Decentralised Ethereum scaling platform Polygon has raised $450 million in its first major funding round led by Sequoia Capital India. About 40 major venture capital firms including SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Galaxy Digital, Galaxy Interactive, Tiger Global and Republic Capital also participated in the round.
Besides primary investment, a chunk of the funds will be raised through a private sale of Polygon’s native MATIC token, the company said in a press statement. The proceeds will help Polygon to widen its lead in its space – Ethereum scaling, weeding out alternative blockchains and enabling Web3 applications for the masses.
Similar to how AWS offers solutions to Web2 developers, Polygon is building a suite of scaling solutions, including PoS, Edge and Avail. According to the statement, the team is also investing in cutting-edge zero-knowledge (ZK) technology that will be key to 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,” said Polygon co-founder Sandeep Naiwal.
Polygon has attracted some of the biggest projects in Web3, from DeFi protocols such as Aave, Dolce & Gabbana and NFT marketplaces including OpenSea and Mark Cuban’s Lazy.com in the past year.
Adoption of Polygon PoS has surged at a rapid pace, with a billion transactions recorded last year. It claims to have 2.67 million monthly active users who drive about 3 million transactions a day. At present, Polygon’s native MATIC token has a market capitalization of about $13 billion.
