Cryptogram - 20JAN2023

Polygon hard fork = hardcore MATIC

January 20, 2023

The newsletter is put together by Giottus Crypto Platform and The News Minute’s Brand Studio. You can read all the previous issues of Cryptogram

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Hi, 

If you are a crypto nut like us, ever feel like we could all be the passionate fools following each other into a dead future?

Last year has certainly felt so. Despite the billions in play, sometimes crypto feels like it will just crash and vanish anytime. And yet we carry on – just like

(paywall). In this great feature, NYT writes about us crypto nuts who are unfazed by the crash and burn of 2022, and solider on because we are not here to just make money, we are here because we believe.

Here are our Top 5 stories of the week.

-1-

, and this is bound to impact investors of DCG, its parent group, which

earlier in the week.

[

.

-2-

.

-3-

. But crypto twitter was like…

… which gives us a lot of lulz, but people could be missing the point, because this could just be

, which has been made a counterparty in the order.

-4-

A new paper from Uniswap and Circle Internet Financial says that

.

-5-

.

Also,

They find South Korea super interesting, and have partnered with Graviton, an Indian Web3 accelerator. 

 WEEKLY PRICE TRACKER

Price movements from last Friday

BTC Watch

 11% as bulls try to push the market up because they stand to gain $130 million profit when options expire today. BTC is in overbought territory so we could see a pull back on first sign of bad news.

ETH Watch

 10% with Ethereum holding strong around $1550 region ahead of March's Shanghai upgrade. ETH will continue to accumulate near $1500 or could see a small rally to the upside ahead of the upgrade. But will continue to follow BTC.

Altcoins Watch

SHIB

:

 20% as millions of Shiba Inu (SHIB) burned ahead of Shibarium release.

SOL

:

 24% with meme coin Bonk Inu (BONK) continues to supply momentum to Solana ecosystem and some contribution coming from Helium's migration to Solana network.

FXS

: 

 60% as Defi protocol Frax Finance's ETH staking product gains popularity with narrative of liquid staking derivatives (LSD) heating up ahead of Shanghai upgrade.

 WHAT'S HOT

Coins to watch out for

Helium (HNT)

 The Helium network is a decentralized wireless network that enables devices anywhere in the world to wirelessly

connect to the Internet and geolocate themselves without

the need for satellite location hardware or

expensive cellular plans. It's recent move to Solana could boost adoption and in return the price too. 

Avalanche (AVAX)

 AVAX has been making waves in the crypto community especially after the partnership with cloud giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) which is the backbone of many software companies around the world.  AVAX is in a good range to accumulate for the long term.

Project to watch out for

Metamask Though it is widely known for its wallet services already, Metamask is introducing a lot of new products like portfolio management, swaps, ETH staking. Also, there has been talks in the crypto community of a potential launch of its own token along with airdrop to users who interact with it regularly.

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 THE HOT TAKE

Polygon hard fork makes MATIC hardcore

TL;DR:

Polygon has been silently gaining strength in this bear market. Its partnerships with global brands are well known (Mastercard, Samsung, Disney and Reddit for example). It continues to be the top Layer 2 of Ethereum. Its

will likely aid its development for the long term.

Here are 5 reasons why it is a strong, strong project. 

1. MATIC has been resilient

In a bear market, usually Bitcoin and Ethereum hold most of the value as altcoins bleed heavily from lack of confidence from users. 

In the last year or so, MATIC has been resilient. Since November 2021’s all-time-high for Bitcoin, MATIC is up more than 70% to date on the MATIC/BTC pair. SOL and ADA have lost more than 50% of their value against BTC in this period.

MATIC/BTC performance in the last year. Source: TradingView

2. Polygon is the leading Layer 2 on Ethereum

Scaling solutions are essentially used for doing transactions in bulk with cheaper fees. With more than 300K daily active users (DAUs) this week, Polygon is the leading scaling solution of Ethereum. Total daily fees on the network is still lower than that of Optimism (OP) which has 73K DAUs.

3. Its partnerships are great

Polygon has approached and partnered with multiple brands globally to become their default NFT marketplace partner as well as a Web3 partner for a few. Meta, Disney, Reddit and Adidas are some of the key ones. In India, Flipkart recently became its partner. It must be doing something right, right?

4. Recent hard fork fixes a possible price hike issue

The only question that remained was – does its development match its public persona and confidence? The recent hard fork addressed two issues that are key to its long term success – 1) lower gas fees when network activity peaks by optimizing network usage; and 2) reducing data block time preventing an issue called ‘reorgs’. While Polygon did receive backlash on the number of validators that voted in this exercise, a successful hard fork this week is notable. 

5. MATIC’s staking returns are good

For long term hodlers, MATIC is currently providing more than 5% returns via a staking delegation. Staking is a safer way to earn interest in crypto and allows users to hold on to their assets unlike lending where assets are used for furthering returns by a central entity. Around

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That’s it this week, see you next Friday.

If you have any questions or feedback for us, write to us at [email protected]. You can check out the previous issues here.

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