Lazy. Proud. Shill. 🦐

Ye this is a shill. But Matic's good. This needs a deep code dive, but everything apart from that looks hot. No idea what metrics are, idc. This is about F u N d i M e N T a L z.

What is Matic about? At the core of it, it's a scalability play. I hate those! So what's different here?

Firstly, why I hate TPS coins:
1) Usually the tech implementations are very raw, or
2) TPS coins make new blockchains and have no network effect

Meaning: by the time your new techie thing will be out, you will already be rekt by a new research paper of some PhD student. Also, existing blockchains can just take your open source code, upgrade, and bam easy-peasy. If you start a new blockchain, you are an underdog right away if your only advantage is speed, because it's very superficial. By presumably making a better ETH - you will not get the same people that love ETH, and those people are what makes ETH actually great. It's all about the community. Token holders. Builders.

Matic enables scalability not by making its own entire new public blockchain, but this with Plasma, on ETH. It's an upgrade to Ethereum, it's not a competitor. It adds to the ETH ecosystem by providing scalability and tech implementations, while simultaneously piggy backing on ETH giant community and resources. This is the potential. What is built on ETH, can be routed via Matic. Why: cheaper and faster. You are still essentually using ETH, just via Plasma implementation of Matic.

For example, Decentraland has committed to using Matic mainnet to wire its operations through it. They are also close with DAI (MakerDAO) for the same purposes. To me, the narrative of this is clear: Engine for DeFi. How realistic this is? Well, you just need to be in bed with ETH projects or have huge backing (cough, Coinbase, cough) - and then just make them all wire transactions through Matic. Done. So the buz dev story is clear: first get all popular ETH projects who lack scalability - to use Plasma. And then start building more yourself.

Ok so just to sum up, what gets me hard:
1) They are dev focused, have nice docs and innovations, so it's sexy.
2) They have a clear biz dev / community acquisition strategy. Check all the ethhub and etc. updates about them. Waiting for Vitalik to tweet next LOL.
3) They explain what the token is for (to make plasma implementation permissionless)

Value creation (Plasma as DeFi Engine) -> value capture (Staking for Permissionless Plasma) checks out.

Follow-up reading: https://medium.com/matic-network/what-is-matic-network-466a2c493ae1. FAQ: https://docs.matic.network/faq. They announced 500,000 USD grant for devs. There are a lot of dApps, but hardly any users. Their experience + resources are supposed to help new devs get started: medium.com/matic-network/matic-developer-support-program-df1f0aaa9cd0