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Polygon, an Ethereum scaling platform, has raised $450 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital India, which also featured investment from venture capital firms like Softbank Vision Fund 2, Galaxy Digital, and Tiger Global.
“Web3 builds on the early Internet’s open-source ideals, enabling users to create 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 in a prepared statement.
“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.”
Shailesh Lakhani, managing director at Sequoia Capital India, is similarly bullish on the project’s potential.
“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,” she said.
This funding round comes amid additional news that Ryan Wyatt, previously head of gaming at YouTube, will join the scaling solution to lead its gaming and NFT arm—Polygon Studios—as CEO.
Polygon in the news
Polygon is an interoperability and scaling framework used for building Ethereum-compatible applications. It aims to address one of Ethereum’s longest legacy issues—throughput and costs.
Earlier this month, Esports brand 100 Theives entered the NFT industry when it gave away over 300,000 Polygon NFTs for free in just a single day. Sports Illustrated also recently partnered with NFT startup OneOf to launch a series of NFT series on Polygon.
Just before the new year, disaster was narrowly avoided when Polygon developers patched a “critical” vulnerability that put approximately $24 billion worth of user funds at risk. The vulnerability in question was shared by white hat hackers in early December.
“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 on the latest funding news.
Novogratz added that Polygon and Ethereum are “building the base layer for a new Internet.”
Polygon’s native token, MATIC, is up 17.8% over the past 24 hours and is trading hands at $1.98, according to data provided by CoinMarketCap.