By moving the POL token contract to the Ethereum network, the team made it possible for it to eventually take the place of MATIC.

An release from Polygon Labs on October 25 states that the Ethereum contract for the new Polygon coin, POL, has gone live. The new coin is meant to take the place of MATIC,

The current token used in the ecosystem. Users do not now required to trade in their MATIC for POL, according to the team.

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The new token was generated on October 25 at 09:06 AM UTC, according to blockchain statistics. It is called the "Polygon Ecosystem Token" in full.

The Polygon team stated in the announcement that POL will power a vast ecosystem of zero knowledge-based Layer 2 chains" by putting in place a "re-staking protocol" that enables token holders to stake their tokens on several chains, thereby carrying out a variety of tasks.

The post said that the introduction of the token will now open the door for the implementation of other Polygon 2.0 roadmap items, 

Such as the introduction of a new staking layer for the Polygon ecosystem, an upgrade to zkEVM layer-2 for the Proof of Stake (PoS) network, and the development of a shared liquidity protocol for all Polygon networks.

The team made it clear that POL is not currently being used for any Polygon network infrastructure. The former token, MATIC, is still used for staking on Polygon PoS and Polygon zkEVM. It is also used to pay petrol fees on the PoS network. Therefore, at this time, users, validators, and app developers do not need to trade in their MATIC for POL.

On June 29, Polygon Labs originally declared that it was creating a new layer-2 ecosystem. The new environment was dubbed "Polygon 2.0." The group declared on September 14 that Polygon 2.0 would employ POL as a new coin. However, the coin had not yet been added to Ethereum and was still a proposal.

Zero-knowledge proofs will be used in Polygon's planned layer-2 ecosystem to validate network transactions. Optimism Labs' Optimism ecosystem, which uses optimistic rollup technology to encrypt messages between networks, will compete with it.

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