Polygon, an Ethereum scalability platform, raised $450 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital India, which also saw investment from venture capital firms such as Softbank Vision Fund 2, Galaxy Digital and Tiger Global.
“Web 3 builds on the open source ideals of the early internet, allowing users to create value, control the network and collect rewards. Ethereum, scaled by Polygon, will be the foundation for this next stage in the evolution of the internet,” said Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon.
“The technological breakthrough did not start with Web 2 and will not end there. That’s why we’re very excited to see some of the same companies that funded the previous round of innovation now being in our vision for Web 3.”
Shailesh Lakhani, managing director of Sequoia Capital India, is also optimistic about the project’s potential.
“The platform of choice for blockchain development today is Polygon. Thousands of developers across diverse applications are choosing Polygon and its full suite of scalability solutions for the Ethereum ecosystem,” he explained.
This funding round comes amid additional news that Ryan Wyatt, formerly the gaming leader on YouTube, will join the scaling solution and lead its non-fungible gaming and tokens (or NFTs) arm, called of Polygon Studios, as CEO.
Polygon in the media
Polygon is an interoperability and scalability framework used to develop Ethereum-compatible applications. It aims to solve some of Ethereum’s oldest problems: processing fee and costs.
This month, esports brand 100 Theives entered the NFT industry when it gave away over 300,000 Polygon NFTs for free in one day.
Recently, Sports Illustrated magazine also partnered with startup NFT OneOf to launch a series of NFTs on Polygon.
Just before the New Year, disaster was narrowly averted when developers at Polygon patched a “critical” vulnerability that put approximately $24 billion of user funds at risk.
The vulnerability in question had been shared by “good hackers” (or “white-hat hackers”) in early December.
“The uptake by individual users and enterprises, the emergence of real-world applications like DeFi and NFTs, and the broad involvement of the institutional community are all strong indicators that Web 3 has passed a major installation milestone and is here to stay,” he said. Mike Novogratz, CEO of Galaxy Digital, on recent funding.
Novogratz added that Polygon and Ethereum are “building the foundation for a new internet.”
MATIC, Polygon’s native token, is up 15.8% in the last 24 hours and is trading at $1.96, according to data provided by CoinMarke