The layer 2 chain provided a non-equity grant to DeLabs, the company behind the NFT projects, to fund its expansion.
Polygon awarded DeLabs, the Los Angeles-based startup behind popular non-fungible token (NFT) projects DeGods and Y00ts, a $3 million grant to migrate blockchains.
Among the top projects built on the Solana blockchain were Y00ts, a 15,000 NFT generative art project, and DeGods, a 10,000-edition digital art collection. The collections’ creators announced last week that they were leaving the Solana network, with DeGods moving to the Ethereum blockchain and Y00ts moving to Polygon.
According to a DeGods representative, Polygon paid for the move with a grant from its partnership fund. The project’s leader, Rohun Vora, also known as Frank, confirmed the grant amount on Friday.
“DeLabs received a $3 million non-equity grant from Polygon to help fund the DeLabs team’s expansion and to kickstart and initially help scale the incubator we are building that will allow you to spend y00tpoints and DePoints to mint our incubator’s NFT collections,” he wrote in the Y00ts Discord channel. Holders who stake their NFTs receive Y00tpoints and DePoints.
Vora went on to say that the funds would be used to grow the DeLabs team in areas like business development, graphic design, content creation, and event coordination. He added that with more capital, the startup will be able to “launch higher quality projects” and “provide actually cool partnerships/deals/discounts/perks with real businesses.”
The move was a setback for Solana, whose native cryptocurrency, SOL, has been falling since its November 2021 high of $258. SOL was trading around $13 on Friday.
“There’s an argument to be made that [DeGods] has capped out on Solana,” Vora said last week in a Twitter Spaces announcement of the migration. According to data from NFT marketplace Magic Eden, sales of DeGods and Y00ts accounted for nearly 70% of total Solana NFT sale volume in the days leading up to the announcement.
Polygon, which has successfully onboarded several mainstream brands and projects in recent months, also benefited from the announcement. In the last year, Starbucks (SBUX), Nike (NKE), Reddit, Instagram, and DraftKings have all launched projects on Polygon.
