Polygon and Solana make big price moves, but MATIC is at the forefront of adoption

• MATIC gains 1.59 percent while SOL prints 5.17 percent gains in the last 24 hours as the two tokens start 2023 bullish. 
• Bullish development activities expected in the two ecosystems could spur more price gains for the assets in 2023.

The cryptocurrency market started 2023 with several tokens recording price gains. Among these are Ethereum Layer 2 calling solution Polygon (MATIC) and high-performance proof-of-history blockchain Solana (SOL).

MATIC is up 1.59 percent in the last 24 hours, trading at around $0.78. Data from WhaleStats shows that in this same period, the token was among the top 10 most purchased assets by Ethereum whales. Per WhaleStats, MATIC was the fifth most purchased asset by the top 100 largest ETH wallets.

Similarly, SOL is up an impressive 5.17 percent in the last 24 hours, trading at around $11.81. This price puts SOL up 18.1 percent since 2023 started as it tries to fight back from the FTX-fueled crash. The crash which began in November has seen SOL drop out of the top 10 cryptocurrencies ranked by market cap.

Solana’s drop has coincided with a massive upswing in adoption metrics for the Polygon network. The total value locked (TVL) on Polygon decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols has remained relatively stable at around $1 billion in the last three months.

MASS adoption 🔥#DeFiForAll by @0xPolygonDeFi https://t.co/3A2Y8d0Ix7

— Polygon – MATIC 💜 (@0xPolygon) January 2, 2023

In comparison, competing protocols like Avalanche and Solana marked liquidity drop-offs in the same period. In the case of Solana, TVL dropped from around $1 billion in November to currently around $215 million. There have also been allegations that the network’s TVL was faked.

MATIC and SOL preparing for a massive bull run in 2023?

With the start of the year performance, the two tokens look poised for bull runs in the new year. This is also supported by anticipation of bullish ecosystem expansion activities in the two networks.

One of these for Polygon is the expected launch of zkEVM (zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine). Polygon zkEVM is a powerful, decentralized technology developed to provide Layer 2 scalability solutions to Ethereum blockchain users.

Specifically, zkEVM is the software that will power Polygon’s zk-Rollups, a smart contract technology that scoops up Ethereum transactions to increase the network’s capacity.

Similarly, the Solana network also has developments that have market participants optimistic. One of these includes the decentralized wireless infrastructure blockchain Helium (HNT) migrating over to become a Solana sidechain.

This is expected to happen in early 2023. The move will mean that the Solana network continues to gain NFT market share despite projects migrating to other chains.

Solana’s roadmap for 2023 also includes a lot of initiatives to promote real-world use cases for Web 3 innovation. These include launching further work on its mobile device, as well as promoting more developers’ onboarding. The roadmap designates December as DEVcember to give a final push to the efforts planned for the year.

These efforts being made by the two chains could see them greatly improve their development activity metric in 2023. This could in turn reflect in price gains in the long term. In 2022, only Polygon made the list of top 10 most developed blockchain networks among the two. Polygon ranked 10 in the data published by Santiment.