Ethereum whales start piling MATIC again as Polygon rakes $450M in funding round

Lavina Daryanani
Source: U.Today

Whales keep altering their token preferences based on the changing market dynamics. Just a day back, for instance, the top 1000 Binance Smart Chain whale wallets started engaging in Baby Bali transactions. Ethereum whales too have their whims and fancies. Right from hoarding large-cap tokens like SHIB and LINK to pilling up not-so-prominent tokens like Render and Covalent, their diversified portfolios boast of umpteen alts. Nonetheless, the Polygon network’s MATIC token has remained a constant pick.

It has already become ritualistic for more than a couple of MATIC-centric whale transactions to take place daily. Over the past day, the trend has gotten even stronger. Three distinct transactions involving 553,990; 599,990; and 750,091 MATIC tokens have taken place over the past 24-hours. The value of all the tokens involved reflected a total of $3,820,260. Whale data aggregating platform WhaleStats brought to like the same via a series of tweets.

Another ‘WAGMI’ moment for Polygon yesterday

Apart from the said whale transactions, the Polygon network was in the news yesterday after it successfully managed to raise $450 million via its first VC funding round led by Sequoia Capital India. The funding participants included the likes of Tiger Global, SoftBank, Galaxy Digital, Republic Capital, Makers Fund, Alameda Research, Alan Howard, Alexis Ohanian, Steadview Capital, Elevation Capital, Animoca Brands, Spartan Fund, Dragonfly Capital, Variant Fund, and Kevin O’Leary among others.

The funds were raised via a private sale of Polygon’s native MATIC token. At press time, the token’s market cap was already over $15 billion.

The raised funds are set to allow the team to lead the Ethereum scaling race. In the said process, the team would also focus on improving the adoption stats of Web3 based apps. Highlighting the same, the startup’s official blog post noted,

“With this warchest, the core team can secure Polygon’s lead in paving the way for mass adoption of Web3 applications, a race that we believe will result in Ethereum prevailing over alternative blockchains.”

It should also be noted that funds would additionally allow Polygon to continue investing in ‘zero knowledge’ tech. That, according to the team, would be key to onboarding the next set of users to Web3.

Over the past year, Polygon has attracted a host of projects in Web3, from DeFi protocols like Aave to luxury brands company Dolce & Gabbana, and NFT firms like OpenSea and Mark Cuban’s Lazy.com. At this stage, more than 7,000 dApps are being built on Polygon.

The aforesaid development managed to stir in optimism amongst community members. Social media was flooded with people from all over the world congratulating the founders and the entire team at Polygon. As a result, the sentiment associated with MATIC flipped to bullish, and over the past day, this token has registered one of the loftiest gains. After appreciating by over 15% in the said time window, the fifteenth largest token was trading at $2.04 at the time of press.