Polygon partners with Walmart and industry giant Flipkart from India

• Ethereum layer 2 scaling protocol Polygon enters partnership with Walmart-associated Indian e-commerce marketplace Flipkart 
• Polygon’s multiple recent partnerships has been boosting the price of MATIC

Flipkart, one of India’s leading e-commerce marketplaces, has announced a strategic partnership with Ethereum layer 2 scaling protocol, Polygon.

Flipkart, which is 77% owned by U.S. e-commerce giant Walmart, said in a press release that the partnership will result in the setting up of a Blockchain-eCommerce Centre of Excellence (CoE). The CoE will work on research and development of Web3 and metaverse commerce use-cases in India to accelerate the adoption of Web3, the release noted.

Commenting on the partnership, Jeyandran Venugopal, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Flipkart, stated that the partnership with Polygon is in keeping with the company’s core focus on innovation.

“Innovation is one of the main pillars for Flipkart and we have consistently worked towards technology solutions to scale new frontiers and introduce new products and services,” he said.

He added that with the CoE, Flipkart hopes to leverage on the expertise and technical know-how of Polygon to onboard more users to commerce in the metaverse. 

For his part, Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of the Polygon, noted that Polygon sees the blockchain e-commerce center of excellence as an engine for ecommerce to gain traction in Web 3 and the metaverse in years to come. 

The partnership with India-originated protocol is not Flipkart’s first play at Web3 technology adoption. Earlier this year, the company announced its innovation wing Flipkart Labs with which it has so far ventured into Web3 and metaverse commerce to explore non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Virtual Immersive stores, and other blockchain-related use cases.

The e-commerce company has also launched an easy-to-use NFT platform called FireDrops, as well as partnered with eDAO to launch Flipverse, a virtual shopping experience in the metaverse that has already been used by customers during the festive season.

MATIC surging as Polygon ecosystem expands

Flipkart is only one of the major partnerships that Polygon has entered into in this year. The Polygon ecosystem has also brands including Starbucks, Instagram, and Reddit come on board, driving adoption through the roof.

The ecosystem expansion has seen the price of MATIC, the protocol’s native token, trading with less volatility than most other tokens in the crypto market. MATIC is trading at around $0.92, up 0.17% in the last 24 hours at the time of writing.

This current price is a 6.74% appreciation in the two weeks time frame. Market participants are however of the opinion that MATIC is undervalued and being repressed from breaking to new highs by the market contagion caused by the FTX collapse.