Polygon price has been under intense pressure for the past few days ahead of an audit-upgraded testnet for Polygon’s zkEVM. At the time of writing, MATIC price was 1.67% lower at $1.2604, while the total volume of Polygon traded in the past 24 hours has slipped by 8%. The altcoin has slipped more than 14% in the past week but remains 67% higher in the year to date.

MATIC Price Outlook

Polygon price has been struggling to recoup its recent losses for the past few days. MATIC, the native token of Ethereum scaling solution Polygon, currently ranks as the 8^th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization after Cardano and above Binance USD.

Polygon recently managed to surpass Solana in terms of NFT sales per day, being the second in the market after Ethereum. Polygon has been among the best-performing digital assets since the start of the year, surviving the crypto winter through a series of partnerships with Mastercard, Starbucks, Meta, the NFL, and Disney. The partnerships helped MATIC gain popularity as the token of the largest Ethereum sidechain.

Investors will be closely watching the MATIC price in March as the network’s developers prepare to launch an update. Polygon network’s developers recently announced the launch of zkEVM (zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine) set for March.

In their recent update, Polygon’s developers said that the zkEVM upgrade would support Etherscan and bring about significant improvement in verifier performance. The upgrade will benefit the network developers and users by scaling the Polygon network, making it speedier, and reducing transaction costs. The updates have also helped Polygon to emerge as one of the leading sidechains of the Ethereum network.

Even with the recent downtrend in the MATIC price, the upcoming upgrades are likely to increase transaction numbers and affordability, motivating the bulls to push the Polygon price higher.

Polygon Price Analysis

The daily chart shows that the Polygon price has been on a steep decline in the past few days, falling nearly 20%. MATIC has moved below the 25-day moving average, while its Relative Strength Index (RSI) inched lower. However, the altcoin has managed to remain above the 50-day and 100-day moving averages.

Therefore, I expect the recent downtrend to be temporary before the MATIC price breakouts higher. A move past the important level of $1.315 will have bulls eyeing the next resistance level at $1.580. On the other hand, a move below the key support at $1.15 will invalidate the bullish thesis.