Mark Cuban still has the touch.
Even as the crypto market continues to recover from last week’s crash, the price of Polygon (MATIC) has soared 25% in the last seven days. The trigger: On May 25, news broke that Cuban had invested in the next-generation Ethereum player. The performance trounced Bitcoin’s 4.8% rise in the same period, and that of Ether itself, which notched a 11.5% hike.
Polygon’s TVL, or total value locked, has also soared 62% over the past three days to $11.1B on May 26 from $6.9B on May 23rd, according to data from DeFi Llama. That’s important because TVL measures how much actual capital has been staked in the DeFi’s project’s smart contract.
Polygon is a so-called Layer 2 solution that enables the Ethereum blockchain to scale and process transactions faster. It supports DeFi projects such as multi-chain wallets and portfolio management programs. And traders are flocking to the platform as a way to get around soaring gas fees.
Polygon has won a choice spot on Mark Cuban’s website as one of his blockchain investment holding. Cuban, a 62-year-old billionaire entrepreneur who owns the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, also owns stakes in NFT marketplaces OpenSea and SuperRare, plus Zapper, a DeFi asset management platform. Earlier this year, he also founded Lazy, a platform that allows users to display their NFTs in online galleries
Cuban’s DeFi Portfolio
News of Cuban’s investment in Polygon broke a day before it unveiled its software development kit on May 26. According to a blog post, Polygon SDK provides a framework for turning Ethereum into a more versatile ecosystem that can better accommodate multiple blockchains.
Polygon SDK will support secure Layer 2 solutions and stand-alone chains in charge of their own security. Secured layer 2 chains rely on Ethereum for security instead of establishing their own validator or minor pools, and are a good fit for projects that require high security or startups that are unable to establish decentralized, secure validator pools of their own. Alternatively, stand-alone chains, including many side-chains, have their own validator or miner pools, and offer more flexibility and independence with the trade-off of being less decentralization and less secure.
Technical Glitch
No sooner had Polygon announced its new kit than news broke of a technical glitch. On May 26, Anyswap Network, which provides software to help investors move tokens around the DeFi space, reported that Polygon’s bridges had become impassable because of a Matic network fork.
Anyswap temporarily warned users against swapping tokens between Binance Smart Chain and Polygon or Ethereum and Polygon. Anyswap said the issue was a bad block that couldn’t properly sync with the right chain.
Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal clarified that there was no Matic fork, and that the issue was a software hiccup quickly addressed by a “hot fix.”
“The network remained resilient and fully operational,” Nailwal tweeted. In any event, overall sentiment for Polygon continues to appear bullish. Despite the token being down 2.9% to $2.16 in the last 24 hours as we went to press, Matic seems to be on track towards regaining its pre-market crash all-time high of $2.70.