Following impressive price action over the past 30 days, the Polygon network's native token, MATIC, has risen to number eight in CoinMarketCap's ranking of the largest cryptocurrencies. While MATIC entered the new year ranked at the bottom of the top 10, a month and a half later its price performance and following capitalization growth are already a threat to long-established projects. The first such in the path of the Polygon token is ADA, the Cardano token.
Both tokens, while belonging to proof-of-stake systems, have a number of similarities in mechanics. There are now 8.73 billion MATICs in circulation, representing 87% of the total supply, but more than half of this volume is locked up in staking and other Polygon ecosystem smart contracts. On the other hand, ADA's circulating supply is estimated at 34.64 billion tokens, of which 72.6% are delegated to staking pools.
Why is Polygon unlikely to be stopped?
However, what will potentially help MATIC overtake Cardano's token and rise even higher in the rankings is not tokenomics. It is Polygon's portfolio of collaborations with large global corporations, as well as highly in-demand innovations like zkEVM, which has led to MATIC's capitalization doubling since early 2023.
Cardano has also added more than 50% in "weight" over the same period, but the rate of increase is unlikely to be sufficient to stop the rise of one of the most hyped crypto projects of recent times. And it is unlikely that this is the last major shift at the very top of the crypto market.