What is Polygon (MATIC), Disney´s preferred blockchain, and why is it up 60%?

The short-term rally that the cryptocurrency market is experiencing, days before the very important meetings of the market with the central banks of Europe and the US, is revealing a little-known protagonist for most investors. The MATIC token of the blockchain Polygon rose 60% in the last week, thanks to a combination of factors that put it in the spotlight of market participants.

With a price hovering around $0.90, the Ethereum layer two blockchain 'altcoin' is not even among CoinMarketCap's top 10 tokens by market capitalization. Its current value is still far from the all-time high at nearly $3 in December last year, but experts believe its bull run is targeting a minimum of $1 because of the remarkable attention Polygon is receiving.

The MATIC network is a protocol to increase the scalability of the Ethereum blockchain and add new use cases. Polygon works through a sidechain that connects to Ethereum allowing for further processing, they explained from 'Blockchain Observatory'. "It is arguably everything Ethereum aims to be with Ethereum 2.0," they pointed out. "It is a project that corrects Ethereum's processing capacity problems. It also uses the proof-of-stake model as a consensus mechanism. Polygon offers a much more intuitive architecture for developers, making it a more attractive network for inexperienced users," they added.

"MATIC polarizes opinions in the cryptocurrency market, but its level of adoption is unquestionable," stated Nick Heale, an analyst at GlobalBlock. He stressed that the blockchain "benefited from the unfortunate demise of Terra Luna by attracting various projects to it". Polygon studios CEO Ryan Watt confirmed in a tweet that 50 cryptocurrency projects migrated to Polygon from Terra. The total value locked in Polygon stands at around $1.76 billion.

The network released data suggesting the network's growth among other dApps (decentralized applications). This week alone, Good Ghosting and Slingshot entered the top-20 best performing dApps.

It also recently announced a deal with social forum Reddit, which allows users to purchase blockchain-based avatars in non-fungible token (NFT) format for their profile. It partnered with Flipkart Firedrops in the NFT arena.

Because of all this, analysts have drawn very good forecasts for MATIC, but the icing on the cake was provided by Disney, as the 'blockchain' has been chosen to participate in the prestigious accelerator program of 'House of Mouse'. The exclusive accelerator program was open to "venture capital-backed growth-stage companies with a vision to make an impact on the future of technology and entertainment." Disney revealed that this year it will focus on use cases involving technologies such as augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI) and non-fungible tokens (NFT).

A final reason experts cite to explain MATIC's boom, is the recovery of the entire market and the good mood around Ethereum's protocol change work, which is set for September. The total capitalization of cryptocurrencies is back to around $1 trillion.