The U.S. remains a key market for large blockchain services, including Polygon. But strict regulation of their token circulation is forcing them to find new ways to position their assets and developments

MATIC is a Polygon blockchain token developed by the American company Polygon Labs with an investment of more than $450 million and a valuation of $20 billion. The market capitalization of the token, even after a major price drop, exceeds $6 billion. And the asset itself is in the top ten of CoinMarketCap. Polygon solutions are used by major brands, including Adobe, Starbucks, Mastercard, Reddit, etc.

Faced with the growing consequences of sensational lawsuits by U.S. regulators. Now Polygon Labs has unveiled a concept for the Polygon 2.0 network update package. And among which is an emphasis on the “utility and evolution of the native token.” Interestingly, two days before the announcement, the company released a statement on Twitter. In which it openly emphasized its focus on the market outside of the U.S.

“We are proud of the history of the Polygon network – developed outside the US, deployed outside the US, and focused to this day on the global community that supports the network. MATIC was a necessary part of the Polygon technology from Day 1, ensuring that the network would be secure – and remains so to this day,” the company wrote. And while adding that “the market outside the U.S. is the largest in the world.”

In April 2019, when the project was called Matic Network before rebranding to Polygon. At that time, the team held an ICO token sale, raising $5.6 million. Several investment rounds followed. And the main event of which was a closed sale of tokens worth $450 million. American investors participated in the financing of the company. As well as firms such as Galaxy Digital or Seven Seven Six. Polygon says that while they always intended to “make MATIC accessible to a wide range of individuals,” the fundraising “has never been aimed at the United States.”

Polygon 2.0

The announcement of the new network from Polygon Labs also emphasizes. That the initiative belongs to the global community of token holders and developers interested in the development of the project. “Only the community that controls the Polygon protocol has the right to adopt and implement Polygon 2.0 solutions,” the publication states. However, our experts note that Polygon Labs, as the main developer of the protocol, obviously has significant influence over the project. And so the ability of the “community” to manage the development of the network is somehow limited.

According to SEC head Gary Gensler, decentralized finance (DeFi) projects are often not technically very decentralized. And their developers make profits in the same way that traditional businesses do. At some point there is always management or developers present. And sometimes there are investors who can be held accountable on behalf of the project.

“The core development teams of Uniswap, Open Sea, Alchemy and many other major Web3 projects are still based in the United States.” Antonio Giuliano, co-founder of decentralized cryptocurrency exchange dYdX, wrote this. His service runs on smart contracts, which does not involve a centralized intermediary. But behind its development and support is an American company, dYdX Trading, which employs about 50 people.

According to Giuliano, the U.S. has a very proper approach to technology. And all that regulators need to do in the matter of regulating the Web3 sphere is to “at least regard it prudently.”

NFT digital tokens can be used at Formula 1 races starting with the Monaco Grand Prix on May 28

Formula 1 ticket supplier Platinum Group has introduced tickets in the form of NFTs. The first event to which they will be available is the Monaco Grand Prix, which will be held on May 28.

The tokens will be issued on the Polygon blockchain. In addition to admission to the event. NFT tickets will also give owners various bonuses. For example, discounts for future races or participation in parties.

For sports fans, easy entry is the most important principle. Eli Zerbib, co-founder of the Web3 company Bary, which was involved in the creation of the tokens, said this. According to him, NFT tokens provide just that simplicity. And they offer transparency, traceability, easy purchasing, personalization. And also great audience involvement, which the company needs.

Our experts note that the use of blockchain technology in sports already goes beyond selling event tickets or issuing fan tokens and NFT collections

A NFT, which was priced at $99 after release, sells in the $700 to $1,400 range.

Donald Trump’s arrest triggered a burst of interest in his NFT. Trading volume of digital tokens from the former U.S. president increased by 89.8% overnight, according to CryptoSlam.

On the evening of April 4, Trump was arrested pending arraignment the same evening. He was charged with 34 episodes, including falsifying business records. The 45th U.S. president himself considered what was happening to be “political harassment and election interference at the highest level in history” by Democrats. He did not admit guilt.

Trump issued a collection of 45,000 NFTs on the Polygon blockchain last December 15. The tokens represent images of him in the form of collectible baseball cards. There were 44,000 NFTs for sale at $99 apiece. All tokens were sold out in the first 24 hours, primary sales brought the project almost $4.4 million.

On April 3, token sales totaled $22,600, but NFT was sold for $70,300 on April 4. During the last day, 78 tokens were sold at prices ranging from $700 to $1,400.

Our experts note that despite a short-term increase in interest in Trump’s NFT collection against the backdrop of the trial. His NFT sales this past March were down from previous months. Thus, in March the volume of trading was $2 million, in February – $4 million, in January – $2.6 million. And for the half of December, when the collection was released – $9.9 million.

