February 7

Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development platform, Polygon has raised about $450 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital India. 

The round also saw participation from more than 40 venture capital firms including the likes of SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Galaxy Digital, Galaxy Interactive, Tiger Global, Republic Capital and prominent investors such as Alan Howard (co-founder, Brevan Howard) and Kevin O’Leary (Mr. Wonderful from ABC’s Shark Tank).

Further, Polygon also attracted contributions from Alameda Research, Transcend Fund, Makers Fund, Animoca Brands, global video game leader and games industry investor Scopely, Third Point, dune ventures, Union Square Ventures, Seven Seven Six, Elevation Capital, Sino Global Capital, DCG, Standard Crypto, Celsius, Dragonfly Capital, Variant Fund, Blue Pool Capital, WorkPlay Ventures (led by Zynga founder Mark Pincus), and many more. The funds will be raised through a private sale of Polygon’s native MATIC token.

Zero knowledge technology

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 — a tool for every possible use case. The team is also investing in cutting-edge zero knowledge (ZK) technology that is said to be key for onboarding the next billion users to Ethereum.

“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. 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,” said Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal. 

‘Platform of choice’

Over the past year, Polygon has attracted projects 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 decentralized apps (dApps) are also currently building on Polygon. 

“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. 

Billion transactions in 2021

Polygon PoS has recorded a billion transactions last year. The network’s more than 130 million unique addresses and over 2.67 million monthly active users now generate some 3 million transactions per day, more than double the volume of Ethereum. Polygon’s native MATIC token has a market capitalization of over $12 billion.

Polygon is making major investments into zero knowledge cryptography, a technology widely seen as the end game for blockchain scaling. The core development team made it a centerpiece of its strategic vision in the Zero Knowledge Thesis published in August. As part of that mission, the team has committed $1 billion, a significant portion of the treasury, to ZK-related efforts.

“Adoption by individual users and enterprises, the emergence of real-world applications like DeFi and NFTs, and broader involvement from the institutional community are all strong indicators that Web3 has passed a major installation milestone and is here to stay,” said Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz.