Polygon’s native MATIC token has soared 8.3% overnight to $1.08, as per CoinGecko data, while the overall crypto market cap has held steady above the key $1 trillion mark.
This makes Polygon the tenth-most valuable cryptocurrency with an overall market capitalization of $9.6 billion, above Solana with $745 million, but below Dogecoin with $11.8 billion.
Polygon is a collection of scaling technologies built to improve Ethereum’s scalability.
Prior to its rebrand, Matic Network focused primarily on using so-called Plasma chains to increase Ethereum’s throughput. These days, the proof-of-stakeproof-of-stake (PoS) network is tinkering with several different “rollup” solutions, including both Optimistic and Zero-Knowledge varieties.
In terms of user activity, the network has dipped some since a steep rise at the beginning of the year. The number of daily users rose from roughly 404,000 on January 1 to 696,00 users on January 6.
Today, however, that figure has dropped to approximately 399,000, per PolygonScan.
Polygon users from December 31, 2022, to January 26, 2023. Source: PolygonScan.
Though Polygon has already performed tremendously this year, up roughly 42% since the year kicked off, it’s still roughly 63% off its December 2021 high of $2.92.
Polygon updates on the horizon
The latest price action also comes as Polygon looks set for some major updates.
Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal recently tweeted that the anticipated addition of the zkEVM update to the network has an official date and will be happening “soon.”
Just came out of a high level zkEVM Mainnet launch committee
— Sandeep | Polygon 💜 Top 3 by impact (@sandeepnailwal) January 16, 2023
First announced in July 2022, zkEVM is an Ethereum-compatible scaling solution that uses rollups to provide compatibility with all existing smart contracts built on the Ethereum network.
Previous versions of ZK-rollups weren't able to execute some of the more complicated operations necessary for smart contracts. A zkEVM promises to resolve that.
In cryptography, a zero-knowledge proof is a way of proving the truth of a statement without sharing the statement's contents or revealing how this truth was discovered.
The technology has been available for available testing via a public testnet since October 11.
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