Polygon’s zkEVM announcement backfires, will the network face the heat?

• Polygon founder’s tweet caused a stir on social media.
• Criticisms impacted overall sentiment, NFT and DeFi sectors affected.

Polygon [MATIC] has been trying to stir up hype around its new zkEVM solution that will launch on 27 March. In a 26 February tweet, the co-founder of Polygon, Sandeep Nailwal, spoke about the features of the mainnet. However, some users were unhappy with the post.

Mainnet : 27th March pic.twitter.com/I473nRdbL9

— Sandeep | Polygon 💜 Top 3 by impact (@sandeepnailwal) February 26, 2023

Read Polygon’s [MATIC] Price Prediction 2023-2024

Polygon gets called out

The aforementioned tweet’s description, encapsulating the “benefits of this solution for developers,” did not sit well with the community. Many users objected to zkEVM’s comparison with Ethereum [ETH].

For instance, twitter user Ye Zhang, objected to the phrase “Ethereum equivalence,” which he felt was a misleading term used to describe the technology.

However, not long after the crypto community voiced their criticisms, Ryan Wyatt, president at Polygon Labs, apologized and claimed that there had been a “disconnect between the teams.”

Hey Ye, I’ll take this on me to fix. It’s fair feedback and a disconnect between the teams.

We definitely don’t want to be deceptive. We’re beyond excited of what’s coming next month, no need to unnecessarily communicate the wrong things. https://t.co/8CBjKZOrBt

— Ryan Wyatt 💜 (@Fwiz) February 27, 2023

These exchanges on social media platforms resulted in a spike in Polygon’s activity on the social front. According to LunarCrush‘s data, the social mentions for Polygon increased by 38.74% along with its social engagements.

Even though Ryan’s comments may have subdued some criticisms of the crypto community, it may not have wiped the negativity out. According to Santiments data, the negative sentiment around Polygon increased over the past week.

Source: Santiment

Problems in the ecosystem

This negative sentiment around Polygon was also reflected in the performance of its NFTs. According to Dune Analytics, the daily number of NFT transactions fell from 10,903 to 2,090 in the last few days.

Realistic or not, here’s MATIC’s market cap in BTC’s terms

But it wasn’t just the NFT sector of Polygon that was impacted, as the network’s presence in the DeFi sector declined as well. According to Defi Llama, Polygon’s TVL decreased from $1.24 billion to $1.16 billion over the last few days.

Source: Defi Llama

Although the current state of Polygon may not portray an optimistic view of its future, things may take a turn for the better after the launch of the zkEVM rollup.