Indian blockchain start-up Polygon has raised $450 million (around Rs 3,400 crore) at a valuation of around $10 billion. It is the biggest funding round and with the highest valuation in India’s Web3 (crypto and blockchain) space.

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The fund was raised through a private sale of Polygon’s native Matic token in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital India. SoftBank Vision Fund II and Tiger Global were among the 40 marquee venture capital firms, including Elevation Capital, Accel Partners and Steadview Capital that participated in the fundraising. According to Coingecko.com, Polygon’s market capitalization was over $13 billion at the time of going to press, with 1 token selling at the price of $2 apiece.

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Polygon is an Ethereum scaling platform co-founded by Sandeep Nailwal, Jaynti Kanani and Anurag Arjun in 2017 to solve the problem of high fees and slow transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. It enables developers to build scalable DApps (decentralised apps) with low transaction fees without sacrificing security.

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The current market capitalization of Matic, the native crypto token of Polygon, is $ 14.6 billion, 28% lower than its lifetime high of $20.4 billion in December 2021.

“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,” said Polygon co-founder Sandeep Naiwal. “Technological disruption didn’t start with Web2, nor is it going to end there. That’s 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 Polygon team said.

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Polygon is offering a complete set of solutions to combat high transactions cost and congestions on Ethereum, which has become highly popular due to the latest applications in decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) used to build applications.

More than 7,000 decentralised apps (dApps) are currently built on Polygon. It has attracted some projects in Web3, from DeFi protocols such as lending platforms Aave to luxury company Dolce & Gabbana and NFT firms like OpenSea and Mark Cubana’s Lazy.com.

Shailesh Lakhani, managing director at Sequoia Capital India said thousands of developers across a range of applications are choosing Polygon and their complete set of scaling solutions for the Ethereum ecosystem.

The Polygon blockchain networks claim to have more than 130 million unique addresses. It has more than 2.67 million monthly active users who generate some 3 million transactions per day, two times the volume of Ethereum. Polygon is making major investments in zero-knowledge cryptography.