Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, well-known for being one of the main “shark” investors on the American start-up reality show “Shark Tank,” recently invested an undisclosed amount in the Indian cryptocurrency platform Polygon, the start-up’s co-founder Sandeep Nailwal said.
Polygon, known for providing faster and cheaper transactions on the Ethereum blockchain without compromising on security, made headlines after its native token Matic crossed a market cap of over $10 Billion, and ranked among the top 20 cryptocurrencies in the world. The transaction meant that Polygon has been added to Cuban’s company portfolio. Cuban’s crypto portfolio comprises 60% Bitcoin, 30% Ethereum, with other coins accounting for the rest. According to Cuban, Bitcoin is a store of value, rather than a currency, and a better alternative to gold.
An avid Silicon Valley investor with a net worth of $4.4 billion and investing in more than 100 companies, Cuban has been one of the most prominent advocates of cryptocurrencies – he is to Dogecoin and Ether what Elon Musk is to Bitcoin(even though Musk has been hyping Dogecoin quite a lot as well).
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.”
“Getting investment from Mark Cuban is a big stepping stone for Polygon as it will attract more Tier I investors in the US towards the Polygon ecosystem,” he added.
Founded in 2017 by software engineers Nailwal, Jayanti Kanani, and Anurag Arjun, Polygon is a layer 2, well-structured, easy-to-use platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development. It helps decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols bypass Ethereum’s high transaction costs, thus opening up the platform to more users. And now that Cuban, the owner of the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) Dallas Mavericks, has shown an interest in it, Polygon is expected grow, as reports have said that it would now be integrated with Cuban portfolio company Lazy.com, which allows people to easily display non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
India has started to be more open to cryptocurrencies in recent times, with the government looking to form a committee to regulate cryptocurrencies and not ban them completely, as was suggested by an earlier committee.
