Polygon: Reddit and BitGo collaborations, staking culture, and more, cause…

• Polygon partnered with BitGo to foster MATIC staking rewards.
• NFT adoption has been key to the ecosystem’s progress despite a recent volume fall.

As a follow-up to its hardfork recent success, Polygon [MATIC] followed through by announcing a new partnership with BitGo. BitGo is a platform for providing core infrastructure and regulatory custody for crypto projects. 

Read Polygon’s [MATIC] Price Prediction 2023-2024

The collaboration would mean MATIC holders could hold their tokens in hot wallets, and would also offer users the chance to stake and earn rewards.

🪙@BitGo launches support for #Polygon 🥳

It now offers Polygon’s native MATIC token in hot wallets & qualified custody.

MATIC holders now have the ability to stake their ERC-20 MATIC tokens through BitGo and earn rewards.

A few of the reasons why BitGo made this move 👇

— Polygon (@0xPolygon) January 19, 2023

MATIC staking: A plan to help supply?

While the Polygon community and MATIC holders may have been elated by the update, the on-chain development activity reacted otherwise. According to Santiment, Polygon’s development activity had slightly trended downwards at 12.64. A simplification of the metric pointed to a decrease in developer contribution to Polygon’s repositories. 

In terms of its total supply, Santiment’s data showed that the total supply of MATIC had flatlined since November 2022. At the time of writing, the supply was 1.49 billion. This meant that the entire number of MATIC tokens, locked or in circulation, had stayed the same for about three months.

Source: Santiment

Concerning the partnership, Polygon’s global head of institutional capital, Colin Butler, opined that the BitGo partnership was necessary. Referring to MATIC holders’ participation in staking, Butler said,

“Staking is extremely popular already amongst MATIC holders and we have no doubt that support from a leading custody provider like BitGo will only add to this.”

NFTs: The catalyst for Polygon’s progress?

Meanwhile, Bankless released a report on Polygon’s progress over the years, and evaluated why the web3 firm has been the beneficiary of multiple partnerships.

The sovereign finance data provider notably referred to the chain’s sojourn with NFTs. While pointing to the 2022 bear market where NFTs and the DeFi TVL plunged, Bankless noted that Polygon stood out from the crowd.

Further, data from Nansen showed that NFTs under the Polygon chain experienced a hike in late 2022.

Source: Nansen

Realistic or not, here’s MATIC’s market cap in BTC’s terms

Additionally, the newsletter reported that the FTX collapse did not hinder increased Polygon adoption. But what was the underlying catalyst? Bankless admitted that the partnership with Reddit collectibles, where traders minted over 8.4 million NFTs, played a vital role.

“Arguably, the most compelling adoption story for Polygon comes from its NFT collectibles partnership with Reddit.”

However, press time data showed that the NFT trades volume on the Polygon chain was $108,000. Moreover, 19 January’s volume of $1.47 million was the highest record since the year began. At such an impressive level, it could be possible that digital collectibles traders replicate the performance as the chain’s development progressed.

Source: Santiment