While many cryptocurrencies have had a favorable run this month, Polygon’s native token appears poised to close out January as a notable standout.
MATIC is up 19% in the past week to $1.19, according to data from CoinGecko, lifting gains for the token to upwards of 50% in January. This comes as the value of Bitcoin and Ethereum have increased nearly 44% and 38% in the past 30 days, respectively.
At the time of writing, MATIC is the tenth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, with a total value of $10.6 billion.
Polygon is a sidechain that runs in tandem with Ethereum and seeks to improve on its counterpart by offering faster transactions and lower fees and serving as a platform for interoperable blockchains.
As the token undergoes a sustained rally, the pseudonymous Twitter account @lookonchain pointed out one wallet address that achieved sizable returns with MATIC.
The Polygon whale received 4 million MATIC from cryptocurrency exchange Binance in September 2020 for around $84,000 or just over 2 cents per token. Two days ago, the wallet parted with its MATIC holdings for $5.2 million worth of stablecoins, according to Etherscan.
Even though the sale included more MATIC than the wallet’s initial purchase from Binance, the trader still saw a return of around 50 times the original price that it paid on the 4 million MATIC, worth around $4.5 million or $1.14 per token at the time of sale.
However, the recent upswing is far from the token’s peak of $2.92 in December 2021. The token remains nearly 60% down from its all-time high. At its highest price, the 4 million in MATIC bought in 2020 would’ve been worth $11.7 million.
MATIC’s price action comes as Polygon prepares to follow through on an upgrade that was first announced in July last year. Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal recently tweeted that Polygon’s zkEVM update has an official date and will launch soon.
Polygon’s zkEVM is a scaling solution compatible with existing Ethereum smart contracts, which uses the cryptographic method of zero-knowledge proofs to verify large batches of transactions—called rollups—more efficiently.
Zero-knowledge proofs are used in cryptography to prove a statement is true without revealing its contents or the steps taken to establish a given statement as true.
When Polygon announced that it was launching its zkEVM, Mihailo Bjelic, co-founder of Polygon, said the update could put Ethereum on par with global payments processor Visa in terms of how quickly transactions could be processed.
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