According to CryptoPotato, Ethereum scaling network Polygon's native cryptocurrency, MATIC, has experienced a significant surge in value, increasing by approximately 20% over the past week. This growth is attributed to increased trading activity and a more positive sentiment in the broader crypto market. The upcoming Polygon 2.0 developments could potentially drive the rally further.

In Nansen's latest quarterly report, Polygon demonstrated network resilience amid rising demand for layer and cheaper alternatives, as well as a developer-friendly environment. During the third quarter of 2023, daily gas fees on the Polygon PoS network experienced notable volatility, fluctuating between approximately $29,000 and $132,000. In the same period, the number of daily active addresses on Polygon PoS demonstrated consistent stability, ranging from 275,000 to 466,000.

In terms of user engagement on Polygon PoS, Tether and USDC stood out, boasting 1.6 million and 1.32 million users, respectively. Meanwhile, Chainlink led transaction volume on Polygon PoS during Q3, recording an impressive 47.08 million transactions. This quarter also saw Polygon Labs double down on ZK research, creating several scaling frameworks, including Polygon zkEVM and the Polygon Chain Development Kit (CDK). Since its launch in March, Polygon zkEVM has attracted approximately $100 million in TVL. The CDK, released in August, is an open-source codebase that enables developers to create their own customizable layer 2 chains using Polygon's ZK technology. Several projects, including Canto, Astar, Gnosis, and IDEX, have revealed plans to build ZK layer-2 solutions leveraging the new software toolkit. Polygon Labs is currently working on Polygon Miden, a ZK-rollup designed to deliver a faster, more secure network with minimal transaction costs, set for a Q4 testnet launch.

