Understanding the Polygon hype
Why have Sequoia, Tiger, SoftBank and more invested $450 million in the Indian startup’s cryptocurrency?
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Editor's note: Bengaluru-based Polygon on Tuesday announced that it had raised $450 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital India with participation from SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Tiger Global and many other global venture funds and individual investors. These include Bitfinex, the crypto exchange famous for being robbed of $3.6 billion in 2016, and Unacademy, India’s second largest edtech startup. To put that figure in context, Indian crypto startups in total raised a little more than $900 million over the past five years, according to estimates by Tracxn. Polygon has over the course of the past couple of years become one of the biggest crypto infrastructure projects in the world; its MATIC token is the 15th largest cryptocurrency, with a market capitalization of over $15 billion. Started in 2017 as Matic Network by three Indians, Sandeep Nailwal, Jaynti Kanani and Anurag Arjun, Polygon was created to reduce transaction costs on the Ethereum blockchain, which is the core infrastructure network for most crypto projects. It is the biggest of what are called Layer 2 networks on top of Ethereum. The promise …
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