Polygon Revisits March Outage as MATIC Retreats Below $1.70

The prices of top altcoins across the cryptocurrency market have soared on the back of Bitcoin’s latest rally. A late charge on Sunday, inspired by several factors, saw the king cryptocurrency shoot up from $44,750 to $47,290 in a few hours.

Though the BTC/USD pair corrected shortly afterward to $46,800, it held onto the traction and maintained a steady uptrend, setting a multi-month high of $47,959. Latest market data shows Bitcoin is now trading marginally above January highs.

The Bitcoin rally spurred positive price action among altcoins that, in turn, mirrored Bitcoin’s upswing. One of the notable tokens outside the top ten chart (by market capital ranking) that have benefitted is Polygon’s MATIC. The native token for the Polygon ecosystem, as tracked by CoinMarketCap, rose from around $1.645 on Sunday to a Monday intraday high above $1.74.

Upcoming developments around Polygon

Outside the market, Polygon teased two new products via a tweet at the end of last week.

“Buckle up #Polygon fam! Two MASSIVE product releases coming up shortly. Hint: #Polygon’s multi-chain #Ethereum ecosystem is about to EXPLODE RT to show love,” the network wrote on Thursday.

Polygon debuts mobile MATIC burning feature and polygon token list

Less than 24 hours after the teaser announcement, Polygon shared a post, ‘What’s New March 2022,’ revealing it had made its MATIC burn console available to mobile users.

“Today, we’re sharing a few small updates to Polygon’s wallet suite that were inspired by feedback and suggestions from our community. A few weeks ago we launched the MATIC burn console, and the good news is it’s now available on mobile.”

The announcement was accompanied by the launch of a new service dubbed Polygon Token Lists that will make it easier for users to get access to the right ERC-20 tokens.

“As the Polygon ecosystem has grown, so have the number of ERC-20 tokens usable across the protocol [] To ensure users have better access to legitimate tokens and to give token creators a way to get in front of those users, we’re introducing Polygon Token Lists.”

Users can leverage the new lists feature to identify investment opportunities with the right tokens.

Polygon (MATIC) market performance

Despite the updates bearing a bullish tone, Polygon (MATIC) price didn’t react to the news as some in the community expected. Far from it, the token has largely moved in sync with the general market mood, seeing decent gains in the range of those recorded by other altcoins.

MATIC is swinging at $1.68, marginally below the multi-week high it touched a few hours earlier. The token’s trading chart over the last seven days shows it has moved up about 13%, but there haven’t been any convincing signs that it will hold onto the momentum.

MATIC/USD YTD trading chart

It is worth bearing in mind that while Bitcoin and Ethereum have revisited and even surpassed January highs in the past few hours, Polygon (MATIC) is still about 36% off its January peak. The token’s YTD chart shows MATIC is even yet to surpass February’s high and is currently trading about 40% below its all-time high.

To learn more about Polygon visit our Investing in Polygon guide.

A mixed performance in Q1

Although the latest updates haven’t influenced the MATIC token price, they remain crucial for the network. This week marks the end of Q1, which hasn’t been all good for the Polygon ecosystem.

In February, Polygon rewarded a white hacker Niv Yehezkel $75,000 for identifying a bug that could have been exploited to process unlimited withdrawals and siphon funds from the deposit manager. This followed a similar incident that involved a $2.2 million bug bounty.

Earlier this month, the network also suffered an extended outage after an issue cropped up with the technical upgrade. Polygon eventually addressed the outage but not before many expressed their dissatisfaction following the unexpected losses they incurred.

Yesterday, the Polygon team shared a blog addressing the recent outage and lessons learned from it. The post highlighted a series of improvements on the way, among them securing the Heimdall node, improving communication between users and the team, and thorough reviewing of all code changes.

“The team is working on Heimdall to make it more robust by adding dynamic transaction gas limit, increasing the block gas limit, and adding bulk state-sync transactions to make the mechanism more robust. In the long term, a redesign of the Heimdall/Bor architecture is in the works […]This will be implemented in the next version of the chain, tentatively codenamed v3, which will merge the Heimdall and Bor nodes and chain and remove the span mechanism,” a section of the post detailed.