Polygon’s MATIC under pressure as 1.4 billion tokens moved out of Vesting Contracts

  • Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal clarified that the token unlocking happened a year ago as part of their schedule.
  • Polygon has given a detailed breakout of where the token will move after being released from the Vesting contracts.

Earlier today, a tweet from Blockworks researcher Sam Martin stirred concerns wherein he noted that “1.4 billion MATIC tokens, or 14 percent of the total supply, have been released from the vesting contract over the past hour”.

The tweet gathered enough attention, especially from the Polygon community looking to find the reason behind this move. However, Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal came up with an immediate response by ending the speculation.

Nailwal noted that the funds have been unlocked over a year ago. On his Twitter handle, Nailwal wrote:

This was a planned movement from the tokens which as per vesting have been unlocked 1 year back. These are staking, foundation treasury etc.

Furthermore, he added that Polygon will come with a major announcement very soon regarding the movement of the tokens from the vesting contracts. Sam also shared a screenshot of blockchain transactions showing the unlock. The screenshot shows the movement of the funds in nine separate transactions from Polygon’s vesting projects to different sectors of the project.

The movement of the MATIC tokens

Seven of the nine blockchain transactions appearing in the screenshot are 25 million MATIC tokens each. Polygon has given a complete breakdown of the tokens moving out of Vested contracts.

  • 640mil (6.4% of MATIC supply) – This quantity of tokens will be staked directly by the Polygon co-founders. As per Polygon, it includes two vesting unlocks as per the schedule – October 2021 (320,000,000) and April 2022 (320,000,000).
  • 546mil (5.46% of MATIC supply) – The Polygon Foundation will hold this supply and will be available for tracking anytime. They have the same vesting schedule as above. Polygon said: “As always, the team will update the community beforehand on any movement from the foundation wallets”.
  • 200mil (2% of MATIC supply) – This includes staking rewards vested tokens from May-December 2021 period as per the schedule.

MATIC price comes under pressure

Following the news, Polygon’s native cryptocurrency MATIC has been trading under pressure. However, experts believe that this is part of the broader market correction and has nothing to do with the unlocking of the tokens.

As of press time, MATIC is trading 6.34 percent down at a price of 85 cents per token. During the last month of July, Polygon’s MATIC crypto had a phenomenal rally in the broader market recovery. The MATIC price surged by more than 90 percent in July.

Also, not many MATIC investors seem to be troubled by the news. A large part of the investor community holds trust in the Polygon team.

Last month, the Polygon team made a major scalability announcement by introducing zkEVM to its platform. This feature will allow users to move their Ethereum smart contracts to the Polygon blockchain without any major changes to the code.