Polygon, earlier known as Matic Network, has reached a valuation of above $10.5 billion within four years of its journey. The crypto coin saw a surge of above ten-folds to reach $1.66, as per current trends on Coinbase.
Jayanti Kanani, the co-founder, and CEO of Polygon was the son of a diamond factory worker who founded the blockchain-based firm with Sandeep Nailwal and Anurag Arjun in 2017. Recently, Polygon got immense popularity due to the association with Billionaire Mark Cuban as an investor.
Beginning of Polygon
Jayant Kanani belongs to the small town of Ahmedabad. He faced a lot of financial difficulties in his childhood. His father, the diamond factory worker, did not have enough money to pay his school fees. After completing his 12th standard study, Kanani joined an engineering college. His objective was to get a decent job to support his family.
After completing his Engineering degree, he got a job in Persistent Systems Pune. He worked on multiple side projects. Later, he joined Housing.com.
In 2017, he came up with the Matic Network startup idea after seeing the huge load Ethereum blockchain had. Matic network provided a scalable solution to Ethereum.
Kanani and Sandeep Nailwal were part of the same crypto community so they knew each other very well. Kanani pitched the idea of Matic to Sandeep and they became co-founders of Matic Network. Later Anurag joined them as the co-founder. Finally, they started the whole thing together in early 2018.
In February 2021, Matic became Polygon to widen its scope from layer 2 chains to stand chains or sidechains. Currently, Polygon is listed among the top 20 crypto tokens in the world.
The startup faced a lot of funding difficulties due to the background of co-founders. They neither had strong connections nor belonged to high-profile institutes like IIT or IIM. Serbian software professional Mihalio Bjelic joined the Polygon co-founders team later.
Cuban Investment Made Polygon More Popular
Polygon shot into the limelight a couple of weeks ago when it announced an investment by billionaire Mark Cuban, star of the TV show Shark Tank.
Before investing in Polygon, Mark Cuban used its products and he was quite satisfied with the developments Polygon had. Cuban investment surged Polygon value by 40%. On May 18, 2021, the Polygon token recorded $2.62, the highest value of the token till now.
Talking about how Cuban joined Polygon, Nailwal said:
“We have spoken to many investors, but the discussion with Mark Cuban was truly mind-blowing. It was so spectacular to know that the nuances of the industry, the tech and adoption we had figured out after months of grind, he was already thinking about those and had those questions in mind.”
Talking about Polygon, Mark Cuban posted on his website:
“Polygon’s scaling solutions have seen widespread adoption with 250+ Dapps, ~76M txns and ~790K unique users.”
In the last few weeks, the crypto industry saw a sudden downfall in its market value but it did not affect Polygon much.
Last month, India received over $1 billion Covid relief of Shiba Inu Coin from Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin in Covid Crypto Relief Fund, founded by Polygon’s Nailwal. Polygon built over 400 applications based on the Ethereum blockchain.
Two months back, Polygon signed a deal with an Infosys-owned consultant organization to include NFTs, Defi, and insurance in its ecosystem.
