The Defiant

Mark Cuban Sends Polygon Soaring As Glitch Pings MATIC

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…

By: Dan Kahan Loading...

Mark Cuban Sends Polygon Soaring As Glitch Pings MATIC

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.

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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.

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