A look at the journey of Polygon zkEVM as it crosses a new milestone 

• Polygon zkEVM’s network activity showed signs of recovery during the last few weeks. 
• zkEVM’s fees and revenue registered a massive uptick in the recent past.

Polygon [MATIC] zkEVM has had a remarkable journey since its launch during the concluding days of Q1 2023. Though there have been quite a few roadblocks, the rollup has shown consistent growth over the past months.

Maintaining its growth spree, the rollup also recently announced that it hit a new milestone in the DeFi space. While we compliment the rollup’s new achievement, it’s also important to have a look at how it is faring against its top competitors.

Polygon zkEVM is making leaps in the DeFi space

Polygon Daily, a popular X (formerly known as Twitter) handle that gives updates related to the blockchain’s ecosystem, recently posted a tweet highlighting zkEVM’s latest achievement.

As per the tweet, the Total Value Locked (TVL) on Polygon zkEVM crossed the $100 million mark with more than 100,000 depositors.

It was interesting to note that more than 50% of the total zkEVM wallets were new wallets, reflecting an increase in the rollup’s popularity.

There have been quite a few developments in the recent past that could have played a role in the rise of the rollup’s TVL.

For instance, the first E-CLP for rETH/WETH went live on Polygon zkEVM last week. Symbiosis, a cross-chain engine and liquidity protocol, integrated with Socket, an interoperability protocol on Polygon zkEVM.

Apart from this, Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, also revealed that OKX launched an ETH L2 called X1 using the Polygon CDK. With the launch, X1 will debut as a zkEVM validium, ensuring low transaction fees by storing DA off-chain.

A bird’s-eye view of Polygon zkEVM’s performance

AMBCrypto’s analysis of Artemis’ data revealed that zkEVM’s daily active addresses reached their highest in July 2023.

After peaking, the metrics started to go down. A similar trend was also noted in terms of the rollup’s daily transactions.

But the good news was that things started to change later, as both its daily active addresses and transactions gained upward momentum since 25th October 2023. 

Source: Artemis

However, if we consider the rollup’s metrics from a broader perspective, an increase in adoption and usage was evident.

When AMBCrypto checked Polygonscan’s data, it was found that unique addresses have been growing consistently over the last several months. After a drop in daily gas usage, the number again started to go up in the recent past, suggesting a recovery.

Source: Polygonscan

A possible reason for the high adoption and usage of the rollup could be its lower operational cost. This was evident from the fact that, after spiking in May 2023, the rollup’s average gas price has remained substantially low.

This might have encouraged new users to join the rollup and, in turn, helped increase its adoption and usage.

Source: Polygonscan

Polygon zkEVM and its competitors 

While the aforementioned looked optimistic for Polygon zkEVM, AMBCrypto’s analysis found out that the rollup was still considerably behind its competitors like zkSync Era and Coinbase’s Base on multiple fronts.

ZkSync Era, which was named the first ever EVM rollup, dominated the space in terms of daily active addresses and transactions.

The rollup had an average daily active address of 200 thousand and average daily transactions of around 600 thousand. Base’s numbers were somewhat close to those of zkSync Era, while zkEVM’s numbers were drastically lower than the other two.

Source: Artemis

However, things looked different when captured value was considered. Though zkSync and Base’s numbers were higher, zkEVM’s metrics were also closing in on both other rollups.

zkEVM’s fees started moving up over the last 30 days. This happened while zkSync and Base’s charts remained flat, suggesting that zkEVM was growing.

In fact, zkEVM stole the show as far as revenue is concerned. The rollup’s revenue spiked substantially on 8th November.

The spike allowed it to overtake both zkSync and Base for a while. Whether zkEVM’s growth trend allows the rollup to dominate the rest over the months to come will be intriguing to watch.

Source: Artemis

MATIC bulls are here

On one hand, Polygon zkEVM showed promising growth on multiple fronts, and on the other hand, MATIC’s price action turned bearish in the recent past. After a comfortable week-long rally, MATIC bears have bucked up as they pulled the token’s price down.

Read Polygon’s [MATIC] Price Prediction 2023-24

According to CoinMarketCap, MATIC was down by nearly 3% over the last 24 hours. At the time of writing, it was trading at $0.9205 with a market capitalization of over $8.52 billion.

Investors’ interest in trading the token also dwindled in the last 24 hours as its volume dropped by over 19%.

Source: CoinMarketCap