Polygon, an ecosystem of Ethereum scaling solutions, has raised $450 million (£332m) through a funding round led by Sequoia Capital India.
Known as a Layer 2 or side-chain network, Polygon runs on the Ethereum blockchain trying to solve scaling issues, bottlenecks, high fees, and other issues that hinder mass adoption.
Titan venture capital (VC) firms such as Tiger Global and SoftBank also participated in the network’s first ever major financing round, a shock considering it already holds a $13 billion (£9.5bn) valuation.
These VCs were also joined by more than 35 other smaller to medium-sized investors who, for many, it is there first time investing on an Ethereum scaling solution or in the blockchain infrastructure space altogether.
The Indian-based start-up, has emerged as one of the most widely-used Layer 2 solutions for Ethereum. By 2022, the platform had accounted for more than 1.3 billion transactions and 23 million blocks.
Its success comes largely from the 7,000 applications that have deployed on Polygon: from DeFi platforms like Aave, Curve, and Uniswap to NFT markeplace OpenSea and metaverse projects like Decentraland and The Sandbox.
The company sees itself as something of an AWS for Web3: “Polygon is building a complete suite of solutions that is similar to what Amazon Web Services offers Web2 developers — a tool for every possible use case and scaling at a click of a button.”
In a statement, Polygon confirmed it plans to use the funding to build up its Web3 applications, including Polygon Avail, Polygon Edge, and Polygon PoS.
The team is also investing in zero-knowledge technology, which it believes will be crucial to onboarding the next billion Ethereum users.
Funds were raised through a private sale of Polygon’s native MATIC token, which surged 16% from £1.30 to £1.50 in the 24 hours following the announcment.
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