• Polygon’s MATIC has gained at twice the rate that of Bitcoin since the beginning of 2023.
• But as part of the consolidation process, Polygon Labs has announced to cut down its staff by 20% or 100 people.

Polygon’s native cryptocurrency MATIC has managed to surge past Dogecoin (DOGE) cementing its place as the ninth largest cryptocurrency by market cap. MATIC has been one of the top-performing altcoins during the crypto market recovery of 2023.

Over the last week, Polygon’s MATIC has gained 20%, while the altcoin is up by more than 90% since the beginning of 2023. As of press time, MATIC is trading 5.32% down at a price of $1.41 and a market cap of $12.3 billion.

Polygon’s MATIC is now looking to overtake Cardano (ADA) amid the recent price surge. The recent price rally in MATIC amid a series of key developments taking place in the Polygon ecosystem.

The bullish momentum in MATIC comes amid the upcoming launch of Polygon’s zkEVM rollup scheduled next month. Here’ zkEVM is an acronym for zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM).

The rollup of Polygon zkEVM will bring off-chain computational capacity with zero-knowledge proofs concept and will validate the data on EVM. This will effectively bring down the storage costs and computational costs that are otherwise on-chain.

By leveraging the zkEVM’s compatibility, the Polygon blockchain will be able to perform smart contracts and other developer activities in the new protocol without any kinds of hassles.

MATIC/BTC Gains Strength

Polygon’s MATIC has delivered a very strong surge since the start of 2023. gaining double than Bitcoin in percentage terms. The MATIC/BTC trading pair has recently touched a new all-time high The MATIC/BTC trading pair has given a strong breakout at $0.000064. Thus, it will be interesting to see how MATIC performs with respect to Bitcoin (BTC) going ahead.

However, in another development Polygon CEO, Sandeep Nainwal has sad news to share regarding layoffs. In his series of tweets, Sandeep explained that Polygon has made some changes in order to deliver the growth expectations from the past. He wrote:

A big part of this strategy includes unifying all of our teams under Polygon Labs to drive more growth. As part of this consolidation process, we’ve made the difficult decision to reduce our team by 20% impacting multiple teams and about 100 positions.

Sandeep added that affected employees will receive three months of severance pay, irrespective of their level or tenure at Polygon Labs. “Our departing teammates have played a historic part in building Polygon ecosystem to be the globally recognized platform that it is today,” he wrote.

Polygon has joined the list of crypto firms announcing layoffs over the last year. In his tweet, Sandeep assured that the company’s balance sheet is strong. The Polygon treasury holds a balance of over $250 million and 1.9 billion MATIC tokens.