New funds for developing Ethereum-based scaling solutions

Polygon, a crypto platform focused on developing secure, fast, affordable, and energy-efficient Ethereum scaling solutions, has raised US$450 million in a recent financing round. Its projects and efforts add to the general trend of decentralizing the financial world and moving towards a new iteration of the World Wide Web (WWW) and token-based economics.

The decentralized WWW, also referred to as Web3, is an innovative concept that some experts think should be implemented in order to remove centralized hosting services. According to its advocates, Web3 would replace the existing architecture with a peer-to-peer infrastructure consisting of interconnected, independent, and privately-owned computers that have the potential to provide censorship-free and secure access to information and services.

A community-run technology that powers the cryptocurrency ether (ETH) and numerous decentralized applications, Ethereum is one of the major platforms developed in order to advance decentralization and the Web3. However, it struggles with slow operating speeds and high transaction costs, which users have to pay themselves.

Polygon’s platform is among the few existing solutions that aim to offload Ethereum’s current issues by employing so-called “Layer-2 rollups.” This group of technologies (e.g., zero-knowledge rollups, optimistic rollups, validium, etc.) are used to move a significant amount of transaction information off the blockchain, allowing the platform to process a higher number of transactions and scale-up.

Powering over 7,000 decentralized applications, the Polygon platform is currently used by numerous players in the blockchain industry, such as the giant non-fungible tokens marketplace OpenSea and metaverse projects Decentraland and Sandbox, to name a few. The company is also backed by investors such as Sequoia Capital India, Tiger Global, SoftBank, Galaxy Digital, and others.

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AUTHOR

Catalina Sparleanu, Editor and Expert Relationship Manager at Supertrends