Polygon and Gaming: The Matic Founders' Story and Rival Chains

Four engineers set out in 2017 to make Ethereum cheap enough to use. Their network became the plumbing under hundreds of games, then watched rivals build chains of their own. The full story, with the numbers.

In 2017, Ethereum had a problem every gamer would recognise: lag. Not frame drops, but fees and waiting times that made a simple action, like moving an item, cost more than the item was worth. That year, four software engineers started a side project to fix it. They called it Matic Network. Today it is Polygon, and for a few years it was the closest thing web3 gaming had to a default home.

This is the story of how that happened, what Polygon actually does for a game, and why so many other chains decided they could do it better.

Four engineers and a scaling problem

Matic was founded in 2017 by Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, Anurag Arjun and Mihailo Bjelic. Three of the four came from India, and Matic became one of the best-known crypto infrastructure projects with Indian roots.

The idea was simple to describe and hard to build. Ethereum, the main smart-contract blockchain, could only process a small number of transactions per second, so users bid against each other with fees (called gas) to get in. Matic ran a faster, cheaper chain alongside Ethereum and periodically anchored its records back to the main network. For a player, that meant actions costing fractions of a cent instead of dollars.

In February 2021, as the project grew beyond a single chain, Matic Network renamed itself Polygon. The token kept the MATIC ticker for a while; in September 2024 holders began migrating it to a new token, POL.

The money years

Polygon arrived at exactly the right moment. In 2021 and early 2022 the NFT and play-to-earn booms sent studios hunting for somewhere cheap to put millions of in-game items. Polygon was compatible with Ethereum's tools, so developers didn't have to learn a new language, and it was fast.

The company spent heavily to win them:

In August 2021 it bought Hermez Network for $250 million, one of several zero-knowledge (ZK) projects it acquired to build the next generation of its tech.
In February 2022 it raised $450 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital India, with Tiger Global and SoftBank Vision Fund taking part.
It signed household-name brands: Starbucks, Mastercard, Disney's 2022 accelerator and Google Cloud all appear on its partner list.

The gaming push got its own unit, Polygon Studios, and in May 2022 a star hire: Ryan Wyatt, who had run YouTube Gaming, left Google to lead it. For many traditional game developers, that hire was the moment Polygon stopped looking like a crypto experiment and started looking like a platform.

What Polygon actually does for a game

Strip away the branding and a gaming chain does three jobs: 1. Records who owns what. Each item that is an NFT has an ID and an owner address stored on the chain. 2. Runs the rules everyone can check. Smart contracts handle trades, crafting or marketplace sales. 3. Keeps it cheap enough to ignore. If a player notices the fee, the chain has failed.

Polygon's pitch was that it did all three while staying tied to Ethereum, the network with the most users, wallets and marketplaces. Its newer work goes further. Agglayer, announced in January 2024, is meant to link many separate chains so assets and users can move between them as if they were one network.

The clearest sign of Polygon's influence in games came in March 2023, when it partnered with Immutable, the Australian company behind Gods Unchained. Immutable's new network, Immutable zkEVM, was built with Polygon's chain technology and reached mainnet in early 2024. Polygon, in other words, ended up powering a rival brand's gaming chain.

The rough patches

Polygon's story is not one of straight lines. In December 2021, it disclosed a critical vulnerability that had been exploited to steal 801,601 MATIC before it was patched. In February 2024, Polygon Labs laid off 60 employees, about 19% of its staff, as the crypto market cooled. And the gaming boom it rode in 2021 faded: many of the games launched in that period have shut down.

The market data tells the same story. As of 12 Nov 2026, POL traded around $0.085, with a market capitalisation of roughly $902 million, about 93% below its all-time high of $1.29, according to CoinGecko. (Token prices are volatile; these are dated snapshots, not a forecast.)

Everyone wants their own chain

Polygon's biggest gaming challenge wasn't hackers or the market. It was other chains deciding games deserved a network of their own. Here is how the main rivals placed their bets:

Immutable ran its own gaming network, Immutable X, from 2021, then folded it into Immutable zkEVM, the Polygon-built chain, with the final migration scheduled for February 2026. On 17 Jan 2024, IMX was briefly the most valuable gaming token, with a market cap near $2.7 billion.
Ronin, built by Axie Infinity maker Sky Mavis, ran as an independent sidechain from 2021 and in May 2026 became an Ethereum layer 2 on the OP Stack. As of 22 Apr 2026, RON traded near $0.097, about 98% below its March 2024 peak of $4.45.
Oasys, a Japan-rooted chain, launched in December 2022 with Square Enix, SEGA, Bandai Namco and Ubisoft among its first validators.
Beam, launched in 2023 by the Merit Circle DAO, runs on Avalanche technology.
Xai, announced in June 2023, is a "layer 3" for games that sits on top of Arbitrum.

Each argued the same thing: a chain built only for games can tune fees, wallets and speed in ways a general network can't. Polygon's counter-argument, through Agglayer and its chain-building kit, is that you can have your own chain and still be part of a bigger network. The Immutable deal suggests it has a point.

By the numbers

2017: Matic Network founded by four engineers
Feb 2021: renamed Polygon
$250 million: price of the Hermez Network acquisition (Aug 2021)
$450 million: raised in Feb 2022
60: staff laid off in Feb 2024 (about 19%)
~$902 million: POL market cap as of 12 Nov 2026 (CoinGecko)

WGC's take, and what to watch

Polygon's real legacy in games may be invisible. It proved that game items need cheap, fast infrastructure, and then it ended up selling the tools for others to build exactly that. The winners of the gaming-chain race, if there are any, will probably be the ones players never have to think about.

What to watch next: whether games that migrated between chains keep their players, whether Agglayer delivers on letting assets move freely, and whether any blockchain game finally reaches the mainstream audience these networks were built for. Our explainers on the Ronin migration and Immutable's chain merger go deeper on two of the rivals.