Polygon Flips Ethereum on Active User Addresses

Active user participation in Polygon explodes, giving positive cues to its native cryptocurrency MATIC.

• Polygon’s count of unique daily addresses active either as sender or receiver rose to a record high of 566,516 on Saturday, surpassing Ethereum for the first time, according to data provided by polygonscan. Ethereum’s tally stood at 527,158 on Oct. 2.
• The number of active addresses on Polygon has grown by 168% in the past 30 days, while Ethereum’s count has gone up by a meager 0.6%, data from etherscan shows.
• Non-fungible tokens (NFT) adoption and gaming have fueled the growth in Polygon’s user base, according to Spencer Noon, an investor in Variant, a cryptocurrency venture capital fund.
• “Since July, traders on Polygon OpenSea [the NFT marketplace] have multiplied 45.5x, and NFTs sold by 17.5x,” Spencer said in the Network report published Oct. 2.
• “Second, gaming is taking off. Arc8 is one example, achieving 104K DAU [daily active users] days after launch,” Spencer added.
• Increased network usage often translates into higher demand for the native token and an increase in its price, Chainalysis’s Philip Gradwell told CoinDesk.
• However, the spike in active addresses has yet to give Polygon’s MATIC token a meaningful lift. While the token has risen 12% to $1.27 in the first four days of October, it is still down considerably from September’s high of $1.80.
• Polygon facilitates faster and cheaper transactions by running sidechains, or tangential networks, alongside the main Ethereum blockchain.