The Polygon network has managed to achieve several significant milestones in December
User activity reached an all-time high, as did the total number of NFTs sold on the network
The Etheurem Layer 2 solution’s native MATIC token hit an all-time price peak of $2.91 on December 22, 2021
Over the past couple of months, Polygon has become a hotbed for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), particularly those pertaining to the growing GameFi sector. The sales of unique digital items on the network nearly breached the 2 million mark in December after gaining considerable momentum throughout the second half of 2021.
The number of NFTs sold in December came close to 2 million, a 60% month-over-month increase
Polygon is a Layer 2 protocol designed to connect Ethereum-compatible blockchains and provide an easy-to-scale environment for the broader crypto ecosystem. Low transaction fees and high throughout have garnered attention from numerous gaming companies that have begun to build NFTs on the Layer 2 network. In recent months, this trend had been the key driver behind the surging sales of digital gaming items on Polygon.
December was a record-breaking month in terms of NFTs sold for Polygon. Image source: Dune Analytics
Blockchain research firm Dune Analytics reports that the total number of NFTs sold on Polygon came close to surpassing 2 million in December. This represents a 60% increase over the previous month and an approximately 450% increase since August 2021.
The number of active Polygon addresses retests ATH set in early October
The surge in NFT sales comes amidst a broader ecosystem expansion that Polygon has been experiencing over the last year. According to data from Polygonscan, the number of active Polygon Proof-of-Stake (PoS) addresses increased to 545,163 on January 5, just 21,350 addresses shy from the all-time high peak reached on October 2.
User activity on Polygon has been undergoing a massive surge that started at the tail end of 2021. Image source: Polygonscan
The founder and head developer of Etheruem, Vitalik Buterin, has recently reiterated the importance that Layer 2 protocols play in the marketplace. Crypto investors agree with Buterin’s sentiment, as L2 platforms, such as Loopring and Immutable-X, have performed incredibly well in recent months.
No other Ethereum L2 solution has been quite as successful as Polygon, however, whose native MATIC token recently managed to break into the crypto top 20. MATIC reached an ATH of $2.91 last week on the tailwind of impressive 7,485% yearly gains.
The launch of Uniswap v3 on Layer 2 network Polygon will reduce gas fees and increase the liquidity of Uniswap’s decentralized trading service
The Uniswap community approved the launch on Polygon in a nearly unanimous vote as 99.3% of users voted in favor of the launch
Uniswap Labs has committed $20 million for the integration with Polygon
After a virtually unanimous vote, the Uniswap community has agreed on deploying the v3 of the Unsiwap trading protocol on Polygon, one of the leading Layer 2 networks. The price of the platform’s native MATIC token has skyrocketed to a new all-time high of $2.70 following the announcement.
The launch of Uniswap on Polygon will reduce the high gas fees when trading, borrowing, and lending
One of the issues of decentralized finance (DeFi) service operating on the Ethereum network is the high gas fees that are associated with performing transactions associated with trading, borrowing, and lending that are a product of Ethereum’s outdated Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism.
The launch of Uniswap’s trading and automated liquidity provision services on Polygon will significantly reduce the costs of performing DeFi services due to Polygon’s efficient Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism.
The Uniswap team has announced the deployment of their decentralized trading protocol on Polygon on Wednesday, four days after the initial governance vote had taken place.
1/ We're excited to announce v3 has been deployed on @0xPolygon! 🚨
As a leading scaling solution, Polygon offers low gas fees and fast transactions, with over 3000 applications hosted and 1B transactions processed! 🚀 pic.twitter.com/bzRRkqDJuk
The proposal to launch Uniswap v3 on Polygon was first submitted by the company’s CEO Mihailo Bjelic, who argued that the deployment of Uniswap on Polygon will bring a long list of benefits to users, including higher revenue, more liquidity, and most importantly, huge savings.
Uniswap Labs has committed $20 million to support the deployment of Uniswap on Polygon – $5 million for various costs associated with driving the overall adoption and $15 million for a liquidity program.
Following the news, the prices of MATIC and UNI tokens jumped to their respective multi-week highs. The price of MATIC has surged to a new price peak of $2.70 in the four days after the announcement, while UNI gained roughly 20% and reversed its recent downward trend.
