Understanding Polygon zkEVM Ecosystem Development After 2 Months: A 3-Minute Guide

Want to understand Polygon zkEVM's development? Not an airdrop hunter or Alpha hunter, but curious about what's happening on this L2?

This 3-minute guide covers everything you can do on Polygon zkEVM - are the ecosystem projects real opportunities or pure airdrop speculation?

zkEVM is considered the holy grail of Ethereum scalability. Polygon is one of the leading explorers in this field, with Polygon zkEVM being the second zkEVM to launch on mainnet after zkSync Era.

This article discusses four main topics:

1️⃣ Opportunities on Polygon zkEVM

2️⃣ Current on-chain asset overview of Polygon zkEVM

3️⃣ All current Dapps on Polygon zkEVM

4️⃣ Thoughts and conclusions

**Opportunities on Polygon zkEVM**

Let me show you some "temptations" - current APRs on Polygon zkEVM and how high the liquidity mining yields are.

**QuickSwap**

TVL on zkEVM chain is approximately $7 million.

- USDC/DAI - 173%

- USDT/DAI - 146%

- USDC/WBTC - 63%

But this isn't just high yields set to attract liquidity. If you check on CoinGecko, you'll find the actual trading volume/liquidity ratio is also quite high.

**Dovish Finance**

TVL is only $550,000.

The wETH/frxETH pool currently has a TVL of 4.5 ETH, but daily total rewards are only 10 FXS, clearly not attractive.

Same for USDC/FRAX, with TVL of $18,000 and daily total rewards of only 10 FXS. Assuming FXS price stays at $7, providing $1 of liquidity would earn an average of only $0.003 daily (70/18000).

The project also uses platform token $DOV as incentives in some pools, but the wETH/DOV LP is thin with only 24 wETH paired, very low liquidity. I'm unsure how $DOV will derive its value - worth following up on.

**Mantis Swap**

I couldn't find a stablecoin swap AMM on Polygon zkEVM, so my friend recommended Mantis Swap:

🔹 Possibly the first stablecoin trading protocol

🔹 Single-token mining

**On-chain Asset Overview of Polygon zkEVM**

Polygon zkEVM is currently just a "baby" with TVL of only around $10 million.

- USDT - $700k

- USDC - $2.3M

- DAI - $80k

- BTC - $700k

- WETH - $2.3M

- MATIC - $3.5M

Interestingly, the Frax ecosystem has an early presence:

- sfrxETH - $475k

- frxETH - $455k

- FPIS - $469k

- FXS - $180k

NFTs haven't been minted like crazy yet, but it looks like some projects are positioning themselves.

**All Current Dapps on Polygon zkEVM**

**QuickSwap**

Currently the largest DEX on Polygon zkEVM.

**Dovish Finance**

Swap platform with perpetual contract functionality coming soon.

However, current liquidity mining isn't very attractive.

**Uniswap**

The on-chain vote for "Launching Uniswap V3 on Polygon zkEVM" has passed and should arrive soon.

**LeetSwap**

A swap built simultaneously on Canto + Polygon zkEVM, but the UI currently can't connect to zkEVM.

**Antfarm Finance**

Antfarm is a swap that prioritizes liquidity providers, aiming to provide more profit and security for LPs by leveraging market price changes. Current TVL is $1.07 million, which looks decent.

**0VIX**

A lending protocol, but currently doesn't have much liquidity available for borrowing.

Borrowing money on Polygon zkEVM really isn't worth it right now. If you bridge all the way to zkEVM just to borrow money, you'd be better off doing something with platforms offering high APY.

But if you're an airdrop hunter, might as well give it a try.

**D8X**

Upcoming institutional-grade perpetual DEX.

**Satori Finance**

A perpetual DEX invested by PolyChain and Coinbase.

**zkEVM Swap**

A very small swap with low Twitter buzz and no additional information.

**zkDeFi**

A low-buzz swap with liquidity mining and Launchpad features, built on zkSync and coming to Polygon zkEVM.

**Thoughts and Conclusions**

Polygon zkEVM is a "baby" L2 backed not only by Polygon's experienced development team but also with airdrop expectations.

As Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal, whom I've always respected, said:

"The Polygon zkEVM ecosystem is preparing for significant improvements through key infrastructure deployments (like Safe), oracle arrivals (like Chainlink), UX improvements based on early developer feedback, cost optimization using data compression, and more. Additionally, there's no rule stating that existing tokens (MATIC) can't do massive airdrops."

Polygon zkEVM's advantages:

🔹 Backed by Polygon, easily attracting more protocols to develop

🔹 Team has strong business development skills to invite more protocol migrations

🔹 Has an active community

Despite this, Polygon zkEVM also faces some challenges:

🔹 Polygon is trying to do many things: DeFi, Web3 gaming, Web2 adoption

🔹 Their DeFi has slowed down significantly, they consider QuickSwap the "king"

🔹 Zero-knowledge proof technology is cool, but how many people really care about it?

If you want to try using Polygon zkEVM, you might find that most cross-chain bridges have low liquidity. You can basically only bridge ETH from Ethereum mainnet. So far, Polygon zkEVM's user experience isn't great (but it's still early).

I enjoy mining in DeFi, and the high APY offered by existing DeFi Dapps is beneficial for me.

Therefore, while Polygon zkEVM is a bit early for broader users, it's worth paying attention to.