Recently I've become interested in Matic/Polygon (thanks to this guy). The reason was pretty straightforward -- the fees.
A little shrimp like me can't afford Ethereum fees anymore (for quite a long time, actually). BSC promised to be an Ethereum with low fees, but due to the recent BNB pump the fees on BSC have become quite hefty too (in USD terms). Before a BSC DeFi game required well under US$1 of fees overall -- since recently I've started paying whole dollars (in BNB) for every fart I make in yet another shit farm... Well, BNB speculators and BSC degens happily make Mr. CZ of Binance and his validator friends richer and richer.
Matic/Polygon looks like a solution for now. I know that Matic is not Ethereum, but if we're ready to tolerate Mr. CZ's dictatorship over BSC -- why not tolerate Matic's pitfalls, provided the funds stay safe on this Layer 2 solution? Besides, the big guys like Aave and Curve are experimenting not with BSC but with Polygon -- and I hope these guys know what they're doing and why.
Here I will skip some entry-level stuff like how to set up Metamask for Matic/Polygon. Those who need some Matic in their wallets to pay for transfers and swaps can get it free from this faucet Free 0.001 MATIC is enough for a couple of transfers and swaps.
Shortly, I decided to "ape" into Matic/Polygon -- and TA-DAMM!!1 The fees...
Naturally, before starting to play DeFi games on Matic, first we have to load our wallets with something to play with. Official ETH->Polygon bridge asked me to pay like US$100 (in ETH) of fees for transferring my assets to Matic.
Holy shit!!!1
I searched again. I have some stablecoins on BSC, but I couldn't find a working "bridge" (or a combination of "bridges") from BSC to Matic. I then went another way, through exchanges -- and it worked out!
That's how I cheaply transferred my stablecoins from Binance Smart Chain to Polygon/Matic Network through exchanges:
- From our BSC wallet we send USDT to Binance over BEP20(BSC) (~$0.1 transfer fee in BNB, as of today). Actually, it's possible to send USDC, BUSD, or DAI to Binance over BEP20(BSC) too, but in this case we'll have to convert them into USDT at Binance later;
- From Binance we send USDT to Ascendex (former Bitmax) over TRC20 (1 USDT fee). The reason is that Ascendex doesn't accept BEP20(BSC) deposits of stablecoins;
- At Ascendex we convert (swap, trade) USDT into USDC (trading fees plus slippage);
- Then we send USDC from Ascendex to our Matic wallet over Matic network (0.2 USDC fee).
- Done!
- And at just about 2 bucks of transfer fees, overall.
Probably, it's possible to find other such ways, through other exchanges. Not very decentralized ways of course -- but personally I'm not Mr. Vitalik or Mr. CZ yet, to pay shitloads of fees for every fart I make...