Polygon raises $450 million from token sale to fund Web 3 development

• The Ethereum secondary scaling solution gave out MATIC tokens to the participating investors at a discount
• The blockchain founders intend to dole out the funds across its scaling products and in building Web3 applications

The blockchain scalability platform Polygon has announced the completion of a private token sale through which it was able to net $450 million. The raise doesn’t come as a surprise as TechCrunch disclosed at the end of last year that a number of venture capital firms were looking to provide financial muscle to Polygon.

Venture funds are shifting focus to scaling projects and Web3

The token sale led Sequoia Capital India, featured over 40 investors in and out of the blockchain space. Some notable names include SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Tiger Global, Accel, Dragonfly Capital, Union Square Ventures, Galaxy Digital, Alameda Research, Digital Currency Group, and Sino Global Capital.

Individual investors that took part in the raise are billionaire hedge fund manager Alan Howard and TV personality Kevin O’Leary. The participants reportedly received discounted MATIC tokens, but neither party has since divulged more information on this.

The scaling project intends to channel the funds into advancing its ecosystem, boosting mainstream adoption of Web3 applications and attracting more users.

The funding provides years of runway

First, the project has set aside $100 million that will be channelled to the ecosystem fund. Polygon will additionally parcel out about $10 million each to its scaling products each year. Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal noted that this allocation would help keep the products funded for three to five years.

The raise brings the company’s valuation (exclusive of the cumulative value of MATIC tokens) to about $2 billion. Polygon, previously Matic network, has been running since October 2017, nurturing a vast ecosystem in the process.

The project has more than 7,000 dApps and has completed several acquisitions as part of its $1 billion pledge into zero-knowledge rollup-related scaling efforts. In August last year, the scaling project announced a merger with scaling start-up Hermez in a deal worth $250 million. Later in December, Polygon acquired Mir Protocol for roughly $400 million in MATIC and USDC.

Polygon’s MATIC is, as of press time, trading at $1.94, up 10.26% in the last 24 hours.