Crypto-Upvotes experts conducted their analysis and told about prospects of NFT segment

Throughout 2022, application solutions with NFT have been actively developed in a variety of projects. The audience of the technology continues to grow at a tremendous rate due to the introduction of the technology by social media. This year, some tools related to NFT were implemented by Twitter (audience of about 400 million users), Reddit (audience of about 430 million users), Onlyfans (audience of about 175 million users).Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Youtube also announced their plans to implement NFT.

Based on these data, we can consider a long-term investment portfolio, taking into account the prospects for the development of NFT

We would suggest dividing the investment portfolio into two parts. The first would be a liquid backbone, the tokens of projects that provide infrastructure for NFT. Polygon blockchain turned out to be the most popular for application solutions. Therefore, as the audience grows, the entire ecosystem could get developed, so the demand for native blockchain tokens would grow accordingly.

Other top blockchains – Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain – may also get a comparable effect from the development of NFT.

Another interesting application of NFT is the Fragment platform from Telegram. It is likely that in the future the supply will expand and the demand for TON will increase.

We suggest forming the second part of the portfolio from specific tokens of various promising NFT tokens. In a growing market, which by all projections should occur in the second half of 2023 and all of 2024. Therefore, collections with high social capital could go up in price several times over.

When to buy ?

Today, terrific conditions for opening long-term positions for at least 1-2 years, better from 3 years or more. The ongoing scandals around centralized exchanges are constantly weighing on the value of the Binance exchange’s native token. And rumors around the potential centralization of Ethereum due to the move to PoS, with validators predominantly in the same jurisdiction, are also negatively affecting the price of ETH in the medium term.

The market as a whole continues to be in a global bearish trend, which opens up the possibility of buying any tokens at undervalued prices.

What is the right investment portfolio structure ?

• Polygon (MATIC) — 20%
• Toncoin (TON) — 20%
• Ethereum (ETH) — 10%
• Binance coin (BNB) — 5%

Another 5% can be allocated under ApeCoin (APE) acting as a native token in the company’s developed meta-universe. The company that owns the world’s most popular NFT-collections Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks and Meebits.

The remaining 40% can be distributed among different NFT-collections.

For example, find interesting offers among applied projects from social media, like collections from Reddit or Twitter.

Risks

The first part of the investment portfolio is quite conservative by the standards of the crypto market. It lists well-established, reliable projects that have many growth and development factors other than the NFT segment. Therefore, the risks in 3/5 of the portfolio do not exceed the overall risks of the market.

However, the rest are extremely risky investments. You have to consider that NFTs have several orders of magnitude less liquidity. And predicting the value of NFTs in the future does not differ in its essence from flipping a coin for luck. But, with all that, the investment can pay off many times over, given a lucky set of circumstances. For example, one appreciated token can potentially outweigh the value of all the others that will fall. But there is absolutely no guarantee that this will happen to you, to your chosen collection, with tokens owned by you.

That’s why it’s worth investing only as much as you’re willing to lose at least half of that amount.

Disclaimer

Crypto-Upvotes experts do not give investment advice, this material is published for introductory purposes only. Cryptocurrency is a volatile asset that can lead to financial losses.

Daily futures trading volume on DeFi platforms reached $5 billion. This is the biggest amount since Terra collapsed in May of this year. Crypto-Upvotes expert review.

DeFi platforms increased revenues amid the outflow of funds from centralized exchanges that occurred due to the collapse of FTX. On-chain data showed an increase in activity on decentralized futures trading platforms and an increase in revenue for DeFi protocols, Cointelegraph reported.

However, not all decentralized applications (DApps) and protocols show such a trend. Because some of them have financial ties to FTX and Alameda. But data on DeFi projects’ revenues show that at least three protocols have exceeded $1 million in the last seven days, including Ethereum and OpenSea Marketplace.

Decentralized futures trading platforms have increased their trading volumes to record levels. Their daily turnover reached $5 billion, the highest since the Terra token crash in May of this year.

Despite the increase in trading volume, the total value of locked-in assets (TVL) at DeFi only increased at seven networks. Gains Network, a futures trading platform on the Polygon network, showed the biggest increase. Its TVL increased 17.3% over the week. And inter-network protocol Ren saw its TVL drop by 50%. This is because Ren worked closely with Alameda. And received quarterly funding and stored its funds directly on FTX.

Blockchain’s profit growth comes on top of an unchanged number of daily active users. Compared to previous weeks, the daily profits of leading blockchains have increased by more than 300%. This suggests that transactions among existing users are occurring more frequently.

Despite growth in profits, only Ethereum made profits among PoS-based blockchains. Other leading networks such as Polygon, BNB Smart Chain and Optimism did not profit. Holders of these tokens suffered inflationary losses.