6 reasons why Polygon (Matic) is massively undervalued at current levels

At current price of around $1.40 and market cap of around $9 Bn, polygon is highly undervalued compared to its peers in the crypto market.

1. According to DeFi Llama Dashboard (https://defillama.com/chains), Solana has a TVL of $9.3bn and Polygon has a TVL of $6.3bn. TVL denotes the total value of assets locked in the network, across various defi protocols. In other words, its the value of assets deployed on the network. Solana, thanks to the recent rise in price, has a market cap of $53 Bn, while Polygon has a market cap of just $9 Bn, based on TVL, Polygon has more room to grow. Worth noting that both Polygon and Solana have done 100x this year, and the TVL in Solana basically doubled in the last week alone as Solana went from $80 to $200 now. For many weeks before, Polygon had consistently more TVL than Solana. On the DeFi Llama dashboard, if you sort by Mcap/TVL, you can see that Polygon is amongst the lowest. A lower Mcap/TVL figure indicates the project is undervalued compared to its peers. This metric can be compared to the PE metric used in evaluating stocks/companies.
2. Coinbase is set to integrate native deposits and withdrawals on Polygon PoS scaling solution. This will be huge, as it would allow Coinbase users to deposit and withdraw Ethereum assets directly on Polygon, without the need to withdraw first to Ethereum L1, and then use the bridge. This can really open up TVL on Polygon to retail users. (More on retail below). Coinbase Ventures is also an investor in Polygon.
3. The Polygon Hermez merger has not at all been captured in Polygon’s current price. While Hermez may be a microcap project based on its price, it shares true Ethereum ethos and is founded by reknowned contributors to the Ethereum ecosystem. Hermez will bring true decentralised L2 scaling to the Polygon ecosystem via its zk-rollups. Developers/users will be able to easily switch between more centralised Polygon PoS chain for cheap transactions for games/NFTs, while using Hermez for trading, swaps, investing etc. When Hermez network is fully integrated on Polygon, it will be a game changer as it is considerably cheaper to use Hermez over other L2 options like Optimistic Ethereum, Arbitrum etc. As per https://l2fees.info, it costs $4.5 to transfer ETH on Optimism, $3 to transfer ETH on Arbitrum and just $0.40 to transfer ETH on Polygon Hermez. On Polygon PoS, it is much lower, at 0.007c!
4. While the present Polygon PoS chain does have more centralisation aspects due to its use of multisig, it has turned into a highly efficient network. The metrics from Polygon are mind blowing. The Polygon network has already crossed 700 million transactions, in little over 2 years. Bitcoin for instance only has 668 million transactions (though Bitcoin does not support smart contracts). Ethereum has around 1.2 Bn transactions. Polygon consistently operates at 70-100 TPS, and does 7 million transactions on an average day. (Metrics: https://polygonscan.com/charts)
5. Polygon is just winding up its DeFi summer, with amazing results and almost all of the top Ethereum projects have already deployed on Polygon, with great success. Curve, 0x, Aave, Balancer, OpenSea, mStable, Pickle, StakeDAO, UMA Protocol.. tons of NFT projects like Aavegotchi, Zed Run, many more are constantly moving to Polygon for scaling requirements. Big names like Dolce & Gabbana are launching NFTs on Polygon. Even Google BigQuery has integrated Polygon data for blockchain insights.
6. Polygon has emerged as an indisputable favourite network for retail users to transact on. Network level transactions show that 45% of all transactions on Polygon PoS are transacting less than $1.45. 65% of all transactions on Polygon PoS are transacting less than $100. 85% of all transactions on Polygon are transacting less than $1k. Most of these users are critical of the fees they would spend on other networks. Daily Active Addresses on Polygon is around 175k, while it is around 450k on Ethereum. Polygon PoS is multiple times cheaper than Optimism, Arbitrum, Avalanche and BSC, while even Hermez would be cheaper than these other competitor EVM compatible chains.

Catering to retail users is one of the main use cases of DeFi, and spending $5 for a DEX swap or just for claiming your LP rewards just doesn't make any sense. While there are multiple networks coming into the picture today, my personal thesis is that the network that retail prefers will continue to remain relevant over time - especially if there are cheap and easy access rails provided by fiat exchanges like Coinbase.