User Activity and Growth

PoS

On the Polygon PoS chain, transaction counts have steadily grown over recent weeks, reaching 20 million transactions weekly. Since January 2024, gaming (6.6%), infrastructure (8.4%), and prediction markets (5.7%) categories have grown steadily.

Monthly transaction counts (97 million) exceeds several other L1s, including TON (30.3 million), and Avalanche C-Chain (8.9 million), while remaining below Sui, Near, and Solana volumes.

Network fees have recently increased from historic lows, reaching $1.4M as of December 2024. As of December 2024, fee distribution shows prediction markets (22.5%) leading, while bots sit at 16.6% of marketshare, and both infrastructure and finance at approximately 8% each.

Polygon zkEVM

Polygon zkEVM transaction counts remain flat or declining since July 2024, averaging 80,000 transactions weekly, including reverted transactions. As of December 2024, finance activities generate 38.5% of transactions, while bots contribute 11.4% and infrastructure comprises 14.6%. These three sectors collectively represent over 60% of network transactions.

Transaction fees have increased threefold from historical lows to approximately 10K per week. Finance dominates fee distribution at 34.4%, followed by bots at 30.4% and infrastructure at 19.6%.

Top Applications

Polymarket

Polymarket, launched on Polygon PoS in 2021, emerged as a breakout application over the past few months. The prediction market gained mainstream media attention throughout the election cycle, driven by several notable events, including:

• Polymarket got the election right. While pollsters predicted a tight race, the Polymarket odds predicted a more conclusive victory for president-elect Trump.
• An anonymous French trader placed $45 million in bets across multiple accounts predicting Donald Trump's victory, attracting international attention. 

Polymarket outperformed established pollsters, traditional polling methods, and mainstream media forecasts, which helped it garner praise from the public, including Vitalik Buterin who said that the app has value as a social epistemic tool as it can help the public understand events and their underlying dynamics while minimizing inherent biases.

Polymarket's trading metrics correlate strongly with election events, peaking at $371.19 million daily volume on November 6, 2024. Current daily volumes have decreased to $100 million. The platform has generated $9.8 billion in lifetime volume across 67 million trades and approximately 13K markets.

 

Trading activity reached 54,874 unique wallets during the November 6 peak, subsequently declining to 38,246 active traders. Market category distribution reveals election-related markets comprise 38.5% of lifetime volume, with politics at 21.2%. Sports, crypto, and business categories maintain smaller portions of total volume.

 

As of date, the app is still the most dominant and popular prediction market, representing nearly 75% of total value locked across prediction markets, and still has 60K daily unique wallets, $100M in daily volume, and represents 70% of total value locked across prediction markets.

Courtyard

Courtyard.io serves as a marketplace for collectible trading cards, including Pokemon, baseball, and basketball cards, stored in vaults and traded as real-world assets. The platform integrates physical asset storage through partnerships with vault storage and security providers who authenticate items in secure facilities.

Courtyard's service centers on its NFT creation process. After securing items in the vault, Courtyard generates a one-to-one digital representation as an NFT, serving as a voucher for physical item ownership. This enables efficient trading where NFTs can be traded globally on any ERC-721 enabled marketplace. Ownership transfers occur through blockchain transactions, eliminating shipping delays and cross-border restrictions.

The platform features a redemption option allowing NFT holders to "burn" their NFT and receive the physical item. Through security partnerships, Courtyard offers shipping to over 200 countries, ensuring global reach.

The initial focus on graded trading cards stems from their standardized format and size, $13.8 billion market size, collector appeal, and efficient storage and inventory management requirements.

The platform resolves traditional collectible trading challenges. Auction houses typically charge 20-50% commissions, while collectors face extended shipping times, cross-border trading obstacles, and storage security issues. Courtyard's digital approach minimizes these concerns.

Courtyard plans to expand beyond trading cards to include additional collectibles and features, such as Metaverse collection displays and physically-backed NFTs for DeFi loans. This would enhance the collectibles market by combining physical security with the efficiency and low friction of crypto rails.

In general, Courtyard NFT metrics show strong growth momentum through 2024, with total minted NFTs reaching 570K. Daily minting activity has shown significant acceleration since June 2024, with recent daily minting volumes averaging around 3000 NFTs per day as of January 19, 2025.

Courtyard is a maturing platform with consistent user activity, demonstrated by the steady growth in both cumulative metrics and daily volumes across minting and transaction metrics since its launch in July 2023.

Real-World Assets

Based on data from rwa.xyz, Polygon PoS ranks third in total real world asset values across blockchains (excluding stablecoins), behind Ethereum, ZKsync and Stellar, holding 2.6% of the total market share. With 19 unique real world assets, Polygon ranks as the fourth-highest in unique RWAs behind Ethereum, ZKsync and Arbitrum. Assets excluding stablecoins on Polygon have grown 8.6% in the past 30 days.

Among non-stablecoin real world assets, non-United States government debt leads at $74,365,440, followed by United States Treasury Debt at $65,809,122, Institutional Alternative Funds at $18,870,662, and Public Equity at $717,295.

Major holdings include Spiko European Union Treasury Bills Money Market Fund at $90.6 million, BlackRock BUIDL and Franklin Government Money Fund each at $32.4 million, and several Hamilton Lane institutional funds through Securitize, each below $7 million in total value.

Polygon PoS distinguishes itself with higher allocations to non-United States debt versus United States Treasury debt. Spiko's growth is a strong example of this trend, having launched a fully-licensed Euro money market fund under European Union regulatory framework. Additionally, Cassa Depositi e Prestiti and Intesa Sanpaolo issued a €25 million digital bond, with Intesa Sanpaolo serving as sole investor and underwriter. Settlement occurred same-day in euros using Bank of Italy's TIPS Hash Link, bridging traditional and blockchain payment systems. Polygon PoS is integrating Assetera, a European Union regulated digital securities platform, to create a secondary market for tokenized financial instruments—including transferable securities, money market instruments, fund units, derivatives—and real world assets such as real estate and art.

In addition to onboarding financial institutions, Polygon PoS has also recently been instated as one of the four chains (Ethereum, Solana, and Base are the others) that Stripe will use for crypto payments for US businesses using USDC. Polygon PoS' stablecoin transfer volume sits ahead of L1s like Sui and TON and has been steadily increasing MoM, and has increased more than twofold ($38.4B) compared to June 2024 ($15.3B).

Conclusion

Going forward, it will be important to monitor a few key developments for Polygon, one being Polymarket's ability to maintain user engagement following the conclusion of the election cycle. More specifically, it's key to track whether the platform's potential pivot to non-political content, such as sports betting, could indicate future growth trajectories through user volumes and activity.

Lastly, but most importantly, the AggLayer's evolution and adoption is key to monitor. Two key developments include Ronin chain's planned zkEVM implementation using Polygon CDK, with future AggLayer integration, and Movement being the first Move-based network to integrate with AggLayer.

The information contained in this report and by Blockworks Inc. and related affiliates is for general informational purposes only and is not intended to provide legal, financial, or investment advice. The report should not be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any security, token, or financial instrument and does not represent any recommendation or endorsement of any investment or financial product or service. Blockworks Inc. and related affiliates are not registered as a securities broker-dealer or an investment advisor in any jurisdiction or country.