It’s been a huge week for the Polygon blockchain, which received a US$450-million infusion from a variety of top investment firms, including Sequoia Capital India, Softbank Vision Fund II and Tiger Global.
The huge investment follows signs that Polygon is moving into the Web3 space, which its investors clearly believe is a profitable move.
What’s Polygon’s Appeal?
Polygon operates as a layer to the network on the Ethereum blockchain and its role is to basically eliminate traffic from the Ethereum blockchain.
This is one reason why Polygon is currently thriving. Over the past year, the Ethereum blockchain has become congested as a result of a huge increase in its number of users. While its usership has increased, so too has congestion, leading to higher gas prices as well as slow transaction speeds.
Moreover, delays surrounding Ethereum’s upgrade have also helped Polygon’s popularity. Ethereum’s upgrade, called Ethereum 2.0, was originally slated for completion last year but has since been delayed for release later this year.
Ethereum’s layer two aside, Polygon’s recent moves into the web3 ecosystem is what has made it so attractive to investors.
Earlier this year, Polygon hired YouTube’s former head of gaming Ryan Wyatt precisely to move Polygon into this new version of the internet.
Web3 promises a more decentralised, user-friendly incarnation of the internet, which will house the metaverse as well as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrencies.
Polygon’s MATIC Token
Polygon also has its own native cryptocurrency, called MATIC, which has experienced a significant increase over the past seven days.
MATIC is used as a staking token to validate transactions using the Proof of Stake (PoS) method.
MATIC has a market capitalisation of US$14.7 billion, which ranks it 15th in the largest cryptos by market cap.
It’s currently valued at US$1.97 after being priced at US$1.53 just seven days ago. An increase of over 20%.
This latest spike comes after a short period of decline since it touched an all-time high of US$2.90 on 27 December 2021.
Bottom Line
Although the year 2022 has so far seen a downturn in the wider crypto market, things are possibly starting to turn around.
The winners this year will be those platforms that evolve with the changing of the internet. Polygon is definitely one to watch in this department.