OVR Augmented Reality Platform has informed about migration on Polygon Blockchain. What are the reasons for this decision? What are the advantages of this solution? What are the benefits for users?

OVR is Metaverse platform, which offers Augmented Reality (AR) solutions, gaming and virtual lands sales. It’s based on two kinds of tokens: OVR utility tokens based on ERC-20 standard and unique, non-fungible OVRLands NFTs, which represent virtual lands.

At the beginning of January OVR informed on its blog about plans of migration from Ethereum blockchain to Polygon blockchain. In the same month the migration started.

Polygon is used for solutions compatible with Ethereum. The platform was founded in 2017 in response to high transaction fees and slow speed of Ethereum network. Polygon network is very popular amongst developers of decentralized applications (Dapps), DeFi projects and games.

Thanks to migration to Polygon transactions will be easier and cheaper. Users can now swap OVR Tokens on the Polygon implementation of Uniswap V3. Currently, gas fees are only 0.01$ per swap.

Users can use the official Polygon Bridge application to move OVR tokens from Ethereum to Polygon and vice-versa. To do this, just connect a wallet to the dApp. If we have OVR tokens in our Ethereum wallet, the bridge will recognize them in the search field and we can perform the bridging.

If we don’t have MATIC tokens to pay for gas on Polygon, we can use the official faucet to get them to trade on Polygon. MATIC is native token of Polygon network, which allows network payment and participation in the Proof of Stake consensus mechanism.

OVR uses Polygon also to solve the problem of scalability in Ethereum. Scalability has been one of the most important issues for OVR since the beginning and the company was looking for the best solutions. Finally OVR decided to move to Polygon.

Why has OVR chosen Polygon?

The company informed on its blog, that there were many reasons for this decision. The most important of them are:

• transaction costs,
• decentralization trade-offs and project vision,
• current adoption,
• vicinity to the Ethereum ecosystem and EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatibility.

On the other side, Polygon is very close to the Ethereum ecosystem, shares the same values, and has massive scalability and adoption. Currently, there are more active addresses on Polygon than Ethereum.

Polygon offers the scalability, that OVR needs to make NFT minting. Another important advantages are low transaction costs, adoption and closeness to such well-known network as Ethereum.

Another important issue may be also decentralization. In its current configuration, Polygon can be categorised as a Commit Chain, and its security model is highly reliant on the Ethereum infrastructure.

OVR predicts that Polygon’s current adoption and market sentiment is good indicator that the future of the Polygon looks optimistic.

Migration to Polygon

The migration from Ethereum to Polygon has started. The changes are described in details on the OVR blog. In the first phase of migration, all new minting began to occure by default on Polygon. User experience (UX) remained not changed. On the primarily market Polygon network payments have been added to the Ethereum and BSC payments options. In this phase the secondary market remained not changed.

In the second phase in February all of the OVRLands saved as Merkle Proofs on Ethereum have been minted to the owner’s wallets on Polygon. It’s over 24k different wallets that own more 700k OVRLands. This change will enable full decentralization and transparency of ownership of OVRLands. Light minting function will disappear, all of the purchased OVRLands will be directly minted as NFTs on Polygon. The secondary market will be fully decentralized and transactions between users will be exclusively intermediated by smart contracts. Owners of OVRLands already minted as NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain will be able to transfer them to Polygon. OVR will refund the gas costs for the transfers with OVR tokens.

Low transaction costs will enable features that were impossible on Ethereum. Renting smart contracts will be implemented, allowing for the monetization of valuable OVRLands. The further development of Avatars, OVRMaps, and 3D objects will be continued, making them valuable assets in the Metaverse world.

What’s next?

Company has informed on its blog that in the near future will be introduced the following changes:

- batch minting of all the light minted OVRLands

- generation of a personal custoded wallet for users who registered without declaring one,

- direct NFT minting of new primary market sales,

- NFT bridge from Ethereum to Polygon,

- fully decentralized secondary market.

For now users can trade OVRLands tokens on OpenSea platform until the decentralized secondary market is ready. It will take place in the near future.