American Billionaire Mark Cuban has invested in Indian crypto startup Polygon, adding to his expanding portfolio of blockchain investments. The quantum of investment remains undisclosed.

A serial startup investor, Cuban is the owner of NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and one of the main investors on the reality TV show, ‘Shark Tank’. According to reports, Cuban plans to integrate Polygon into Lazy.com, a portfolio company that allows people to easily display non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

In a recent interview with CNBC, Cuban expressed his deep interest in Ethereum, saying it is ‘the closest to a true currency.’ But, what prompted him to invest in an Ethereum scaling platform such as Polygon?

Due to high demand, transactions on Ethereum have become costly and slow. Ethereum is the blockchain system that supports Ether - the second largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin.​

To solve the problem, Polygon provided a second layer on top of Ethereum. “That helps pull money from the Ethereum chain up into Layer 2, where users can transact at much faster speeds,” said Sandeep Nailwal, Co-Founder, Polygon in an interview with CNBC-TV18.

It’s how e-Wallets such as PayTM or GooglePay facilitate quick payments. So, users have increasingly turned to Polygon to avoid the crowded Ethereum space. That includes Mark Cuban. “I was a Polygon user and find myself using it more and more,” he said in an email to CoinDesk.

Not just Cuban, “Many of the large billion-dollar worth blue-chip applications on Ethereum have moved to Polygon,” said Nailwal. This includes several Decentralised Finance (DeFi) crypto products and services. Polygon has registered 250+ apps, more than 60 million transactions and 700,000 unique users.

Formerly called Matic Network, Polygon was founded in 2017 by Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal and Anurag Arjun. Serbia’s Mihalio Bjelic came on board later as a co-founder.

In addition to making transactions on Ethereum platforms easy and quick, Polygon has its own native crypto token - Matic, which has hit a valuation of $14 billion. Now, it features among the world’s top-20 cryptocurrency coins.

But, Polygon has bigger aspirations for its cryptocurrency. Nailwal told CNBC-TV18 that the goal is to become the number-3 cryptocurrency in the world.

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First Published:May 27, 2021 9:49 AM IST