As we move through the final month of the year, a number of projects are moving ahead with continued development, and this week’s choices are set to benefit from significant updates and announcements that should strengthen their market positions and benefit their communities. The news should also result in increased amounts of attention to each respective currency over the coming weeks.
3. Harmony (ONE)
Harmony Protocol aims to scale blockchain to 10M transactions/second and 100-millisecond latency. Harmony will bring 1,000x speed and capacity to the next generation of the decentralized economy, enabling marketplaces for 10B people and 100B devices.
The Harmony team are pressing ahead with implementing full cross-shard composability and cross-shard transactions across the Harmony network. The team are also developing a trustless Ethereum bridge in order to facilitate asset transfers between Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake chains. The bridge will allow applications to access assets on Ethereum while benefiting from fast, low cost transactions on Harmony. The bridge is live on testnet and set to go live on mainnet before the end of the year, and you can keep up with the latest developments here.
2. Stacks (STX)
Stacks is a decentralized computing network and app ecosystem that uses the Bitcoin blockchain as a secure base-layer. The Stacks 2.0 blockchain brings apps and smart contracts to Bitcoin, and enables new ways to earn BTC.
The Stacks team are staying busy as the year comes to an end and two NFT drops will take place this week. The Project Indigo NFT Drop on December 19 is made up of a collection of 3,000 wasteland NFT avatars with the prices still to be determined. This will be followed by the Magic Ape School NFT Drop on December 21 with 2,500 apes being made available on the Stacks blockchain. In between the two events the Stacks 12 Day Holiday Giveaway will begin on December 20 with tickets going on sale for the event, and as a result it’s another big week for Stacks and all STX holders can keep up to date with events here.
1. Polygon (MATIC)
Polygon, previously known as Matic Network, is a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum which aims to provide major scalability improvements for decentralized applications by utilizing a modified version of Plasma with sidechains based on Proof-of-Stake.
Why Polygon? Uniswap V3 To Deploy Contracts on Polygon
The deployment of Uniswap v3 contracts over Polygon are set to take place as the Uniswap community approved the relevant governance proposal. The proposal was brought forward by Polygon CEO Mihailo Bjelic on November 20 and closed for voting on December 18. Over 72 million Uniswap users voted in favour of deploying contracts on Polygon and a $15 million fund has already been put together for a long-term liquidity mining campaign. The Polygon team also recently acquired the ZK knowledge proof Ethereum scaling solution Mir for $400m and look set to close out the year very strongly. MATIC was one of 2021’s best performers and a lot of eyes will be on Polygon to see if the team can continue to perform into 2022.
How did the coins perform last week?
The seven day period generally led to poor results across the market; and NEAR fell by 11% and is currently trading at around $9.44. GALA fell by 21% and is currently trading at $0.45, and ETH fell 3$ over the week, and is currently trading at $3,945. Over the course of the week, the market moved from an overall valuation of $2.33T to $2.26T, a drop of 3.00%.
Following the weekend crypto market crash, digital assets have mounted a strong comeback over the last 24 hours
The total market cap has increased by roughly 9% on the tailwind of Bitcoin’s price growth and impressive showings by several altcoins
BTC dominance has fallen to a two-month low as alternative digital assets are recovering more rapidly than Bitcoin
The cryptocurrency market is experiencing a much-needed bounce back after the weekend’s crash, which wiped out nearly $500 billion from the market in the span of hours. Bitcoin (BTC) reconquered $51,000 support earlier today and was accompanied by numerous altcoins, including Ethereum (ETH), Cardano (ADA), and Solana (SOL), to name just a few, sporting robust double-digit gains.
The crypto market cap is eyeing a $2.5 trillion valuation after gaining 9% in a single trading day
Bitcoin and other crypto assets lost as much as 20% during Friday’s flash crash, whose fallout carried over into the weekend. The 24 hour period starting on December 3 was the second-worst period for the cryptocurrency this year, trailing only the May 19 market crash.
On Friday, the total market capitalization of all digital currencies in circulation fell from $2.68 trillion to $2.25 trillion in a matter of hours. After a modest bounceback on Sunday, the market cap dug an even deeper hole Monday, reaching a two-month low of $2.25 trillion. Starting earlier today, the crypto market has started to mount a comeback and is currently sitting at $2.45 trillion, down 8% since pre-crash levels.
