Polygon Network Gas Fee Skyrockets Amid Heavy NFT Gaming, Will MATIC Rally Continue?

Etheruem’s Layer 2 scaling solution Polygon has been witnessing heavy on-chain activity over the last week and so. Recently, the NFT play-to-earn game Sunflower Farmers has clogged the Polygon network amid high demand of the network.

The popularity of this NFT game accounts for gas consumption of a staggering 40%. The second account is just consuming 3% gas after it.

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By the end of December 2021, the Sunflower Games has caused the gas fee to increase by a staggering 16x on the Polygon blockchain network. The surge in the gas fee is also causing trouble for certain DApps. For e.g. the NFT rental protocol – Double Protocol – has announced postponing the release of alpha Pass scheduled earlier today.

NFT game Sunflower Farmers incentivizes gamers thereby engaging them in a fierce competition to farm as many token rewards as possible. Gamers receive these SFF token rewards through smart contracts. Thus, players are constantly involved in the tasks of planting and harvesting crops to receive rewards. These earned tokens can be used for purchasing in-game NFTs as well as paying for other benefits.

As a result, players willing to get a greater share of the SFF tokens are leveraging high gas fees thus making sure that their transactions are accepted on Polygon. However, despite the current surge, the Polygon gas fee is still very cheap to Ethereum wherein one transaction costs anywhere between $50-$100.

Will MATIC Continue With Its Price Rally?

While the broader crypto market has been moving sideways, Polygon’s native crypto MATIC has performed really well! Last week, the MATIC price surged to its all-time high of $2.87. however, since then it has been moving sideways and hammered during today’s market crash.

As of press time, Polygon (MATIC) is currently trading at its 50-day SMA average of $2.14. If MATIC manages to reverse the trend from here, we can expect a quick 15% gain in short term.