As Polygon forges major alliance, where is MATIC headed

• Polygon claimed that the collaboration will help in enhancing the scaling capabilities of Polygon zkEVM.
• MATIC’s Open Interest declined, signifying decreased interest in the derivatives market.

Over the latter half of April, Polygon [MATIC] witnessed a steady increase in the protocol fees collected on the network. As per Token Terminal, the Ethereum [ETH] sidechain racked up a monthly growth rate of over 9% in fees paid by users to confirm their transactions.

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On the flip side, the number of active users on Polygon plunged as much as 33% over the previous month.

This divergence in network traffic and fees collected indicated that the network was becoming expensive to use. Polygon’s near-term growth prospects could also be impacted because of this.

Source: Token Terminal

However, a big partnership was on the horizon which has the potential to change Polygon’s fortunes.

Polygon and Google Cloud join hands

Polygon announced a strategic alliance with Google Cloud in a bid to increase adoption of its core protocols. As part of the deal, Google Cloud will provide its infrastructure and developer tools to make it easier for users looking to build and launch Web3 products in the Polygon ecosystem.

Google Cloud will become the strategic cloud provider for all protocols, including Polygon PoS, Supernets, and zkEVM.

Additionally, Google Cloud will integrate its fully managed node hosting service, Blockchain Node Engine, into the ecosystem. This will help developers to overcome the hassles of maintaining their own PoS nodes.

Moreover, Polygon claimed that the collaboration will help in enhancing the scaling capabilities of the recently-launched layer-2 solution zkEVM.

As per the official statement, initial tests to run  zkEVM’s zero-knowledge proofs on Google Cloud resulted in faster and cheaper transactions.

Did MATIC benefit?

The news of the collaboration brought some optimism among the MATIC fanbase as the coin was up 1.76% in the 24-hour period at press time, data from CoinMarketCap revealed.

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

The number of daily unique addresses involved in MATIC transactions also surged over the past week, according to data from Santiment. Most of these users might be offloading their tokens to pocket gains as the daily volume in profit increased by 48% from the previous week.

Source: Santiment

MATIC’s Open Interest (OI) was on a declining slope since mid-April, signifying decreased interest in the futures market. At the time of writing, the total worth of active contracts was $170.86 million, down by 14% on a weekly basis.

Source: Coinglass