Bitcoin broke the critical $50K resistance level with ease
The exact reason for the severe market pullback is impossible to pinpoint with a hundred percent accuracy. However, the positive results of a recent unemployment report have led many to believe that the Fed, and central banks around the world, will soon start raising interest rates to combat the 30-year high inflation.
Bitcoin benefited greatly from expansionary monetary policy employed to negate the adverse economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, growing from $4,000 in March 2020 to an all-time high of $69,000 in early November.
It seems that the era of massive stimulus packages is slowly coming to an end. As a result, risk assets such as tech stocks and digital currencies have been facing considerable selling pressure. Most notably, Bitcoin fell to the $44,000 level preceding Fed chairman Jerome Powell’s statement about the upcoming interest rate hike.
After the massive drop over the weekend, Bitcoin has recovered a decent chunk of its losses during today’s trading activity. The price of the world’s largest crypto increased from $47,400 at the start of the day to $51,300 at the time of this writing, a 9% improvement.
Going forward, it will be interesting to observe whether the heavily touted notion of Bitcoin being an inflationary hedge turns out to be true. Central bankers across the world are leaning towards implementing higher interest rates to combat the rising costs of living, measured as the consumer price index (CPI), which has increased 6.7% year-over-year.
Ethereum and other altcoins are recovering their losses more aggressively than BTC
Despite significant daily gains, Bitcoin’s recovery is trailing alternative digital currencies by quite a considerable margin. The BTC dominance ratio is currently sitting at 41.3%, the second-lowest value since the last week of September.
The altcoin surge has been headlined by Ethereum, which regained lost ground much quicker than BTC, and is now exchanging hands at the $4,400 level, just 4% removed from its pre-flash crash price.
Despite impressive 10% gains posted by ETH, numerous other altcoins have managed to mount even more aggressive comebacks. For instance, BitTorrent (BTT) grew by over 65% in the last 24 hours, while Loopring (LRC), Bitcoin SV (BSV), and Kadena (KDA) all demonstrated over 30% gains.
Polygon (MATIC) has been arguably today’s most impressive top 100 crypto asset by market capitalization. The 35% price increase has pushed the value of MATIC to a new cycle high of $2.44 and cemented the Layer 2 scalability solution firmly in the crypto top 20 on an $11.7 billion valuation. While the steady growth of the Polygon network and solid platform fundamentals have without a doubt been a determining factor of MATIC’s recent price rally, the listing of several exchange-traded products (ETPs) for Polygon in the recent weeks have provided an additional boost.
Algorand experiences a miny rally in the last 10 hours, gaining more than 15%
Following the announcement of Polygon integration with a major consulting firm, Ernst & Young, MATIC sees strong upward momentum
Ethereum is quickly approaching its September peak value, gains more than 6% in the last 24 hours
During a relatively modest trading volume day, Algorand and Polygon have performed the best among the cryptocurrency’s top 20 largest projects by market capitalization. Ethereum is also experiencing quite an uptick, the second-largest crypto is now up more than 6% for the day and over 20% in the last three days of trading.
Algorand price surges by more than 15% in the last 10 hours
While Algorand has experienced a lackluster market performance over the last seven days, ALGO has awakened from the slump and surged by more than 15% over the last 10 hours of trading to reach $2.20 at the time of this writing. Taking a step back, and analyzing the month-long period, Algorand has been on a tear. ALGO was trading below $1 USD ($0.98 to be exact) at the end of August and has since exploded by more than 100%.
The announcement of a massive 150 million ALGO fund (worth over $330 million at current market rates) by the Algorand Foundation certainly contributed to the rise in value. The recently launched fund is looking to boost decentralized finance (DeFi) development by providing 100M ALGO in liquidity incentives and 50M ALGO towards grants. Investment firm SkyBridge Capital recently announced that it had raised $100 million for the newly created fund.
The native cryptocurrency of the Polygon network, MATIC, has experienced rapid growth over the last 72 hours. MATIC was trading at $1.21 on September 14 and has since risen to reach $1.46 for a total increase of over 20%. The three-day rally has helped MATIC reach its highest price since the flash crash that happened at the beginning of last week.
