- Polygon has seen a significant surge in NFT activity on the back of its several partnerships with global brands.
- The NFT activity surge is not reflected in NFT trading volume, however, MATIC could still be poised to surge.
Ethereum scaling protocol Polygon has been exploding on the back of massive mainstream adoption happening in its non-fungible token (NFT) ecosystem.
In a Twitter thread, Martin Lee, a data journalist at crypto market analytics firm Nansen, pointed out NFT ecosystem metrics in which Polygon is seeing an increase. This is despite the crypto winter causing the same metrics in other blockchains, including Ethereum and Solana, to decline.
According to Lee, first-time and returning buyers per day have reached an all-time high on Polygon. Taking into account only mints and NFT projects on OpenSea, Nansen’s data shows that Polygon’s users per day has risen sharply in December to peak at 62k users after hovering around 10-15k for most of the year.
4/ Txs per week in the last couple of weeks are ~3x higher than almost any other week in 2022
Weekly transactions hit a high of ~7.5m on the week of 14 Nov
However, most of it are mints and not trades/purchases pic.twitter.com/2ICGGP37hT
— Martin Lee | Nansen 🧭 (@themlpx) December 9, 2022
The trend on Polygon is similar for users per week and transactions per week metrics. Users per week have risen significantly in the past six to eight months, while transactions per week are about 3x higher this week than any other week in 2022, hitting approximately 7.5 million.
Lee notes that despite the surge in the metrics, Polygon has not seen a commensurate surge in NFT trading volume. Lee suggests that Polygon’s various deals and mainstream utilization of Polygon to launch NFTs by major brands have been effectively increasing the usage of NFTs as an underlying technology, and getting NFTs into the hands of the masses, based on the data points.
The analysis goes on to argue that this is a very bullish development for NFT adoption as the asset can finally move just being utilized as a tradable asset used for speculation. Lee states that the adoption path led by Polygon can help more users see NFTs as a piece of technology to be owned. He wrote.
My view is that the current adoption path largely led by [Ryan Wyatt, CEO of Polygon] and team at Polygon helps to remove the current stigma and idea that NFTs main value is speculation. The more users we get using and seeing NFTs as a piece of technology instead of a tradable asset the better,
MATIC could still be poised to surge off of the massive NFT activity
While the NFT activity surge has not increased NFT trading volume on Polygon, the price of MATIC, the native token of the ecosystem, has been showing signs of divergent strength.
MATIC, unlike many cryptocurrencies that plunged, recorded a 62.3 percent price upswing in Q3 and is up another 14.8 percent so far in Q4 of 2022. The asset is trading at $0.89, up 0.75 percent in the last 24 hours.
