Polygon Partners With Reddit Co-founder Alexis Ohanian's 776 VC, Launches $200m Initiative To Build Social Media on Web3

Polygon, an Ethereum scaling solution, has partnered with Seven Seven Six (776), a venture capital firm led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. The partnership has created a $200 million initiative aimed at backing projects that delve at the intersection of social media and Web3.

According to Polygon's official press release, the project will help budding startups working within the frameworks of social media and Web3 in "exploring better ways for humans to connect online."

“These past few years have brought a dawning realization that social media business models have a profound impact on our world. With Web3, users create the value[s], control the network[,] and reap the rewards. This is not just a different way to share lolcats online, though we love those. We are inventing new high-fidelity means of transmitting culture itself.” shares Polygon co-founder Sandeep Naiwal.

Web3, or conversely, the "third phase" of the World Wide Web, is both a concept and a vision for decentralizing the internet as we know it today.

"The motivating force behind Web3 is that a better version of the Internet is possible, one which empowers users over platforms. It is a response to a pervading sense that the current instantiation as represented by the social media giants has strayed too far from the early Web’s open[-]source ideals." Polygon stated.

While protocols like the Ethereum blockchain are attempting to build infrastructure that would allow information to be both decentralized and cryptographically verified, projects built within the Web3 framework are focusing on creating decentralized alternatives of popular centralized social media sites and other services that have been traditionally centralized since the rise of the internet from the late 90s and the internet boom of the early 2000s.

"We are still in the early days of Web3 and the most obvious opportunities right now are in gaming and social. This initiative will do just that, with a focus on gaming properties and social media platforms built on Polygon's scalable infrastructure. We’ve already seen some of the best product founders in our portfolio start building on Polygon and I’m excited for Seven Seven Six and Polygon to play a big role in shaping what the new internet looks like." shares Ohanian. 

As a scalable, low-fee infrastructure powering some of the most impactful projects in the decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) such as Aave, SushiSwap, and OpenSea, Polygon is pushing forward to offer a wider range of secure, fast, affordable and energy-efficient Ethereum scaling and infrastructure solutions for developers who wish to build Web3 applications. This new initiative will effectively place Polygon at the forefront of Web3 development, securing an industry position for a host of newly-designed social networks that would no longer rely on traditional centralized protocols.

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