Polygon, formerly known as Matic Network, is a blockchain platform that provides interoperability solutions and a highly scalable framework for the development of ETH-compatible chains. Ernst & Young, an international consulting firm with over 300,000 employees, has recently announced the integration of its blockchain services with Polygon. The consulting behemoth revealed that Polygon will provide its enterprise clients with faster and easier to scale transactions paired with quick settlement tines and stable fees.
Ethereum is showing bullish signs, the market is recovering quickly from Monday’s Litecoin “pump and dump”
As soon as the news of Litecoin partnering with Walmart was revealed to be fake, the prices of all crypto assets took a big hit, leaving a “candle” pattern, which can be seen on the above graph of Ethereum for the last 7 days. ETH has dipped below $3,200 at the lowest point on September 13. However, since then, the second-largest crypto has managed to quickly regain lost ground and surpass the $3,600 mark. At the time of this writing, Ethereum is up more than 15% in the last three days.
Generally speaking, the crypto market has shown a great deal of resilience over the last two weeks. Following the massive drop that occurred following a cascade of “long” liquidations, the market has managed to recover more than half its losses since September 8. Litecoin fiasco could also leave the market in a much worse state than it did. It will be interesting to observe how things will pan out in the coming weeks.
In celebration of the 1st anniversary of its premium listing marketplace ProBit Exclusive, ProBit Global has launched a commemorative Exclusive anniversary event on July 27 featuring a 50% discounted subscription window for MATIC, a top Layer 2 scaling solution in the space.
ProBit Exclusive debuted on July 22, 2020, featuring MATIC with a core objective of lowering the bar for first-time crypto holders to set up their portfolios with discounts on rapidly vaulting blue chips like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
MATIC was pegged for an encore subscription round with long-term performance exceeding 100X following their rebranding from Matic Network into Polygon and has cemented its status as the premier Layer 2 to amplify Ethereum’s enormous network effects.
Backed by 28% of circulating MATIC staked and roughly 100 validators, the Polygon PoS Chain achieves unrivaled scalability through a unique multi-layered architecture with Bor block producers who aggregate transactions for expedited confirmation and Heimdall validator nodes that publish Merkle roots on Ethereum.
This unique security infrastructure and EVM compatibility have cemented Polygon as the leading DeFi onramp with $8.47B TVL, outpacing Ethereum as a viable alternative due to its near-zero fees and much-improved throughput.
Polygon-native DEX QuickSwap has quickly secured a place among the top 5 DEXes on DeFi Pulse with a robust $1.02B TVL and over $9M in 24H volume. As one of the few projects to launch via fair token distribution, the team allocated 96.75% of the total supply for the community, of which 90% will land in liquidity miner wallets to improve liquidity and reduce slippage.
With USDC currently the most locked token in Quickswap, Polygon has recently secured a partnership with Wyre to provide a fiat-USDC onramp for potential Trad-Fi users to enter the DeFi rabbit hole in under 30 seconds.
Having onboarded industry-leading Chainlink price oracles and its Verifiable Random Function (VRF) has flung the gates wide open for Polygon’s entry into gaming. VRF and its unique mechanism of providing verifiable and tamper-proof forms of randomness are critical for many gamification elements ranging from NFT item drops and executing fair blockchain auctions.
With the continual growth of the Esports scene into mainstream channels and projections of reaching $1.9B by 2022, Polygon has targeted a ripe market opportunity with the top Esports tournament platform Community Gaming, the recent beneficiary of a $2.3M fundraising round.
The integration with a premier blockchain-based Esports platform enables gamers to instantly create tournaments at just fractions of a penny while massively increasing its mainstream appeal by facilitating near-instantaneous payouts for tournament winners.
In addition, Polygon hosted its first tournament for Axie Infinity, which has established the play-to-earn model as a legitimate income stream in countries such as the Philippines.
