Polygon Paid Top Solana Projects Y00ts and DeGods $3M to Migrate Chains

DeLabs, the Los Angeles-based startup behind popular non-fungible token (NFT) projects DeGods and Y00ts, received a $3 million grant from Polygon to migrate blockchains.

Y00ts, a generative art project of 15,000 NFTs, and DeGods, a 10,000-edition digital art collection, were among the top projects built on the Solana blockchain. Last week the team behind the collections announced that they were leaving the Solana network, with DeGods moving to the Ethereum blockchain, and Y00ts moving to Polygon.

A DeGods representative previously told CoinDesk that Polygon had paid for the move with a grant from its partnership fund. On Friday, the project’s leader, Rohun Vora, known as Frank, confirmed the size of the grant was $3 million.

"DeLabs received a $3M non-equity grant from Polygon to help fund the expansion of the DeLabs team 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. Y00tpoints and DePoints are tokens given to holders who stake their NFTs.

Vora went on to explain that the money would be used to expand the DeLabs team across departments such as business development, graphic design, content creation and event coordination. With expanded capital, he added, the startup can "launch higher quality projects" and "provide actually cool partnerships/deals/discounts/perks with real businesses."

The move dealt a blow to Solana, whose native cryptocurrency, SOL, has continued to drop since its November 2021 high of $258. On Friday, SOL was hovering around $13.

“There’s an argument to be made that [DeGods] has capped out on Solana,” Vora said in a Twitter Spaces announcing the migration last week. In the days leading up to the announcement, sales of DeGods and Y00ts accounted for nearly 70% of all Solana NFT sale volume, according to data from NFT marketplace Magic Eden.

The announcement also signaled a win for Polygon, which has successfully onboarded several mainstream brands and projects in recent months. Starbucks (SBUX), Nike (NKE), Reddit, Instagram and DraftKings have all launched projects on Polygon in the past year.