Polygon (MATIC) Briefly Surpasses Shiba Inu (SHIB) to Become the 13th Largest Crypto By Market Cap

2022 has been great for Polygon (MATIC), as data from the crypto asset price-tracking website, CoinMarketCap, shows that it has pushed past Shiba Inu to become the 13th most valuable cryptocurrency in the digital currency market.

MATIC Riding on Investment Growth

Currently priced at $2.44, MATIC is up by 6.30% in the last 24 hours and has a live market cap just north of $17 billion. The token has a circulating supply of over 7 billion coins and had a trading volume of $2.1 billion in the last 24 hours.

MATIC’s price boost is largely due to recent investment growth in the Polygon blockchain, with news emerging that the Associated Press was getting ready to launch a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace on the platform. It has also been reported that deep-pocketed investors have been hoovering up millions of dollars’ worth of MATIC as everyone seeks to jump aboard the token’s seemingly never-ending bull run.

Polygon also just took to Twitter to announce the launch of Plonky2, a recursive SNARK which it says is not only natively compatible with Ethereum (ETH), but which is up to 100 times faster than most alternatives currently on the market.

The Polygon team attests that the unique features of Plonky2 will be integral to future engineering breakthroughs in the crypto space, such as the horizontal scaling of blockchain networks. 

Since its launch in late 2017, MATIC has grown from strength to strength. The Polygon protocol has played a central role in addressing Ethereum’s crippling scalability issues and prohibitive transaction costs, leading to more developers of ethereum-based projects moving to the Polygon platform. Analysts predict that this rapid growth will continue to fuel MATIC’s bull run deep into 2022.

Shiba Inu Looking to Increase Investors’ Confidence

Meanwhile, the Shiba Inu dipped to lows of $0.0000255 earlier in the week, leading to the popular meme coin losing its footing in the latest market cap rankings. At the time of writing, the Shiba Inu was trading at $0.00003012, a 16% markup in the last 24 hours. The token currently has a market cap of $16.5 billion, which makes it the 14th biggest cryptocurrency in the world.

While analysts predict a bullish 2022 for MATIC, there are doubts Shiba Inu will repeat its 2021 heroics, when it grew by an unfathomable 50 million percent. But despite the misgivings, the Shiba Inu team are in the process of putting their house in order and increasing investors’ confidence in preparation for an upturn in the token’s fortunes. 

There are reports that the development team has decided to give the Shiba Inu community voting rights on major projects. The team hopes to achieve this with the launch of the Doggy DAO, which is aimed at eradicating the influence of whales on the Shiba Inu ecosystem.