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The cryptocurrency market has ended the Week 29 with a total market capitalization of $1.44 trillion, which is around $140 billion more than at the end of the week. In addition, the cryptocurrency market saw quite a significant recovery during the first few hours (CEST) of Week 30 with most of the coins jumping up by 10% or more. At the time of writing, the total market value of all the cryptocurrencies combined already exceeds $1.56 trillion. Bitcoin, the market barometer, reclaimed the 50-day moving average and the general sentiment seems to be turning bullish again. If this uptrend will be sustained for a longer period, we could see a $2 trillion total market capitalization again. Whether this happens or not, it is undoubtedly worth checking out the coins listed in our weekly Top 3 Coins to Watch series, where we list coins that have the potential to outperform the rest of the market in the week to come.
1. Uniswap (UNI)
UNI is the governance token of the automated market maker (AMM) protocol Uniswap. UNI tokens are ERC-20 tokens that allow holders to decide on the future of Uniswap by voting on proposals. Uniswap’s platform, which facilitates quick swaps between various Ethereum-based tokens, has been struggling to keep its users and market share because of high fees on Ethereum in the beginning of 2021. However, with the launch of Uniswap V3 and the rise of Ethereum Layer 2 solutions, Uniswap is confidently reclaiming the pole position among decentralized exchanges (DEXs).
Uniswap is Slowly but Steadily Reclaiming its Market Share
While Uniswap and other Ethereum-based decentralized exchanges went through a rough patch this spring and lost a significant portion of their market share to Binance Smart Chain-based PancakeSwap, things are starting to look a lot better for Uniswap. According to Messari Research, Uniswap has successfully reclaimed much of its lost share of DEX weekly volume as its weekly trading volume represented 54% of the whole DEX trading volume at the end of Q2 2021. Messari noted that this is the highest Uniswap market share ever since November 2020. It is not a secret that Uniswap’s recovery was facilitated by the development of Layer 2 Ethereum solutions such as Polygon. In addition, an alpha version of Uniswap V3 has recently launched on Optimistic Ethereum, an Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution that uses optimistic rollups to facilitate instant transaction confirmations while keeping the costs of transactions as low as possible. It is therefore not surprising that the UNI token is heavily represented in the Grayscale’s DeFi Fund, whose holdings rebase daily based on a Coindesk’s DeFi index that tracks top 10 coins and tokens from the DeFi sector. As of today, UNI represents almost 50% of the DeFi Fund’s total AUM, which currently stands at $4.7 million.
2. Polygon (MATIC)
Polygon, previously known as Matic Network is an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution that aims to provide major scalability improvements to the biggest smart contract blockchain. The Polygon protocol plans to deliver supersonic speeds and throughput by utilizing a modified version of Plasma. Its Layer 2 solution consists of several simultaneously run Proof-of-Stake sidechains that regularly push the data to Ethereum, creating network checkpoints.
Polygon Launches Polygon Studios and Integrates with Wyre to Establish a Direct Fiat Onramp
Polygon has recently revealed that it has founded Polygon Studios, a new arm of the project focused on Blockchain Gaming and NFT ecosystem. You might say Polygon is a bit late to the NFT party but at the other hand the saying goes that it is “better late than never”. Polygon Studios aims to become the go-to platform for large Web2.0 franchises looking to venture into the world of Web3.0 and the home for builders, developers, creators as well as NFT investors. In other news, Wyre has recently added USDC to their payment API allowing users to use fiat (converted to USDC) on various Polygon dApps. Wyre has essentially opened the doors for mass adoption among non-crypto users, which will hopefully boost the growth of the DeFi ecosystem on Polygon.
As already mentioned, Polygon’s success also resembles in the declining market share of BSC-based PancakeSwap and recovering market share of Uniswap V3. However, Uniswap is not the only big project that has launched on Polygon. Since the rebrand from Matic Network, over 450 projects have partnered with Polygon. Today, Polygon performs more transactions per day than Ethereum mainnet. Polygon co-founder Jaynti Kanani commented on what he thinks is Polygon’s key to success saying:
“What sets Polygon apart from other L2 solutions is our Layer 2 aggregation approach, which allows developers to pick the scaling solution best suited for their needs, be it ZK, OPR, Data availability chain or other scaling approaches like our PoS commit-chain.”
Polygon supporters believe that $10 per MATIC is not as delusional as other think, even though the token is currently trading at only $1.10.
