Polygon rallies 25% following listing on Upbit, daily transactions decline over 50% following gas fee spike

Upbit, the largest crypto exchange in South Korea handling over $7 billion transactions daily, has now listed the Polygon token, MATIC, for trading. Korean traders can now use the exchange to buy, sell and transfer MATIC, with the minimum deposit set at 10 MATIC.

With the news, MATIC rallied 25 percent, trading at $1.54 at writing time per our data. The token now mimics many others that have received considerable boosting following exchange listing. Solana and NuCypher, which Upbit has also launched trading, surged 5.8 percent and 678 percent, respectively. Others listed on Coinbase saw double and even triple-digit gains between June and August. Harvest Finance, for instance, skyrocketed 127 percent in July after its Coinbase listing.

On top of its recent success, Polygon (MATIC) also celebrated this month as its active address briefly outperformed Ethereum’s. However, recent news clouded the Ethereum scaling solution’s triumph. About a week ago, the network’s co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, recommended raising transaction fees to tackle spam transactions. Thereafter, the network saw a sharp decline in its on-chain activity. Daily average transaction volume dropped from 6 million to 3 million, shedding over 50 percent.

Polygon Reigns Supreme Despite Hiked Fees

Nonetheless, in the past week, the number of Polygon wallets has drastically risen to roughly 97.7 million wallets. The surge reduced the gap between Polygon’s and Binance Smart Chain’s (BSC) wallets by about 695,000.

Additionally, the layer-2 scaling solution still tops in terms of total value locked (TVL) in comparison to other Ethereum bridges, such as Arbitrum and Optimism. However, the network’s TVL has still declined 8.3 percent to $4.46 billion over the last week. The drop was attributed to the significant decrease in decentralized exchanges’ (DEXs) TVL starting September.

That said, MATIC traders remain bullish, despite the recent fall in daily transactions. The altcoin registered a May all-time high of $2.62, owing to the larger market rally. This October, however, the coin has been trading just above $1.2, until this morning’s announcement.

New developments strengthening network utility may pay off traders’ optimism. Recently, Polygon studios, Polygon’s gaming, and development arm partnered with Unicly (UNIC). The latter is a protocol that combines, fractionalizes, and trades non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The partnership is expected to place Polygon-native NFT projects on the whitelist, in addition to incentivizing them through UNIC rewards.

The NFT utility layer may also solve the pain point of Ethereum’s extravagant gas fees. Such layers are also associated with high social anticipation owing to the rising popularity of NFTs. Unicly might, therefore, further pump the price of MATIC. According to our data, the altcoin is up 20.7 percent and 17.1 percent week-over-week and in a month respectively.