In its latest venture financing round, the Ethereum scaling platform, Polygon has raised a total of $450 million, with a market cap of around $13 billion.
Institutional Investors Come On Board
This was Polygon’s first major financing round. It was conducted to power Polygon’s attempts to expand its portfolio of Ethereum scaling solutions and services to attract the larger developer ecosystem. Among the investors that participated, some noteworthy names are Tiger Global, SoftBank, Galaxy Digital, Republic Capital, Makers Fund, Alameda Research, Alan Howard, Dune Ventures, Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, Steadview Capital, Unacademy, Elevation Capital, Animoca Brands, Spartan Fund, Dragonfly Capital, Variant Fund, Sino Global Capital, and Kevin O’Leary. However, the funding was mainly led by Sequoia Capital India. For many of these investors, this is the first time betting on an Ethereum scaling solution.
Commenting on the investment, Shailesh Lakhani, MD at Sequoia India, stated,
“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. 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.”
Cofounder Charts Polygon Path
According to one of the founders of Polygon, Sandeep Nailwal, the addition of institutional investors will help establish the brand further and build partnerships. Furthermore, the funding will help Polygon build larger developer ecosystems in several markets.
“We have a very liquid token in the market and a decent treasury. We did not have to go to the market to raise funds. As the global market begins to look into the crypto world, we realized that even as by organic metrics — daily active users, transactions volume — we are 5 to 10 times bigger than Solana and 20 times bigger than Avalanche, we don’t have as much visibility as we should.”
Nailwal has also stated that the startup’s $100 million ecosystem fund will support its ambitions to explore more accelerators, hackathons, and grants.
Recent Upgrades On Polygon
As one of the few Layer 2 platforms targeting issues on the Ethereum network, Polygon is employing methods to take a wide range of transaction information off the blockchain. This will allow the platform to pack more transaction details on an Ethereum block and thereby help scale up the number of transactions that can be processed.
Previously, Polygon had tried to accomplish the information moving via the Plasma technique. However, more recently, it has been exploring multiple other technologies, including zero-knowledge rollups, optimistic rollups, and validium to accomplish the information removal. In fact, it has spent nearly a billion dollars to acquire firms that would help it expand on its approach. In January, Polygon launched the latest EIP 1559 upgrade, which will enable the burning of the native MATIC token and improve fee visibility.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
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