Polygon is looking dapper with 19,000+ dApps, but there is a caveat 

At the time of writing, Polygon [MATIC] was the #17 biggest crypto by market cap, trading at $1.27. This was after losing 4.86% of its value in the last day and skidding by 12.10% in the past week. In fact, most of the market was steeped in red and Bitcoin fell through the $39,000 support as well.

While bulls might be disappointed by their favorite assets’ price action, it’s important to zoom out and also keep an eye on a project’s most recent DeFi and developmental updates.

Looking dApp-er!

Polygon recently announced a new milestone of over 19,000 dApps on the network, when compared to 3,000 in October.

The report published by the Polygon team noted,

“There are now 8,000 monthly active teams building on Polygon PoS, up from about 6,000 in January and just a few thousand in October.”

It added,

“Alchemy data shows that 65% of the teams integrated exclusively on Polygon, compared to 35% deployed on Ethereum.”

This is a significant update, as it shows that apart from just asset prices, work is happening behind the scenes to boost Polygon’s popularity and increase the number of use cases it can support.

All I ever wanted. . .

But is the coin really living the #blessed life? After all, 24-hour active addresses have been declining since January 2022, apart from a brief spike in March. This rather defies the idea that MATIC adoption is increasing.

Source: Santiment

Adding to this, development activity on Polygon has been fluctuating since a steep rise in early March. At press time, however, it was far below the heights it achieved in mid-March.

In fact, it appears that development activity on Polygon has been matching up with MATIC’s price movements since early April.

Source: Santiment

Furthermore, while 2022 has seen a rise in contributors’ counts for Polygon when compared to 2021, these levels have been declining slightly since late March.

Source: Santiment

While the number of Polygon-based decentralized apps might be growing, other development-related metrics are also relevant to the project’s long-term progress.

No protocol left behind

dApps are well and good but don’t forget about DeFi either, which can reveal much about user adoption. At press time, Polygon’s total value locked [TVL] was about $3.89 billion. The project bagged an eighth place in TVL rankings.

Source: DeFi Llama

While TVL was down at press time, this was consistent with the performance of most of the top 10 blockchains by TVL.