A look at Polygon and what's behind its 80% rise in the last month

Polygon (MATIC) registered an impressive 83 percent gain in July. Over this one-month period, MATIC's growth has been quite noteworthy, especially compared to how its peers performed: Ether (+37 percent), BNB Coin (+14 percent), Solana (+4.5 percent), and Polkadot (-2 percent). MATIC also ranks 13th in market capitalisation with $1.72 billion in locked deposits on smart contracts, also called total value locked (TVL).

There have been several factors behind this meteoric rise. These can be divided into two broad categories: Polygon building its ecosystem, and several new partnerships forged during the second quarter. The cumulative result of several developments within these categories resulted in a spectacular gain in July, particularly in the second half of the month. The Q2 of 2022 also saw the gas fee on Polygon dropping by 49 percent to $0.018 per transaction.

In early June, USDC announced its support for Polygon. The move allows crypto-focused payment company Circle to work directly with Polygon rather than bridging manually from Ethereum via the Polygon Bridge.

Another crucial partnership lets Reddit use Polygon to launch its NFT marketplace and sell its collection of thousands of digital avatars. The handshake is part of the American social media giant's latest NFT push.

And in yet another positive development for Polygon, several platforms such as Lido Finance Meshswap, and Balancer, began to offer liquid staking for MATIC, making it ever more attractive to hold these coins. Besides these factors, several other major developments have helped Polygon duck the bear market trends. Some of them are as follows:

The spike in Polygon prices came on the heels of Walt Disney choosing it for its business development accelerator program. Although Walt Disney did not spell out why it chose Polygon, it is believed to be interested in Polygon's ability to implement Web3 applications besides processing crypto transactions.

Polygon is one of the six companies and the only blockchain-native platform taken on board by the media and entertainment conglomerate to develop AR, AI, and NFT experiences. The accelerator program aims to spur the growth of innovative companies through guidance and mentorship by Disney's senior leadership team and executive mentors.

Another major push for Polygon came when the company announced the implementation of a zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM). It's expected to slash Ethereum fees by 90 percent and increase the throughput to 40-50 transactions per second.

Polygon announced its plans to implement zkEVM Rollups at the Ethereum Community Conference on July 19 in Paris. The company believes that move will play a crucial role in onboarding the next billion users to the Ethereum network.

The zero-technology EVM is a scaling solution that brings cost and time efficiency by bundling several transactions and sending them as a single transaction to the Ethereum blockchain.

In an interview with Cointelegraph, Polygon co-founder Mihailo Bjelic said zkEVM Rollups will allow Ethereum to outpace even Visa in terms of transaction throughput. Bjelic also said that, if upgraded further, zkEVM can one day process thousands of transactions per second. Further, he believes that implementing a zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) can push MATIC's price beyond $1.

On February 6, Polygon raised $450 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital India to support its web3 plans. As many as 40 VCs, including Softbank, Tiger Global, and Galaxy Digital, participated in the funding round conducted through a private sale of MATIC coins. Following news of the new funding round, MATIC's price surged 17 percent to $1.98 in 24 hours. It was Polygon's first significant fundraising round since its foundation in 2017.

Polygon Studio also earmarked $20 million in May to help Terra projects migrate to the Polygon blockchain. It offered them technical and financial assistance to migrate and continue building projects. By the end of the month, at least 48 Terra projects were in the process of migrating to Polygon.

But it's not all good news for Polygon. Despite its 83 percent rally, smart contract deposits or total value locked (TVL) dropped by 42 percent in the same period. This hints at a lack of substantial growth in the user base, which can make it difficult for MATIC to maintain its price momentum. Further, according to DappRadar, the interaction between Polygon network addresses and decentralized applications also saw a decline of 19 percent during July 2022.

However, both these factors can be discounted due to the current bear market. Other than these worries, Polygon seems to be riding the wave of web3 with plenty of ecosystem strengths and strategic partnerships.

With its improved layer-2 scaling solutions and smart contract capabilities, Polygon aims to become a preferred infrastructure partner for web3. The network already hosts several Dapps, Yield aggregators, NFT marketplaces, GameFi platforms, and Decentralized Finance (Defi) projects. And thanks to its bolstered performance, it could grow in popularity in the coming months. At the time of writing, MATIC was trading at $0.85, down by 7.14 percent over the last 24 hours.