Polygon briefly overtakes Ethereum in daily transaction fees as Polymarket activity spikes

Polygon exceeded Ethereum in reported daily transaction fees during a short-lived episode, driven by intense trading on the prediction platform Polymarket and heightened stablecoin settlement on the L2. Token Terminal registered a Friday high of about $407,100 for Polygon against roughly $211,700 for Ethereum, a first in the observable daily-fee series and an outlier tied to app-level concentration.

The margin contracted by Saturday as Polygon fees fell to near $303,000 while Ethereum collected about $285,000, signaling volatility rather than a durable regime change. Analysis from on-chain analytics indicates Polymarket alone generated just over $1,000,000 in fees across seven days, dwarfing the next L2 application, Origin World, at around $130,000.

Polymarket’s concentrated liquidity and large wagers produced short-term fee concentration that propagated through Polygon’s gas market and fee accrual. The protocol reported single-market wagering exceeding $15 million for an Oscars category, a discrete event that amplified transaction batching and settlement demand.

Stablecoin throughput also contributed; Polygon analytics flagged a new weekly peak near 28 million USDC transactions, reflecting both custodial settlement and market-native flows. Polymarket’s integration of Polygon-based USDC links prediction-market volume directly to the L2 fee curve and liquidity depth.

From a network-design perspective, this episode exposes how single-application concentration can distort short-term fee rankings between base-layer and L2 environments. Fee leadership in a snapshot sense does not equate to sustained value capture, because it depends on user-intent spikes and event-driven order flow rather than diversified throughput.

For market participants, the event underscores operational risk: oracle responsiveness, agent automation, and settlement latency become critical when one dApp drives a large share of transactions. It also raises economic questions about fee distribution, rent capture by sequencers, and how L2s monetize transient demand surges.

Investors and analysts should treat this as a signal of product-market fit for prediction markets, not as an immediate topology shift away from Ethereum’s broader fee base. Monitoring multi-day aggregates and active addresses will better indicate whether this is a recurring pattern or a one-off concentration effect tied to specific markets.

Policy and compliance teams will note the coupling between high-value wagers and stablecoin rails, increasing on-chain traceability and AML vectors when large USDC cohorts settle on an L2. Infrastructure providers and relayers may see short windows of elevated revenue but also higher operational load and potential front-running exposure.

In short, Polygon’s temporary fee lead is a measurable consequence of concentrated app activity and stablecoin volume, not a systemic displacement of Ethereum. The episode offers a case study in how application-level behavior shapes short-term economic signals across interoperable chains and rollups.