Changes and rebranding dramas frequently unfold in the crypto market, but few projects handle it as fiercely as POL. Once a popular project under the name MATIC, after rebranding with a new identity, it instead sank into a quagmire, with its market cap dropping from tens of billions to nearly being forgotten by the market. Today, let's calmly analyze how this project went from a promising start to its current situation, and whether the subsequent rescue efforts are worth paying attention to.

Looking back at the background: POL is not a new project that appeared out of nowhere. Its predecessor is MATIC, launched in 2019 through a leading exchange's LaunchPad, which was highly anticipated and claimed to be an "Ethereum scaling solution." By September 2024, the project announced the launch of the "Polygon 2.0" upgrade plan, officially renaming MATIC to POL, and claiming to create a "multi-chain aggregation core token." The ideal was grand, but reality was quite sobering—its popularity did not explode as expected, and instead, its market cap came under pressure, which can be described as "changing the soup without changing the medicine, and even breaking the bowl."

Why is this happening? To put it plainly, the dilemma POL faces is fundamental. The reason this project gained attention early on is essentially because Ethereum's mainnet had obvious pain points: at that time, transaction gas fees often cost dozens of dollars, and waiting hours in transaction queues was common. MATIC, as a sidechain solution, emerged to address these issues by lowering fees to nearly negligible levels and achieving transaction confirmation speeds in seconds, naturally becoming a preferred choice for users.

However, Ethereum's upgrade progress over the past few years has been unexpected. Starting from the Dencun upgrade, followed by major updates like Fusaka, Ethereum has achieved a qualitative leap in scalability. The introduction of blob data mechanisms has significantly reduced Layer 2 costs. As Ethereum's core pain points gradually diminish, the value proposition that MATIC originally relied on has also been weakened. This fundamental change in demand is something no rebranding or marketing activity can reverse.