Y00ts, once among the top Solana-based NFT projects and that moved to Polygon in 2022, plans to migrate to Ethereum and will return its $3M grant from Polygon
The popular project, which started out on Solana and migrated to Polygon earlier this year, said it would return 100% of the grant money it received.
Context & Ripple Effects
Y00ts had already joined the cross-chain reshuffling of major Solana NFT brands: in late 2022, it and DeGods outlined plans to leave the Solana ecosystem for Polygon and Ethereum, respectively.
This reversal matters because it separates a project’s network choice from the incentives used to attract it. Returning the full grant removes an obvious financial overhang from the move.
First-order effects
- Y00ts will shift its NFT project from Polygon to Ethereum, changing the chain on which its community and activity are centered.
- Polygon recovers the full $3M it granted Y00ts, while losing a prominent NFT project it had recruited.
Second-order effects
- The move gives other NFT teams a concrete example that a grant-backed deployment does not necessarily determine a project’s long-term chain affiliation.
- Polygon’s ecosystem efforts must replace both Y00ts’s user and brand presence; Ethereum gains another recognizable NFT community without having funded this migration in the reported arrangement.
Third-order effects
- If prominent NFT projects continue to move among chains, ecosystems will compete less on one-time recruitment payments alone and more on the durability of their user, developer, and marketplace advantages.
- NFT communities may increasingly treat chain selection as a revisable distribution decision rather than a permanent ecosystem commitment, though one project’s move cannot establish that pattern by itself.
The trend: NFT projects are becoming more portable across blockchain ecosystems, making incentive-led ecosystem growth harder to retain over time.