Polygon (MATIC) Daily Transaction Volumes Tank 50% After 30x Increase In Gas Price

Ethereum scalability solution Polygon (MATIC) had been seeing high network activity recently. In the last month of September, the Polygon blockchain registered a 150% surge in daily active addresses. At one point, Polygon even surpassed the daily transaction volumes of Ethereum.

However, it turns out that the daily average transaction volumes on Polygon have tanked by 50% from 6 million to 3 million. This happened after Polygon recently increased its gas fee by a massive 30x from 1 gwei to 30 gwei.

Although the Polygon blockchain has been registering strong address activity, it comes at a cost. Recently, the Polygon blockchain also saw a strong surge in the number of spam transactions taking place on the platform. Thus, the Polygon founders had to take this decision of increasing the gas fee to increase the entry barrier for foul market players. This was a crucial step in ensuring the long-term health of the blockchain platform.

Polygon Increases Gas Fee By 30x

While confirming with the community about this development, Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of the Polygon blockchain wrote:

To reduce the number of spam transactions in the network, we are increasing the minimum gas price to 30Gwei from the current (default) value of 1Gwei for our foundation nodes. It’s just a recommendation to increase the gas price, but other validators are free to choose their own min gas price.

Following strong network activity, Polygon’s native crypto MATIC has had a strong run-up this year. However, the MATIC price action has remained tepid and volatile since the beginning of October 2021. As of press time, MATIC is trading 4.5% down at a price of $1.22 with a market cap of $8.14 billion.

Despite this, the MATIC price is still trading at 120x gains year-to-date. This makes MATIC one of the top-performing altcoins for 2021. It will be interesting to see its performance during Q4 2021.