Polygon, an India-based scaling platform for the Ethereum network, secured $450m on Monday through a private token sale featuring telecommunications group SoftBank and blockchain entertainment product developers Alameda Research and Animoca Brands.
The deal, a private sale of Polygon’s MATIC token, was led by Sequoia Capital India and included cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, mobile video game publishers Voodoo and Scopely, online education provider Unacademy and cryptocurrency lender Celsius.
Tiger Global Management, Galaxy Interactive, Galaxy Digital, Republic Capital, Transcend Fund and Makers Fund, Sino Global Capital, Digital Currency Group, Standard Crypto, Variant Fund, Dragonfly Capital, Seven Seven Six, Elevation Capital, Dune Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Blue Pool Capital and WorkPlay Ventures also took part.
The participants were filled out by Accel, Steadview Capital, Third Point, Sangha Capital, CoinFund, Finality Capital Partners, Sound Ventures, Ghaf Capital, Spartan Group, private investors Alan Howard and Kevin O’Leary and undisclosed others.
Founded in 2017 as Matic, Polygon provides a digital platform that allows developers to create scalable decentralised apps with low transaction fees that are compatible with the Ethereum blockchain.
The company will use the proceeds to develop its product and invest further in zero knowledge technology, a cryptographic verification mechanism to which it has committed $1bn.
The steepening demand for cryptocurrency is coming in tandem with heightened efforts to advance scaling technology that will make crypto transactions and Web3 applications – those built around the blockchain – easier and more efficient to develop.
Developers of parallel layers and networks tied to the main blockchain are receiving significant amounts of funding as they create ways to move transaction details off the blockchain, which ultimately puts more information into each block and speeds up transactions, consequently scaling to meet demand.
Polygon had processed more than 1.3 billion transactions and 23 million blocks as of last month, and its growth is due in large part to its accelerating adoption. It counts non-fungible token marketplace OpenSea, metaverse platform Decentraland and decentralised finance platforms Sushi Swap, Uniswap and Aave among the 7,000 applications to use its technology.
The token sale came as another crypto scaling technology developer, Qredo, raised $80m in a series A round that included cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase’s corporate Venturing unit, Coinbase Ventures, as well as blockchain technology developers Terraform Labs and Ava Labs.
Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal said: “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 did not start with Web2, nor is it going to end there. That is why we are very excited to see some of the same firms that funded the previous round of innovation now being our Web3 vision.”
The company had previously received an undisclosed amount of funding from private investor Mark Cuban in May 2021, after Coinbase Ventures had supplied an undisclosed amount of seed capital two years earlier.
