Hi!
And welcome to our Crypto Insider for January 21st 2022. By popular demand, we’re bringing you the smartest insight, analysis and investing tips for all things Crypto.
Everyone knows about and talks about Bitcoin and Ethereum, but what about the rest of your crypto portfolio? Unless you’re neck-deep in the space, it’s hard to know what to invest in.
That’s why our focus is specifically on coins and projects you may not have heard of. Where to find moon shots before they take off.
This is our second issue, and today we’re giving you an overview of Polygon $MATIC, one of the cryptocurrencies frequently tipped as a big riser for 2022.
Let’s go!
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the time of writing, Polygon is the 14th largest cryptocurrency by market. It got to this point by solving a big problem – serving as a workaround to expensive and slow transactions on the Ethereum network.
Essentially, Polygon helps solve scaling issues the Ethereum network has, allowing for faster and cheaper transactions.
Polygon $MATIC at a glance:
- $MATIC (at time of writing): $1.92
- Market Cap (at time of writing): $14.3B
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/0xPolygon
- Discord: https://discord.com/invite/XvpHAxZ
Why It Could Moon
Ethereum is the coin with the 2nd largest market cap right after Bitcoin.
What makes it such a great coin is the Ethereum Mainnet, which allows decentralized apps through the use of smart contracts. If you read our last issue on Defi Kingdom, we mentioned that Defi Kingdom was built on Harmony, another layer 1 protocol with decentralized apps.
But if you’ve done transactions on Ethereum lately, you’ll notice that gas fees have become ludicrously high.
Gas (ETH transaction fees) can cost you anywhere from $20-$300, depending on what you’re doing and when. It’s fairly common to pay anywhere from $80-$150 in gas fees, which is an insane amount of money to do a simple transaction.
Using Polygon turns gas fees into pennies at worst, which makes decentralized apps on the Polygon network more accessible for everybody. The improved accessibility is why it is on many individuals’ top coins of the 2022 list and why many expect the price of $MATIC to shoot up.
It’s still a relatively young network with more and more apps and defi opportunities coming to the network every day. You can currently earn 84% APR with Popsicle.finance. We’ll do a YouTube video of this for next week 👍
The deep-dive
Polygon Project Roadmap
- Go Multi-Chain so that the $MATIC coin can be available on other networks such as Ethereum, Phantom, and more.
- Improve scaling, which will lead to faster processing. They acquired two companies that will help with this.
Community
The Discord boasts more than 48,000 community members. While this is a huge number, having an active discord community for this project isn’t nearly as important as it is for Defi Kingdom, for example. That said, a big community helps.
What’s more important is an active development community.
It’s encouraging that Polygon has regular programs to promote application development on the network. Still, it’s hard to get exact numbers on the number of Polygon developers and projects currently being built on the network. The developer channels seem to have engagement, but that’s not reliable.
Perhaps a better indicator is the growth of Polygon’s Subreddit, which has consistent engagement and show strong growth.
Price
Polygon’s price shot up 2021, going from under $.03 to as high as $2.45, more than an 80x in the space of five months.
At the time of writing, $MATIC hovers at $1.92, down 33% down from an all-time high of $2.88 reached on December 25, 2021.
While it might not be feasible to get a 100x on $MATIC, one of cryptocurrency’s best performers of 2021, it’s reasonable to still hope for triple-digit returns.
Strengths:
- Strong development and advisory team
- It makes network transactions faster and much cheaper to use, opening up cryptocurrency to more real-world applications and faster adoption
- It is rapidly getting more decentralized apps on the network
- Uniswap, one of the largest decentralized exchanges (DEX) in cryptocurrency, is moving to Polygon
- Despite the cryptocurrency market tumbles, it has held onto its price extremely well
- Staking $MATIC can you earn more $MATIC
- Polygon has great defi opportunities beyond Popsicle such as Aave, Curve, and Beefy.
Weaknesses:
- Still a new network that needs time to mature
- Relatively few decentralized apps
- It had a large network bug that was resolved on December 28, 2021
Competition Analysis
You could argue that any layer 1 or layer 2 network is Polygon’s competition. There are a lot of other fast-growing networks out there that saw increases similar to 2021, such as $FTM, $SOL and $AVAX.
However, we’ll compare it to the leading network, Ethereum, since we’ve already talked about Ethereum’s Mainnet a lot in this article and because Polygon is built on Ethereum.
Polygon sits at a market cap of $14.3B, which is just 4% of Ethereum’s market cap ($343B at the time of writing). Suppose $MATIC can get to just 20% of Ethereum’s current market cap (though Ethereum’s own is still likely to grow). In that case, that will represent almost a 5x increase.
Admittedly, this is ambitious given the maturity of the Ethereum ecosystem, as well as its utility in terms of the number of apps and popularity of NFTs.
However, we already noted that $MATIC is a superior network in the speed and price of the transaction. Users can expect to pay .01% of the network fee on the Polygon network vs. Ethereum.
Want to invest?
Disclosure: This is not financial advice. This article is for entertainment purposes ONLY. I am also a holder of $JEWEL and long on the project.
And just a heads up – we don’t go through crypto safety best practices in this section. It is your responsibility to keep your information safe and secure.
How to Purchase $MATIC:
There are multiple ways to do this – we’ll go over the route that we imagine most beginners would go through.
The easiest way to buy $MATIC is through a centralized exchange (CEX) such as Coinbase. It’s very accessible and easy to purchase – all you need is $BTC or a supported fiat currency such as $USD and $EUR.
