Polygon (MATIC) Holds Its Gains While Market Turns Red

Polygon’s MATIC has struggled to keep its weekly gains despite the entire crypto market trading in the red zone. The crypto market plunged into an endless decline yesterday after FTX’s acquisition by Binance was made known. The FTX saga has shaken many crypto investors for days due to rumors that the platform had liquidity issues. This resulted in mass liquidation, especially of the platform’s native token, FTT. 

Although the acquisition news pushed prices up, bearish sentiments held sway, pulling the market downward. As of writing, MATIC and OKB were the only tokens still holding substantial gains across the top-100 board. Specifically, MATIC is still up by over 2% from last week’s run. However, it was trading at an intraday loss of 26.70%.

While much of the cryptocurrency market is again plunging into the red, Polygon still keeps measurable weekly and monthly gains. In addition, it has enjoyed strong network expansion over the previous several months. Specifically, more than 46 million new wallet addresses have been added to the network in the past six months. The data was pulled from the protocol’s network explorer, PolygonScan.

There are now over 188 million unique addresses on the Polygon network, up significantly from the 143 million in May. At the beginning of the year, it had about 130 million different addresses. According to the statistics, the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network expanded by over 30% within six months. It added approximately 250,000 new unique addresses every single day on average.

During this time span, the value of MATIC, the network’s native cryptocurrency, has skyrocketed. Since the beginning of this year, $MATIC has seen a price increase of nearly 58%, according to market statistics. Whereas Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) have both had price decreases of 35.6% and 37.6%, respectively.

Despite the network’s expansion, price estimates for the cryptocurrency indicate a negative reversal by the end of the year. The crypto community at CoinMarketCap predicted that MATIC might fall to an average of $0.899 before the year ends. But the MATIC price has already touched that level today and currently stands at $0.8894. 

These forecasts stand in stark contrast to the rapidly expanding usage of the Polygon network. This week, the international banking group JPMorgan conducted the institution’s first-ever transaction using decentralized finance on a public blockchain. Polygon was used with a customized version of the primary decentralized finance lending protocol Aave to complete the transaction.

Meta also announced that it has started working on how to mint and trade non-fungible tokens (NFTs) through its Instagram app. Users will be able to generate their own NFTs and sell them on the platform thanks to this new feature. At launch, the social media giant will use the Polygon blockchain for the NFTs. It’ll import metadata from NFT marketplace OpenSea to make collection names and descriptions accessible.