Polygon has surged 3% in the last 24 hours as data shows Ethereum whales have been shopping up MATIC this New Year.

500 Biggest Ethereum Whales Have MATIC In Their Top 10 Purchased List

2022 was an abysmal year for Polygon investors as the cryptocurrency finished the year with losses amounting to more than 70%, but the coin has had a more optimistic start to 2023.

At the time of writing, MATIC is trading around $0.7795, up 3% in the last 24 hours. Here is a chart that shows the trend in the price of the asset over the last five days:

As shown in the above graph, Polygon started the year by observing some fresh uptrend. However, because MATIC saw some losses in the final days of 2022, the crypto is still 3% in the red in terms of returns over the last seven days, as today’s rise hasn’t been enough to compensate for those losses yet.

The reason behind this latest surge in the price of the coin may have been due to buying pressure from the Ethereum whales. As per data from crypto whale tracker service WhaleStats, the 500 biggest ETH whales were accumulating Polygon during the New Year as the token made it into their top 10 list of most purchased coins. Other coins bought up by this cohort include Shiba Inu (SHIB), Curve DAO token (CRV), and WETH (Wrapped Ether).

Also, today’s stats of the top 100 Ethereum whales include MATIC, with the coin being their 5th most purchased token in the last 24 hours.

Top 10 purchased tokens by 100 biggest #ETH whales today

$BUSD $USDC $WETH4⃣ $USDT5⃣ $MATIC @0xPolygon6⃣ $SHIB @Shibtoken7⃣ $CRV @curvefinance8⃣ $REN @renprotocol9⃣ $CHZ @chiliz $MASK @realMaskNetwork

Whale leaderboard https://t.co/N5qqsCAH8j pic.twitter.com/wjw0s6M7T6

— WhaleStats (tracking crypto whales) (@WhaleStats) January 2, 2023

This means that Ethereum whales have constantly been picking up Polygon in the first two days of the year so far.

Polygon Didn’t Observe Much Dev Activity In 2022

While accumulation from the whales is certainly a bullish signal for the price of MATIC, there has also been some negative news for the crypto. The on-chain analytics firm Santiment recently released its top 10 list for cryptos based on developer activity, and Polygon ranked last on it.

The “developer activity” here is a measure of the average amount of work that developers have been doing on any project’s public Github. High activity from devs shows commitment from them to keep on adding and improving features on the project, which helps grow the coin in the long term.

Since MATIC has been way behind the likes of Cardano (ADA) and Polkadot (DOT) in this metric, there may be an effect on the price in the long term unless, of course, the activity picks up this year.