In my first article published here in Binance in 17 Oct 2023, you might have noticed my reference to a token called Illuvium at its final paragraph. Yes, I said I have 3 USDT worth of Illuvium tokens at hand - to be precise, in my spot wallet - and that one Illuvium token stands at 40 USDT. During the past two days it became 41 and then fell back to 39. $ILV Since these tokens are the only digital asset I own at the moment (ah yes, there is some LEVER locked away for 150 days in my earnings wallet and a Binance Account Bound [BAB] Token in my Defi Wallet which I guess I can’t sell) I felt like I should read something about Illuvium in the internet. I cannot promise authenticity but the following are the details I found.According to Golden.com, Illuvium is a role-playing game (RPG) in which each participant of the game assumes the role of a character that can interact within the game's imaginary world. It is built on the Ethereum Blockchain by a company called Illuvium (same name as the token) based in Sydney, Australia. Co-founded by three brothers called Aaron Warwick, Grant Warwick and Kieran Warwick in 2020 (is there a fourth called Kain Warwick?), Illuvium’s total funding is believed to be 5.0 million dollars at the time.Pitchbook.com describes Illuvium as a “developer of a decentralized gaming platform designed to harness the power of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT). The company's platform creates a world that can support a variety of titles in multiple genres with the option to open [it] to other developers, and utilizes staking mechanics similar to the compound protocol, enabling users to take stake collateral and receive governance tokens and weekly distributions as a reward”In his interview with The Sydney Morning Herald's Dominic Powell - the Money Editor for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age - Kieran Warwick, one of the co-founders of Illuvium recalls its genesis: But then I stumbled onto NFT gaming, and immediately saw the opportunity. And it just so happens that our other two brothers, one’s a game designer, and the other one is a professional CGI modeler. So off we went. The basic structure of the Illuvium game he explains:It’s basically the first triple-A interoperable blockchain game. We’ve got three games: one is a city builder game [Zero] very similar to SimCity or Clash of Clans. That is where you extract resources and fuel. You then take that fuel and you go into the Overworld, which is connected to it, which is very similar to Pokémon. And then you’ve got our third genre of gaming which is our Illuvium Arena, where you take the deck that you’ve built up of characters, and you start battling them. And all three games are seamlessly connected, and they all use the same assets across the whole ecosystem.Kieran points out two ways to use Illuvium: one to make money, one to play games. That means there would be two types of users in the platform: Investors and Gamers.There are two funnels that you can go through for Illuvium: there’s the crypto funnel, with about 3 million active gamers, and they’re all about the NFT jargon about yields and all of that. But there are 3.5 billion people in the world who like gaming that has nothing to do with NFTs – they just like playing fun games.Then how these 3.5 billion Gamers in the World would evolve into Investors of Illuvium:So we’ve got a free-to-play version – you’re literally just playing the game, and we will store your assets for you without you even realizing that you have a wallet. This is how we’re going to get mainstream adoption. And at any stage, a user can migrate, and we will create their own wallet for them and then all of a sudden, you’re a crypto user. So it just breaks down the barrier.Kieran also describes the 74 million USD virtual land sale where people paid him upwards of $80,000 for a virtual block of land in Illuvium and what people get when they spend that much.Illuvium Zero is the game that uses that land. There’s only a finite number of resources, and 5 percent of all the revenue generated from the entire ecosystem goes back to those people who hold a land plot. All of these plots are literally powering our entire in-game economy.Kieran ends his interview with a positive note (This is in 2022): We just don’t have it yet. But once we do, people will forget about all thinking NFTs are bad because all their favorite games will be NFTs.[Courtesy: How Young Rich Lister Kieran Warwick Sold $120 Million Of Virtual Property - The Sydney Morning Herald]Cointelegraph.com has more to add: Warwick’s 2022: Kieran’s Illuvium game built a following in 2022, gathering over 350,000 Twitter followers and 200,000 Discord members. After several development delays, the Ethereum-based MMORPG finally launched its Overworlds Private Beta on Dec. 12.This is how cointelegraph sees the Illuvium gaming environment: Players explore futuristic game environments and capture NFT creatures called “Illuvials.” They can also go on quests, purchase in-game items and trade NFTs. Enhancements, such as using a teleporter or jetpack to move around the sci-fi-inspired metaverse, are set to be added following the Beta launch. Resources for mining and scanning were not available upon launch.I watched several videos on the breathtaking ecosystem of Illuvium on YouTube. Reminded me of an interactive version of the planet of Pandora in James Cameron's 2009 science fiction movie, Avatar. Yeah, teleporter and jetpack are already there. But compared to Pandora, it appears to be a somewhat lonely planet. Addressing NFT Fest Australia in November (2022) Kieran described Illuviam as more than an NFT game, calling it a “fun-first” game focused on user experience [cointelegraph] “10 years from now, Illuvium players won’t call it a crypto game — they’ll just call it a fun game,” His thoughts on the crypto bear market on Twitter (now X). [cointelegraph]  “This bear market has taught me that resilience is one of the most significant traits you can have. It seems obvious, but until you build into it, you don’t know. [...] We’re not through it yet, but that only makes us work harder,” he shared.Cointelegraph describes Warwick’s 2023:Kieran also laid out a detailed vision on Twitter, sharing elements of Illuvium’s roadmap. What’s consistent throughout his message is the reference to Illuvium as something that “isn’t just a game” but rather a collection of multiple games within a coherent universe. This is also apparent in the blockchain game’s initial releases: Zero, Overworld and Arena. Overall, Kieran’s vision for the Illuvium universe seems to be in sync with the general direction of how the metaverse is developing, wherein players are expected to engage in a game’s social platform and “live in” a game’s world.[Courtesy: cointelegraph webpage: top-people-in-crypto-and-blockchain-2023/kieran-warwick]Thechainsaw.com explains why Illuvium has become the most anticipated Play to Earn (P2E) game these days. Early P2E games needed more and more newcomers buying up NFTs to retain their value. If the volume of newcomers deflated, the NFT value would also decrease. When existing gamers cashed out their NFTs and left faster than newcomers joined to play, P2E games lost. Also games were easy to replicate. When a P2E game became successful, many similar versions appeared in its wake to capture the newcomers. On some occasions, the NFTs won by Gamers were never unique. And their prices fell.What Illuvium did was the exact opposite. Rather than depending on the newcomers, they made NFTs and other virtual assets scarce in their game. Kieran explains one example: “We have a mechanism where players fuse [Illuvium] creatures together and create a more powerful version of it. We do it in a way that removes three NFTs to create a more powerful one. And then you can do that, again, if you find another three, so you’re constantly removing creatures from circulation”If a player happens to need a creature that has been removed by the system, the only way out is to buy it from some other player who still has it. Kieran shares:“Instead of that just the constant influx of just more and more and more and more, it’s now a situation where people are using those, so they become less and less and less, and you can’t capture them anymore. And you have to buy them off someone else,” Another strategy is limiting the time span that players can access classes of creatures, each one defined by an element in the game.“We introduced … a concept called ‘sets’. You can only get certain creatures for a finite amount of time. And once that’s over, you can never collect them again. Now the cool thing about that is you might have a character that’s not really sought after in the first set. Over time, certain creatures from different sets will become more powerful than others. One year, fire type creatures will be more powerful, while in another set, water will be more powerful”Then some more rules to establish the rule of scarcity:“The third and last mechanic that we put in is every time that an Illuvial gets caught in the Overworld, it becomes a little bit harder to find that Illuvial. So, as you’re getting to the end of the set, the more common ones become harder, and the super rare ones become almost impossible to find. This means the assets increase in value over time,” Kieran adds. However, Thechainsaw.com also points out an issue that Illuvium might face when crypto trading is offered to gamers in the form of a P2E blockchain game that is based on the golden thumb rule of scarcity. Crypto gaming venture capitalist David Hong of Red Building Capital states "...any sort of advancement costs you more money, right? If I want to upgrade a level, and I can only get like 5000 fuel a day or something, we run into this problem. You have these hardcore gamers that will play 14 hours a day, and by limiting their energy, they’re just not going to be able to play 14 hours a day, unless they spend $500 a day to recover their energy. I’m not gonna be able to do that, right? So, you have this target audience problem where these gamers aren’t going to participate because it’s gonna cost them too much to do it,”[courtesy: thechainsaw.com - Investors Are Betting Big On An Aussie Web3 Millionaire. Will His Game Survive the Hype? By Tom Mitchelhill - Cryptocurrency Reporter at The Chainsaw and the Founder of crypto & Web3 copywriting agency called CoinCopy]Now what is in this for my 3 USDT worth of Illuvium lying in my spot wallet of Binance? Two things can happen. Either this game becomes a superhit and the price of Illuvium goes sky high or players would just ignore this and Illuvium price dips. I am really not sure what the outcome might be. To view market fluctuations chart on Illuvium, just type "ILV" in Binance search bar! To stay informed about ILV news just subscribe to their newsletter offered by their website! (Illuvium website address available on info section below ILV chart in Binance)What is your opinion? Would ILV go up or down? Also if you are interested in knowing more about the history of a particular coin or token available in Binance please let me hear from you! My next article would be just that!#ILV #NFT #Web3 #crypto2023 #cryptocurrency