol limits to 0.6 tx per second, which will likely increase once the Optimism technology matures with further testing and optimization. How to start trading on 1inch Optimism? Well, visit the Optimism Gateway and start your L2 journey by connecting your wallet.

Then, start exchanging tokens on the Optimism L2. The full tutorial is already live and helps other users. The deposits are instant, but the withdrawals take a week to process, owing to the Optimism solution limitations. 1inch is the second major DEX to onboard the solution after Uniswap.

In the future versions of Optimism L2, scaling performance improvements will integrate alongside efforts to increase decentralization and wallets paying for gas in any token (not only ETH). 1inch is likely to benefit from that. Optimistic Ethereum is an EVM-compatible Optimistic Rollup solution. It's a developing solution and the team is treading carefully in uncharted waters to ensure maximum security and stability.

The Layer 2 scaling solutions are protocols that increase the processing capacity of a blockchain (hence scaling) and as a result, relieve congestion on the network. They work by delegating the network processing “off-chain” to their own chain, processing it there, before settling the final balances on the base layer mainnet.

The second-layer off-chain scalability solutions apply to subsidiary etiquette developed on top of the principal blockchain where transactions are ‘off-loaded’ from the principal blockchain to conserve area and decrease network bottleneck. Second-layer solutions are normally in the order of side-chains and state channels.