While the wider cryptocurrency market has rallied this month, Polygon’s native currency MATIC has been among the outperformers.
MATIC is currently trading at $1.15, up nearly 15% in the last seven days and over 50% this month, per Coingecko data. In contrast, the leading cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, are up nearly 44% and 38% in the past 30 days, respectively.
As of writing, the layer-2 cryptocurrency is the tenth-largest by market capitalization, with a total value of around $10 billion. Ethereum, the layer-1 for Polygon, has a market cap of approx $200 billion.
As MATIC continues to surge, a trader has made substantial gains, according to Twitter account @Lookonchain.
A Polygon whale received 4 million MATIC from Binance in September 2020, worth around $84,000 or a little over 2 cents per token. According to Etherscan, the wallet sold its MATIC holdings for $5.2 million in stablecoins 2 days ago.
Even though the sale had 553,023 more MATIC than the initial purchase, the trader earned a 50x return on the 4 million MATIC, valued at $4.5 million or $1.14 per token at the time of sale.
Despite the rally, MATIC is still 60% away from its all-time high of $2.92 in December 2021.
Polygon is set to implement an upgrade, first announced in July 2022, leading to MATIC’s price action. Sandeep Nailwal, the co-founder of Polygon, recently confirmed in a tweet that the zkEVM update for Polygon will be rolling out soon.
The zkEVM update is a scaling solution that works with existing Ethereum smart contracts, using zero-knowledge proofs for efficient verification of large groups of transactions known as rollups.
