SoftBank, Tiger, and Others Contribute $450 Million to Polygon’s Token Sale

• In a private token sale, Polygon raised $450 million.

• The Ethereum scaling project intends to expand its ecosystem and attract the next billion crypto users.

Polygon, an Ethereum scaling project, has raised $450 million in a private token sale.

Polygon, an Ethereum scaling firm with a market cap of around $13 billion, has raised $450 million in a new venture financing round as the firm aggressively expands its portfolio of Ethereum scaling solutions and works.

Polygon’s first major financing round was led by Sequoia Capital India. Tiger Global and SoftBank were joined in the token purchase by Galaxy Digital, Republic Capital, Makers Fund, Alameda Research, Alan Howard, Alexis Ohanian, Steadview Capital, Elevation Capital, Animoca Brands, Spartan Fund, Dragonfly Capital, Variant Fund, Sino Global Capital, and Kevin O’Leary.

Polygon’s MATIC tokens were given to the investors at a discount, but the project’s co-founder Sandeep Nailwal declined to share specifics. According to CoinGecko, the current price of MATIC is around $2, up 16 percent in the last 24 hours.

Polygon intends to invest $100 million in its ecosystem fund

Polygon plans to allocate $100 million to its ecosystem fund and about $10 million each to its various scaling products, including Hermez, Miden, Zero, and Nightfall, with new capital in hand, according to Nailwal.

“That would give us three to five years of runway,” he said.

According to Web3 Signals, a website that tracks venture investments in the crypto space, many of these investors are making their first bet on an Ethereum scaling solution or, more broadly, on the infrastructure play.

Polygon recently committed to investing $1 billion in ZK-rollup-related scaling efforts and has since announced two $650 million acquisitions: Mir and Hermez. According to Nailwal, the new funding will allow Polygon to consolidate its Ethereum scaling efforts and onboard the next billion Ethereum users.

Polygon’s ecosystem has expanded dramatically since its inception in 2017. According to the project, over 7,000 decentralized applications are currently being built on Polygon. For its NFT efforts, it collaborates with Aave, OpenSea, Mark Cuban’s Lazy.com, and Dolce & Gabbana.

The announcement on Monday backs up an early December TechCrunch report that outlined some of the deal’s early details.