Billionaire investor Mark Cuban, who’s seen in investing reality show Shark Tank, invested an undisclosed amount in an Indian Blockchain startup called Polygon. Cuban is not only one of the biggest proponent advocates of cryptocurrencies, but also have backed the concept of NFT (non-fungible tokens) and has his own NFT platform called Lazy. So far, Cuban has put his money to back 10 blockchain startups from across the globe.
Details
After the investment, Mark Cuban’s website showed Polygon in Cuban’s portfolio. In its description the company wrote-
“Polygon is the first well-structured, easy-to-use platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development. Its core component is Polygon SDK, a modular, flexible framework that supports building and connecting Secured Chains like Plasma, Optimistic Rollups, zk Rollups, Validium etc and Standalone Chains like Polygon POS, designed for flexibility and independence. Polygon’s scaling solutions have seen widespread adoption with 250+ Dapps, ~76M txns and ~790K unique users.”
Founded by Jayanti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, Anurag Arjun and Mihailo Bjelic in 2017, Polygon was created to work as a ‘sidechain’ or an alternative to Ethereum’s blockchain. The company claims that on its sidechain infrastructure, the transactions will be faster and the processing power required to mine would be lesser. Through its proof of stake-based infrastructure, Polygon is currently among the top 20 cryptocurrencies across the world and has the market cap of over Rs. 970 billion.
Thanks to recent investor Cuban’s Lazy.com, the Bengaluru-based blockchain startup will see a perfect place to be integrated with. For the uninitiated, Lazy is Cuban’s portfolio company which is also known as a ‘virtual art gallery’ where people can display their NFTs.
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Polygon’s Journey in India so far
The co-founders of Polygon came with the proof of concept for their sidechain platform in 2017. In 2018, they created a small company and raised funds from friends and family to start building the product. The first round which involved the friends and family was $1,50,000. As the company progressed towards its work, it had another financing round of $5,00,000. After raising $5 million through an Initial Exchange Offering with cryptocurrency giant Binance, the company started to build its side-chain ecosystem in India. As developers build decentralized apps on the platform, the co-founders focused on building a community.
Proof of work vs Proof of Stake
The company is unlike most cryptocurrency platforms that work on the proof of work concept. For the uninitiated, a proof of work concept is when computer systems are in a race to solve complex mathematical problems where a lot of electricity consumption takes place. However, in proof of stake, miners don’t require excessive amount of computational power. Only a few hundred machines work together to mine and thus electricity consumption is a small fraction of what it is with bitcoin.
In an interview with the Mint, one of the co-founders said that-
“Our investments going forward will be strategic in nature where the individuals coming onboard will bring larger value than just money. We are US-listed and regulated with our listing on Coinbase, and this brings institutional investors to Polygon. Mark Cuban is a huge angel investor, and we are getting his help to onboard entities such as Lazy.com.”
In another news, CoinSwitch Kuber, a Bengaluru-based cryptocurrency investment startup had its Series B funding round where it raised $25 million on its $500 million valuation from Tiger Global Management. At a time when cryptocurrency is in a state of purgatory in India, platforms and their investors are reaffirming the faith of cryptocurrency traders.
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