Polygon L2 Proposal Roils ApeCoin Community

Republished By Plato

Followers: 0

Polygon ruffled feathers in the ApeCoin community by proposing the development of a Layer 2 network dedicated to hosting Yuga products. The kicker? Polygon wants $200,000 per year for the service.

On Oct. 11, Sandeep Nailwal, Polygon Labs’ co-founder, published the proposal to ApeCoin’s governance forum, pitching an Ethereum Layer 2 leveraging Polygon’s Chain Development Kit. Nailwal said the venture would “accelerate the growth and development of the ApeCoin ecosystem.”

The proposal noted that last May, Yuga Labs, the NFT studio behind the projects governed by the ApeCoin DAO, urged the DAO to consider migrating to its own chain to scale properly after the disastrous NFT mint for Otherdeed skyrocketed transaction fees on the Ethereum mainnet.

But while the majority of ApeCoin community members agreed that deploying an L2 would serve as a boon to the project, many also took exemption with Polygon’s asking price of $200,000 per year to build and maintain the chain.

“Why do we need to be paying Polygon $200K per year for this, when we can go to any other chain (AVAX, Arbitrum, Optimism, etc.) and do it cheaper?” asked SmartAPE, an ApeCoin Engineer.

“The economics of this proposal are one-sided in Polygon’s favor,” tweeted Bradley Zastrow of Dash. “There is no recognition of the value APE brings to the Polygon ecosystem. Chains don’t bring in users — projects do.”

Bear Market

The proposal comes as Yuga Labs and ApeCoin grapple with the extended NFT downtrend.

The APE token crashed 82% since the start of February, according to CoinGecko. The floor prices for top Yuga NFT collections Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, and Otherdeed have crashed more than 90% from their respective all-time highs, according to NFT Price Floor.

On Oct. 6, Yuga Labs announced it would eliminate several positions and focus on its metaverse project, Otherside, as part of a major restructuring.

Implementation Partner

Nailwal also clarified that the estimated $200,000 in annual costs would go to an “implementation partner” chosen by the ApeCoinDAO. Igor Mandrigin, the co-founder of Gateway, a Polygon implementation partner, joined the discussion, noting the performance of the proposed chain would rival Polygon ZkEVM.

Polygon also requested a development fund from the ApeCoin DAO treasury to “stimulate the growth of ApeCoin-integrated projects… and ApeChain-related public goods,” including marketplaces and other infrastructure, games, and consumer applications.

The price of APE is up 1.7% over the past 24 hours.