3. FTX Token (FTT)
FTT is the official token and the backbone of the FTX cryptocurrency derivatives exchange. The total supply of FTT is 350 million tokens. FTX is a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange that offers futures, leveraged ERC-20 tokens and OTC trading. The developers of the FTX exchange aim to offer a first-class trading experience by constantly improving the platform and addressing the issues that are often left unaddressed on other mainstream exchanges. FTX focuses on developing and offering institutional-grade solutions.
FTX Raises $900 million in a Record-breaking Series B Funding Round
FTX exchange has recently completed a Series B Funding round, in which over 60 participants invested over $900 million into the popular exchange. Visible individuals like Paul Tudor Jones, Alan Howard, Izzy Englander, and firms including SoftBank, Sequoia Capital, Paradigm, Lightspeed and Third Point participated in the funding round, which now claims the title of the biggest investment round in a company from the cryptocurrency sector to date. The FTX’s record setting funding round more than doubled the previous record deal, held by Circle, which raised $440 million earlier this year. FTX’s postdeal valuation stands at $18 billion. FTT is currently changing hands at around $33 per token, its price is up by almost 30% in the last 30 days. The total market capitalization of $3.1 billion makes FTX Token the 4th largest token among the exchange tokens.
In the past week cryptocurrency markets faced quite a hefty correction. The bearish market, which was triggered by Elon Musk’s announcement that Tesla is halting Bitcoin payments citing environmental concerns as the reason, caused the total market capitalization to drop by a whooping $400 billion from $2.45 trillion on May 9 to $2.05 trillion on May 16. Nevertheless, some projects, such as Cardano (ADA), Kusama (KSM) and Polygon (MATIC) managed to defy the general downtrend by posting gains of over 10% in the last seven-day period. Will the bearish market continue throughout week 20? Which cryptocurrencies are the most likely to rebound or defy the general trend? We recommend you to read our this week’s top 3 coins to watch article, in which you will find a diverse selection of cryptos worth keeping an eye on this week.
1. Bitcoin (BTC)
Although we believe Bitcoin does not need much introduction and that all eyes would be on it even if it were not featured on our list, here is a short summary of the history and key characteristics of the first truly decentralized digital currency. The world’s pioneer cryptocurrency was launched by pseudonymous figure named Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 and has a capped supply of 21 million coins. The decreasing miner block rewards makes the cryptocurrency scarcer with time, ensuring a deflationary nature.
BTC Dominance is Dropping but Fundamentals Remain Strong
One tweet form Elon Musk sent BTC down from $54.7k to under $45k, and the whole market with it. The immediate and undisputed effect that the Musk’s tweet had on BTC price, is best seen from this price chart:
BTC is down by over 20% over the last week, and with BTC depreciation, the BTC dominance continues to drop. While Bitcoin dominance stood at over 70% at the beginning of the year, the percentage has been dropping steadily over the last few months, indicating that more money has been flowing to altcoins as compared to Bitcoin. Currently, the BTC dominance is just over 40%, but several analysts are convinced we are headed towards the low 30s, an all-time low BTC dominance.
Despite the drop in the BTC’s price and with it, its share in the total cryptocurrency market cap, Bitcoin fundamentals are still firm and there is a strong case that BTC can still pump to 6-digit territory. First and foremost, BTC holdings on exchanges are still dropping, indicating investors are not interested in selling or trading their BTC. These so-called strong hands or long-term holders comprise mostly of institutions and whales (holding over 1000 BTC) are additionally accumulating precious BTC. While after the Musk’s tweet, inflows on exchanges started piling up the trend has soon reversed and there was a net BTC outflow from exchanges. In addition, the recent price dump “reset” the NVT chart values. When the NVT Ratio (Network Value to Transactions Ratio) is high, it indicates that its network valuation is outstripping the value being transmitted on its payment network. In other words, Bitcoin’s valuation now better corresponds with the total value its network transmits.
To conclude, a 30% correction from ATH price is healthy and even something that should be expected, especially considering how fast we moved up, as every exponential move needs an accumulation break. Perhaps this one is the one we need to move to 100k.
