Ethereum scaling protocol Polygon (MATIC) has hit a fresh all-time high of US93.7c this morning, even as much of the cryptocurrency market treads water in advance of this evening’s monthly options expiry.

At lunchtime, Polygon was trading at US91.6c, up 15.5 per cent from yesterday. Its 159 per cent gain for the week makes it the top-performing top 100 coin for the week, ahead of Waves‘ 74 per cent gains.

The token was trading at less than US2c apiece at the start of the year.

The platform is a “layer 2” scaling solution for Ethereum, creating “side chains” that aggregate transactions to avoid ETH’s high transaction fees and slow speed. (There’s a big split in the cryptocurrency community over whether it’s better to use layer 2 solutions to fix Ethereum, or whether a rival layer 1 protocol such as Solana, Tezos or Cardano is the answer).

Overall, the cryptocurrency market was mixed at lunchtime, with Bitcoin down 1.6 per cent to $US53,682 ($69,000) and Ethereum up 1.0 per cent to $2,742 ($3,526). ETH hit an all-time high of $US2,797 yesterday afternoon.

Coin360

Venus, Waves, Uniswap, CEth and PancakeSwap were the other top 100 coins hitting all-time highs in the past 24 hours, according to Coingolive.com.

About $US4 billion in monthly Bitcoin options on the Deribit exchange are set to expire at 6pm AEST (8am UTC), and some volatility was expected following that.

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