Polygon, a decentralised scaling platform for the Ethereum blockchain, announced that it has raised $450M in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital India. The latest funding round takes Polygon’s public valuation to $2B, reports Reuter.
More than 40 major venture capital firms, including SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Galaxy Digital, Galaxy Interactive, Tiger Global, Republic Capital, and prominent investors like Alan Howard (co-founder, Brevan Howard) and Kevin O’Leary (Mr. Wonderful from ABC’s Shark Tank), participated.
Polygon’s native MATIC token has a market capitalisation of over $12 billion, mentions the press release.
How will the funding be used?
The funding will enable the team to Ethereum, obviating the need for alternative blockchains and paving the way for mass adoption of Web3 applications.
Further, Polygon is building a suite of scaling solutions, including Polygon PoS, Polygon Edge, and Polygon Avail, that is similar to what Amazon Web Services offers Web2 developers.
“Web3 builds on the early Internet’s open-source ideals, enabling users to create the value, control the network and reap the rewards. Ethereum, scaled by Polygon, will be the bedrock of this next stage in the Web’s evolution,” said Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal. “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.”
The team is also investing in cutting-edge zero-knowledge (ZK) technology that will be key to onboarding the next billion users to Ethereum.
What does Polygon solve?
At present, the Ethereum community is seeking to increase the network’s capacity to handle more transactions.
The huge popularity of new applications in decentralised finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) brought with it congestion and soaring fees.
Here’s where the company has stepped in with a broad range of scaling options and transaction rates that are among the industry’s lowest.
Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development
Founded by Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, Anurag Arjun, and Mihailo Bjelic, Polygon is a platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development.
Its growing suite of products offers developers easy access to all major scaling and infrastructure solutions: L2 solutions (ZK Rollups and Optimistic Rollups), sidechains, hybrid solutions, stand-alone and enterprise chains, data availability solutions, and more.
Adoption soared exponentially
According to the company, Polygon PoS adoption has soared exponentially, with 1B+ transactions recorded last year.
The network has more than 130M unique addresses and over 2.67M monthly active users now generate some 3M transactions per day.
Moreover, Polygon has attracted some of the biggest projects in Web3, from DeFi protocols such as lending platform Aave to luxury brands company Dolce & Gabbana and NFT marketplaces including OpenSea and Mark Cuban’s Lazy.com.
Virtual worlds such as Decentraland and Animoca Brands’ The Sandbox are also laying the groundwork for the metaverse on the network.
More than 7,000 decentralised apps (dApps) are currently built on Polygon.
Investor
Based out of California, Sequoia is a venture capital focused on energy, financial, enterprise, healthcare, internet, and mobile startups.
The company manages investment funds, including funds specific to India and Southeast Asia, Israel, and China, in addition to the US.
“The platform of choice to build on the blockchain today is Polygon. Thousands of developers across a range of applications are choosing Polygon and their complete set of scaling solutions for the Ethereum ecosystem,” said Shailesh Lakhani, MD at Sequoia India. “This is an ambitious and aggressive team, one that values innovation at its core. Sequoia Capital India is thrilled to lead this significant financing round.”
