Bitcoin remained near the $49,000 level during the US trading hours yesterday after it didn’t manage to break past the much-anticipated $50,000 level. Ether also remained in the red.
The small price movement for the top two cryptocurrencies meant the trading volume was low on all important centralized exchanges.
But tokens related to layer 1 protocols and scaling systems, such as LUNA and MATIC, managed to shine. Both of them managed to generate important 30-day returns.
MATIC managed to reach a new ATH yesterday thanks to the news that Uniswap was launched on Polygon which makes transactions cost less than on the Ethereum blockchain.
This growth comes as the number of smart contracts that are being deployed on Ethereum has slowed down with data from Delphi Digital showing that the total smart contracts deployed every month have fallen by a lot compared to this spring or summer.
Delphi Digital stated:
“The rising costs of deploying contracts have likely played a key role in pushing developers to alternatives networks. Whether this can eventually pick up on Ethereum-centric layer 2s [companion systems] remains to be seen.”