2. Dogecoin (DOGE)
The cryptocurrency Dogecoin was introduced as a joke in December 2013 by Billy Markus. Markus built the cryptocurrency project around the Shiba Inu doge meme that went viral in 2013 and the Dogecoin even uses the Doge meme as its official logo. Surprisingly, the currency took off. Even more, it developed a relatively large community on social platforms such as Reddit, which used Dogecoin to tip other members of the community and for performing similar micro-transactions. The Dogecoin community also raised funds to sponsor their own NASCAR racer for a few races and pay for a physical gold Dogecoin to be delivered to the moon via crowdfunding.
What are Elon’s plans for DOGE? Will we see DOGE exceed $1 soon?
Dogecoin’s price is, much like Bitcoin’s, but to an even greater extend, affected by Elon Musk’s twitter activity. Pumps of 20% or more are not uncommon when Elon tweets about DOGE, so considering the frequency and timing of Elon’s tweets, it is definitely a coin to watch. For example, Musk asked his Twitter followers whether Tesla should start accepting DOGE payments on May 11, resulting in a minor DOGE pump. On May 14, he tweeted that he is “working with Doge devs to improve system transaction efficiency.” According to Tradingview, the total Dogecoin market capitalization increased by $10 billion following the May 14 tweet. But Musk’s influence goes both ways! When the CEO of Tesla appeared on SNL last weekend, DOGE dropped from around 70 cents to under 50 cents. The reason – Musk called Dogecoin “a hustle” and failed to promote the coin as many holders expected him to do.
What does Elon have in store for this week? Will he help push the coin to the storied$1 mark? While many cryptocurrency investors hate Musk for making the whole crypto sector look like a joke, he has without a doubt became one of the most influential sources of crypto indices. The bottom line is that the price of DOGE depends on other factors than the general crypto market sentiment and could end up the week in the green, even if the whole sector is on its way down. All it takes is a couple of tweets from some influential entrepreneur. Nevertheless, Dogecoin, which is currently changing hands at around $0.50, would have to double its price to reach $1.
3. Polygon (MATIC)
Polygon, previously known as Matic Network is an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution that aims to provides major scalability improvements. The Polygon protocol plans to deliver supersonic speeds and throughput by utilizing a modified version of Plasma. Its Layer 2 solution consists of several simultaneously run Proof-of-Stake sidechains that regularly push the data to Ethereum, creating network checkpoints.
Major cryptocurrency exchange Kraken revealed on May 14 that it will list MATIC along with two other cryptocurrencies. Trading of assets will commence on Monday, May 17, at approximately 15:30 UTC. In addition, Polygon is pushing forward with continued development of its Layer 2 protocol. Considering this, a Mumbai testnet upgrade will kick off at block number 13996000. Both events listed above might provide a short-term boost to the MATICtoken valuation, but the project’s long-term perspective is also looking good as Polygon’s Layer 2 solution is currently one of the most perfected Ethereum scalability solutions available. With average Ethereum transaction fee often exceeding $20, Layer 2 solutions are of high importance. This is likely going to stay that way at least until Ethereum 2.0 is fully deployed. MATIC also boasts with outstanding past price performance. The token, which is currently trading at exactly $1.50 is up by 45% in the last 7 days, 250% in the last month and 7,300% in the last year.
At the initial stages, aggregation will be available for Curve, SushiSwap, QuickSwap, Aave V2 and Cometh, while more protocols will be gradually added.
Polygon, a platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development, is widely believed to be vital for helping Ethereum keep up with the competition amidst the process of switching to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm.
Aiming to enable Ethereum to become a full-fledged, powerful multi-chain system, Polygon offers a high throughput of roughly 7,000 transactions per second. Unlike Ethereum’s original Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm, in PoS, block transactions are confirmed by validators.
“After the 1inch Network has expanded to Binance Smart Chain, there was a massive request from the community to make Polygon also available for swapping via 1inch. Currently, the 1inch Aggregation Protocol is already deployed on Polygon, while the 1inch Liquidity Protocol and the 1inch Governance Protocol are expected to expand over to Polygon in the upcoming few weeks,” says Sergej Kunz, co-founder of 1inch Network.
To simplify the process of transferring assets between the Ethereum and Polygon blockchains, Polygon runs a bridge connecting the two networks and a dedicated wallet.Enjoy swapping on Polygon via 1inch and stay tuned for more updates to come!
