POL Token Migration Complete but Price Remains Depressed

Polygon's native asset POL (formerly MATIC) completed its token migration on September 4, 2024, with 99% of MATIC on the Polygon network migrated by early 2025. Despite the technical success, POL hit an all-time low of $0.1533 on April 7, 2025, and dropped 91% from its 2024 peak of $1.24 to $0.111 by March 2026. The price decline is attributed to weak altcoin sentiment, competition from rival Layer-2 networks (Arbitrum, Optimism, Base), Solana's rise, inflation pressure from a 2% annual emission, and leadership uncertainty following co-founder Sandeep Nailwal becoming CEO of the Polygon Foundation in June 2025. Polygon activated the Bhilai Hardfork in July 2025 boosting throughput to over 1,000 TPS, and the Rio Upgrade pushed toward 5,000 TPS by October 2025. The Gigagas roadmap aims for 100,000 TPS by 2026. Visa integrated Polygon into its global stablecoin settlement program. Over a third of POL is locked in staking. Analysts predict a potential price range of $0.15–$0.80 in 2026 and $0.25–$7.00 by 2035.