• Crypto exchange Coinbase announced support for Polygon allowing transactions for ETH and USDC on the Polygon blockchain network.
• Polygon’s MATIC has seen a huge whale accumulation over the last six weeks leading to its price surge.

Ethereum’s Layer-2 scalability solution Polygon is grabbing the limelight in the crypto sphere. Over the last week, Polygon’s native cryptocurrency MATIC has registered a strong 50 percent rally following a major correction earlier this month.

As of press time, MATIC is trading 18 percent up at a price of $0.60 and a market cap of $4.7 billion. There have been a number of reasons behind the current rally in the MATIC price. On Thursday, June 23, U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase announced support for transactions on Polygon. The announcement noted:

Over the next month, eligible Coinbase customers will be able to send and receive ETH, MATIC, and USDC on Polygon. The Polygon integration marks the first time Coinbase has enabled the ability to send and receive these assets on an L2 or sidechain.

The latest decision comes as the gas fee on the Ethereum blockchain has been skyrocketing due to major network congestion. As a result, projects have been moving to more affordable platforms like the Polygon blockchain network.

However, funding wallets on networks like the Polygon has been usually costly and time-consuming. The crypto exchange noted:

Coinbase is reducing the time, effort, and high fees of today’s experience by letting customers convert fiat to crypto and fund their Polygon and Solana wallets in minutes and at a fraction of the cost.

Polygon (MATIC) whales are buying

One of the other reasons behind the rally in Polygon’s native crypto MATIC is a strong whale accumulation over the last few weeks. Also, on-chain data provider Santiment reported:

MATIC sharks and whales have been in a pretty big accumulation trend for about six weeks. The tiers of holders ranging from 10k to 10m coins held have collectively added 8.7% more to their bags in this timespan.

At the same time, Polygon has been achieving major milestones in terms of its carbon neutrality goals. As part of its environmental commitment, Polygon recently entered into a partnership with KlimaDAO. Polygon also announced purchasing of carbon credits representing 104,794 tonnes of greenhouse gasses worth $400,000. This equals Polygon’s total carbon debt since its inception in 2019. Commenting on this development, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nainwal said:

Our world is facing an environmental crisis, and the blockchain industry must do far more than promise to stop adding to the problem. Reaching carbon neutrality is an important first step, but there is more work ahead. Polygon will lead the way as the whole industry moves toward becoming a net positive for the environment.

With the recent launch of Polygon ID integration, Polygon is taking a step towards secure DAO governance as well as handling users’ identities in a secure manner.