Cryptocurrency has been a hot topic suffering a huge blow in these last two weeks thanks to Elon Musk’s on and off announcements regarding his affair with Bitcoin. Adding fuel to the fire was China’s decision to ban its financial institutions from offering digital currency services. While crypto values stabilized after Musk announced Tesla $1.5 billion stakes in bitcoin, what comes as a huge flip for the future of digital currency in India is Billionaire Mark Cuban announcing he will be investing in Indian crypto startup Polygon Matic which will add to his growing portfolio of blockchain investment.
What made Cuban sit up and take notice was how Polygon’s initial native token Matic climbed from $26 million in 2019 to a phenomenal $14 billion which means its co-founders are now India’s first crypto billionaires, check them out.
How and What is Polygon matic?
India’s first crypto billionaires are the co-founders of Polygon. Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal and Anurag Arjun co-founded Polygon as a blockchain platform in 2017. Established as a scalability platform, Polygon was create with an eye to resolve the slow transaction time and high fees of Ethereum. Ethereum is also a blockchain-based digital platform supporting ETH which is the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap created in 2013.
Essentially, what Polygon sought to do was to introduce a scalability platform to increase the number of transactions on Ethereum. It was an ambitious idea that paid off in billions. Polygon rested on Ethereum but enabled its users to start building applications on the platform at reduced rates than Ethereum while still being users of Ethereum. In the process, polygon also introduced its own native token Matic which was valid for crypto trading transactions. By being just a layer 2 blockchain platform to scale Ethereum, Matic grew with such increasing speed that surprised its co-founders as well.
Since last year, Matic has helped Polygon grow by over 10,000 percent and is now worth $14 billion today and of course, its co-founders are all smiles with achieving not just the billion-dollar milestone of their company but also becoming India’s first crypto Billionaires.
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How will the new valuation affect the co-founders?
Now that Polygon is worth billions, the Indian crypto billionaires and co-founders Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal and Anurag Arjun will see an increase in their own net worth in the industry today. Speaking to media sources, Sandeep Nailwal said, “We are not really in need of money. 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.”
What does Mark Cuban’s investment in Polygon mean?
While speaking to the media after he declared he would be investing in Polygon, American Billionaire Cuban said he had always been using Polygon and had been following its growth. On Cuban’s investment, Naliwal said that it will be Cuban’s Non-Fungible Token (NFT) company Lazy.com that will be investing in Polygon. Lazy.com works with Ethereum that is proving extremely costly for them but now their costs would be phenomenally lower with Polygon whose digital infrastructure will even decrease the prices of Lazy.com’s NFT’s.
About Polygon’s co-founders: India’s first crypto billionaires
Sandeep Nailwal is originally from Delhi while his co-founders are from Mumbai and Ahmedabad. Polygon’s headquarters are in Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) where Naliwal had studied engineering and computer science. He then went on to work as a software engineer for two years after which he did his MBA in information technology. After a brief stint with companies like Welspun E-Commerce and Deloitte, Naliwal launched his own website for white-collar services working on the lines of Flipkart. With not much success, Naliwal began exploring blockchain which is when he met his co-founders like Kanani also a software engineer. They were joined by Arjun an entrepreneur who had previously worked with IRIS, a software used by central financial institutions and banks. Polygon has a fourth founder and that is Serbian Mihailo Bjelic, a blockchain expert who joined the trio in 2020 when the company changed the brand from Matic to Polygon.
Polygon is also helping in covid relief
Now that India’s first crypto billionaires have made a fortune in the fastest time possible, the three co-founders are also doing their bit for covid relief in the state of Maharashtra. Naliwal said that a few vendors who are users of Polygon are working in tandem with the state government to track Covid test results in the state. Moreover, Polygon’s Crypto Covid-19 relief fund has raised more than a billion till date.
