Tough slogging

Post-summer realities are setting in. Work, school, chillier weather – it’s all telltale evidence the fall is here.

U.S. stock futures fell to start a truncated trading week. Bitcoin as of 6 a.m. (EST) today had ticked slightly higher (1%) as it inched begrudgingly toward $59,000.

Interest rate cuts could help flip the script on "Wrektember," a trending moniker for the ninth month of the year.

How bad has September been for BTC historically? Well, the largest crypto shaded red for the 30 days of September in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. Last September, the streak broke as BTC gained 4%.

Macro data could tell a tale as the week drags on. Employment numbers come out on Friday. A rate cut is presumed as a given. Investors will be straining to divine some insights as to the size of the cut.

Coinstash co-founder Mena Theodorou said the crypto market seems to be in a “wait-and-see mode.” Seven months of BTC downshifting between $68K and $58K have left investors restless about whether BTC can break out to the upside or continue to grind lower (Cointelegraph).

Illiquid conditions during a long holiday weekend made for an ugly close to a dismal month. When the chapter titled "August 2024" concluded, BTC had shed 8.6%. To start the first day of September, BTC lost 2%.

Altcoins at large were battered by extension. AI excitement was snuffed out. Coins such as Render (RENDER) and Bittensor (TAO) cratered. Each lost 17% in the past seven days.

Memecoins are also reeling of late. Pepe (PEPE) lost 10% in the past week. Bonk (BONK) lost 11%. Floki (FLOKI) plunged 22%.

Since hitting an all-time high of $0.0003449 in June, FLOKI has decreased 64%. Some traders will be shifting attention to presale memecoins, including Pepe Unchained and Shiba Shootout. But memes can be a fool's errand. 

According to Cointelegraph, citing a Chainplay study, some 97% of memecoins ever made have since ceased to exist.

Starting tomorrow, Polygon will introduce a monumental upgrade, replacing the MATIC token with POL, described as a unifying coin usable across Polygon’s various chains. The conversion is automatic for MATIC holders on Polygon.

MATIC holders on Ethereum, Polygon zkEVM or centralized exchanges may need to take specific steps to migrate tokens to POL.

"A migration contract is already in place to facilitate this process on Ethereum," The Street pointed out.

Polygon’s main chain, which relies on a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus method, will use POL as a native staking token, and for gas payments. Eventually, POL will also be used to secure other chains within Polygon’s broader “aggregated” network. This would include the AggLayer, which is under construction. It's a new approach to scaling blockchains by aggregating Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs from all connected chains, "allowing them to interact securely and efficiently," said PlayToEarn.

Polygon launched MATIC in 2019. At the time, the Polygon ecosystem solely comprised the Matic chain. Polygon later launched another interoperability-centric chain. That was Polygon zkEVM. “The new POL token represents the entire Polygon ecosystem,” Polygon said in a blog post.

And so we bid a fond farewell to MATIC. Investors won't have you to kick around any longer. (MATIC is down 18% in the past week).

It had a memorable run. MATIC's all-time high of $2.92 came on Dec. 27, 2021.

In case you blocked it out of your mind, that ATH arrived at the same time that the Omicron coronavirus variant was pushing Covid-19 cases to record levels; and yet, remarkably, Spider-Man: No Way Home had topped $1 billion in global ticket sales.