By George Ward
The creator of Solana-based Y00ts and DeGods NFTs revealed that it would migrate from Solana to the Polygon chain in Q1 of 2023. However, the latest reports showed that the developers’ decisions were influenced by the Polygon network, which paid them $3M.
Polygon Gave DeLabs A Grant Of $3M
Late last year, the Solana network got caught in the fierce storm of the FTX collapse, leading to a drastic devaluation of its token. Consequently, many investors and projects on the platform started migrating and withdrawing their funds, including DeLabs.
DeLabs is a non-fungible token developer based in Los Angeles, California. It developed the famous DeGods and Y00ts NFTs on the Solana platform.
According to the project’s website, Y00ts is a generative art collection with 15,000 NFT tokens. Meanwhile, DeGods is a digital art gallery of about 10,000 NFTs.
The two collections are among the leading projects developed on the Solana chain. Furthermore, DeLabs announced on December 25 that it would migrate its Y00ts and DeGods NFT projects from Solana to Ethereum and Polygon networks, respectively.
However, it left the price valuation involved in the transition when announcing the planned move. According to reports, Polygon chain issued DeLabs a non-equity bound grant of $3M to migrate its Y00ts NFTs to its Layer-2 chain.
DeLabs To Fund Its Expansion With Grant Received
Meanwhile, DeLabs CEO Rohun Vora, popularly known as Frank III, commented on the development. Vora confirmed that Polygon offered $3 million to help DeLabs to fund its expansion programs in exchange for executing the migration.
According to him, the money received would expand the scope of DeLabs operations by scaling their minting incubator. He added that the development would enable users to spend their Y00tpoints and Depoints and get incentivized with the incubator’s NFT token.
In addition, Vora said the fund would be used to further expand its services across different sectors like content creation, graphic design, business development, and management. He added that with enough funds, the firm plans to launch improved projects with several partners where its users would earn benefits and perks.
The migration was an adverse event for the Solana crypto platform as it came when its native token drastically dropped in value. In November 2021, Solana recorded its all-time high of $258. However, it has lost about 98% of its value since then.
SOL trades in the $13 price range at the time of writing. A few days before the sudden announcement, 70% of the total sales volume of NFTs on the Solana platform came from sales of Y00ts and DeGods NFTs, according to on-chain data from an NFT analytics firm.
The announcement of the migration has added another feather to the cap of the Polygon chain. The layer-2 solution had already onboarded many NFT projects from popular brands like Reddit, Starbucks, DraftKings, Nike, and Instagram.