Polygon, a decentralized scaling platform for the Ethereum blockchain, has secured around $450 million in capital by selling its Matic crypto-token in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital India. SoftBank Vision Fund II was among the 40 major venture capital firms to participate in the round alongside Tiger Global Management, Accel Partners, Elevation Capital, and Steadview Capital.
Post this funding round, Polygon had a market capitalization of approximately $13 billion, with each token trading for almost $2, according to Coingecko.com. The company plans to consolidate its dominance in the Ethereum Layer-2 domain, which has witnessed increased competition in recent months, with this massive investment. The company also stated that it is developing a suite of scaling solutions, such as Polygon point-of-sale (PoS), Polygon Edge, and Polygon Avail, with a tool for every possible scenario, similar to what Amazon Web Services provides to Web2 developers.
Sandeep Nailwal, the co-founder of Polygon, said in a statement, “Ethereum, scaled by Polygon, will be the bedrock of this next stage in the Web’s evolution. Technological disruption didn’t start with Web2, nor is it going to end there. That’s why we are very excited to see some of the same firms that funded the previous round of innovation now being our Web3 vision.”
Polygon (previously Matic Network) is a blockchain scalability platform founded in 2017 by three Indians Anurag Arjun, Jaynti Kanani, and Sandeep Nailwal. It onboarded Mihailo Bjelic from Serbia as a co-founder last year. The company has also raised funding from investors such as US tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban. Last year, Polygon PoS adoption surpassed a billion transactions, according to the company. The network has over According to Polygon, the network’s more than 130 million unique addresses, as well as, more than 2.67 million monthly active users, currently generate about 3 million transactions each day, more than doubling the volume of Ethereum.
Polygon has influenced a number of Web3 projects in the last year, including Decentralized finance (Defi) protocols such as Aave, Curve, Sushiswap, and luxury brands company Dolce & Gabbana, as well as NFT startups like Mark Cuban’s Lazy.com, and OpenSea. It claims that over 7,000 decentralized apps (dApps) are actively being developed on the Polygon platform.
Polygon invested $400 million to acquire Ethereum scaling startup Mir Protocol in December. It completed its second acquisition in the zero-knowledge rollup (ZK rollup) sector, following Hermez Network in August 2021. In January of this year, Hike, the gaming and social media firm, secured funding from Polygon.
