Polygon (MATIC) is making its way higher gradually in early trading on Thursday but we have several reasons to be optimistic about the uptrend strengthening in the coming sessions. At the time of writing, MATIC/USD is trading around $1.28.

One of the most popular L2 scaling solutions for Ethereum, Polygon has gone on to see its on-chain activity surpass that of Ethereum’s blockchain lately. The number of unique daily addresses active on Polygon not only surged by 168% through the month of September against Ethereum’s growth by 0.6% during the period but also surpassed Ethereum’s count last Saturday by almost 40,000.

One of the busiest projects on the network, the OpenSea NFT marketplace has seen activity increase by over 45 times since July while its sale of NFTs has risen by more than 17 times. In addition, several other dApps are also moving to Polygon’s ecosystem for its low transaction costs and higher levels of scalability than what Ethereum is able to offer.

Of course, with rising popularity, the network is also facing an issue of spam transactions that are deterring its efficiency. To counter this, Polygon’s co-founder Sandeep Nailwal announced the company’s decision to hike minimum gas fees from 1Gwei to 30Gwei. Nailwal has also clarified that this decision is a client level configuration, so node operators can undertake the recommended hike or choose to fix their own minimum gas fees on every transaction.

On the fundamentals front, the Polygon Grants Hackathon received one more sponsor – MEXC Global, a leading exchange. The hackathon which runs till 22 October aims to support new projects building dApps on its ecosystem, helping it develop further and improve its security as well, giving developers a chance to win $100k in prizes for contributing to the network’s strategic growth.

MATIC/USD Technical Analysis

Leading crypto strategist and trader Scott Melker anticipates that Polygon is getting ready for an upcoming rally after going through a downtrend over the past month. Melker’s technical analysis forecasts a rise by almost 40% in MATIC’s value over the coming sessions.

Taking a look at the 4-hour chart of MATIC/USD, we find a bullish bias among almost all moving averages. However, the leading technical indicators MACD and momentum suggest some selling interest as well.

Polygon’s price is well above the pivot point at $1.24 and buyers can take it even higher comfortably. It will be smooth sailing till the first resistance at $1.44.