Polygon’s native token POL surged 15% on Friday as crypto exchange giant Binance said it added spot and perpetual contracts trading with the token to its platforms, marking the completion of the token’s upgrade and rebrand from the longstanding MATIC.
POL jumped to nearly $0.45 from around $0.38 earlier today, hitting its highest price since late August. It has retraced some if its gains recently, but the token is still up 15% over the past 24 hours, outperforming the roughly flat bitcoin (BTC). It also was the best performing asset in the broad-market benchmark CoinDesk 20 Index during this period.
Polygon introduced last week the upgraded version the network’s token, POL, migrating from its longstanding token MATIC. The transition also brought some changes in tokenomics, introducing a new token emission rate of 2% annually.
The new ticker also might have some psychological influence, offering a fresh chart to crypto traders for their technical analysis, which could explain large part of Friday’s price action.
“Full MATIC-POL spot migration had already happened, but new charts are multiples more important,” crypto analyst DeFiyst noted. “First successful big token migration we’ve seen in a while, expect other projects to follow.”
UPDATE (Sep. 13, 14:52 UTC): Adds that Binance listed spot and perpetual contracts with POL on Friday.