Palm Foundation to Scale Its Native Network to Support NFT Minting and Trading

Non-fungible token (NFT) infrastructure firm Palm Foundation has laid plans to scale its support for minting and trading tokens on its native Palm Network.

In doing so, it’s tapping Ethereum sidechain developer Polygon Labs and Web3 tooling company Consensys to build out Palm’s network as a Polygon Zero Knowledge (ZK) Supernet.

Polygon’s ZK Supernet is a customizable layer 2 network that aims to provide easy onboarding for users and developers. The network is tailored toward projects that want to scale their Web3 enterprise endeavors.

By leveraging the Polygon Supernet, Palm Foundation hopes to grow its native network infrastructure across its existing 1.7 million wallet addresses. The Palm Network already supports NFT collections from sports franchises like Major League Baseball, NASCAR and WWE, as well as entertainment companies Netflix and Warner Brothers, sold through NFT platform Candy Digital.

Palm Network will soon be able to help the companies within its ecosystem create decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), or subdaos, to help govern their communities within the greater Palm DAO.

Andrea Lerdo, Executive Director of the Palm Foundation, told CoinDesk that in order to support the current sales volume on the Palm Network, it’s necessary to scale the network while keeping gas fees low and transaction speed high.

“The layer 2 just gives us the ability to process more transactions faster and also still use layer 1 security,” said Lerdo. “This is a trend that we're seeing everyone scale to, and I think we're preparing to onboard the next billion people into Web3.”

Additionally, the Palm Network will be compatible with Ethereum and Polygon 2.0, helping projects expand into additional ecosystems with a focus beyond NFTs. Jordi Baylina, co-founder of Polygon, said in a press release that the Polygon Supernet’s high speed, low cost and customizable nature makes it an ideal network for the Palm Foundation’s expansion of access to NFTs.

“By leveraging Polygon Supernets technology, developers of Palm Network can preserve the user experience amid even the highest network activity while minimizing the gas costs for its community – resulting in a significantly more accessible and democratic ecosystem,” said Baylina.

The Palm Network will begin its integration to a Proof-of-Stake (POS) blockchain on August 1 and will complete its migration to a ZK Supernet in 2024.

In addition to its network, the Palm Foundation governs Palm NFT Studio, which recently merged with NFT platform Candy Digital, rebranding under the Candy name. In March, Palm Foundation teamed up with Russian activist group Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova to teach an art activism masterclass through the Palm DAO.