Bankless - 94 - The Swiss Army Knife of Scaling | Polygon's Sandeep Nailwal & Mihailo Bjelic

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

Polygon is the Swiss Army Knife of Scaling. With a suite of scaling products, Polygon is pushing in many directions to scale out the Ethereum ecosystem. On the heels of the 'Abandoning Ethereum' twitter drama, Sandeep and Mihailo from Polygon come on the podcast to discuss how Ethereum is, in fact, not abandoning its users. A ton has happened in the world of Polygon in the six months since they were last on the show, including a partnership with DraftKings and massive leaps into the Metaverse. ✨ EPISODE DEBRIEF ✨ https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/exclusive-debrief-the-swiss-army  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ 📣 OPOLIS | YOUR CRYPTO CAREER https://bankless.cc/Opolis  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🍵 MATCHA | DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE AGGREGATOR https://bankless.cc/Matcha  🔐 LEDGER | SECURE YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger  🧙‍♀️ ALCHEMIX | SELF-PAYING LOANS http://bankless.cc/Alchemix  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 6:00 Sandeep & Mihalo Return 8:20 Not Abandoning Ethereum 15:27 Adoption of Ethereum 24:06 On Maximalism 29:52 A Portfolio of Chains 37:47 The Mission 44:50 Tokens & Unifying Forces 49:42 Is Polygon an ETH Killer? 54:33 Polygon vs Alt Layer 1’s 1:04:40 Checkpointing to Ethereum 1:08:53 Bridges & Sidechains 1:18:00 Facts & Tribalism 1:22:50 zkRollups & Miden 1:29:12 Apps & DraftKings 1:34:00 On-Ramp to the Metaverse 1:37:09 The Roadmap 1:42:10 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Sandeep on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sandeepnailwal?s=20  Mihailo on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MihailoBjelic?s=20  Announcing Polygon Miden: https://twitter.com/0xPolygon/status/1460609713922457606?s=20  Polygon Metaverse: https://twitter.com/MihailoBjelic/status/1456091349745295362?s=20  Modular Blockchains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjxyjgWiqLE&t=3276s&ab_channel=Bankless  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless. David, I feel like this was a long overdue conversation. It's been a long time since we had Polygon on the podcast. And they've been doing a lot over the last like nine months or so since we talked to them. So yeah, fantastic episode with Sandeep and Mahalo, who are the co-fam.

founders of Polygon, which is like a Swiss army knife for scalability on Ethereum. What were some of your takeaways? Yeah, this is coming right on the heels of all of this Twitter drama that has happened last weekend. And that definitely set some of the context of some of the conversations that we had. We really drilled down into the differences between there's a lot of chains out there that are forks of Geith, Geth, one of the original Ethereum L1 clients. Avalanche is a fork of Geith.

The finance smart chain is a fork of Geith. Polygon is a fork of Geh. What makes these things similar? What makes these things different? And so we go into the differences between the security models for these things. And overall talk about the, in addition, completely separate from that, the long-term vision of Polygon, where I believe, Ryan, you called it a portfolio of scaling solutions rather than a single individual scaling solution. And also talking about the whole draft kings becoming a validator on Polygon, the future of ZK Roll Up Tech on Polygon,

and overall, just the future of the entire portfolio, a whole. Yeah, I think if you're like an investor in the space, also if you're a user, but, you know, if you're an investor, you're someone building, right? The key question the, the industry is facing right now is like, where is the future going to be, right? And there's the Ethereum version of future, which is like this modular blockchain sort of future. And then there's the alternative layer one future, sort of the multi-chain future version of events as well. And that alternative layer one feature has really gained steam over the last, you know, three to six months or so correlated with prices predominantly. But there's also been some activity on these alternative layer ones.

And so I think this is an important episode to hear like, you know, polygons side of the story, which is definitely very modular blockchain, very Ethereum-centric so that you can make your own decisions, right? Because like if you believe the modular blockchain thesis, then you might be able to. believe a lot of these alternative layer ones are overvalued. If you don't believe this thesis and you think that, you know, cheap block space is paramount and Ethereum doesn't have the market cornered on, you know, good scalability ideas, then maybe these alternative layer ones are justified in their valuations. And maybe if you're building in the space, you should consider building on one of them. So this kind of lays it out. And again, this is this is Polygon's perspective and they're very pro-Etherium. But also, I think that, like, it's sort of bankless's take, too. We do. We have kind of said

that we believe in the modular blockchain thesis, ultra-scalable Ethereum. We think it fits with, you know, the values of decentralization that this program holds dear. And so it's good to hear other builders in the space doing it. So we talked about, like, the events of the past weekend, and all of the pushback on Twitter, and then we got into the actual Polygon solution. A lot of people don't know that it's not just one proof of stake kind of solution, that this is a Swiss Army knife of different tools and technologies, including some really cool stuff going on in ZK roll-ups.

What's also interesting, I think, is a lot of the narratives get spun on the back of token price, I think, and Polygon is one of the few layer two-type solutions in this. space that actually has a token, which is interesting, right? Optimism, Arbitrum, ZK. Sink, Starkworthy, do not have tokens available on the market. So, you know, it's interesting for investors to consider relative valuation of, like, Maddick, versus everything else that's going on in the space. So a lot of insights here as we dig into the Polygon story. And quick disclaimer, I'm an advisor on this project. I believe in what the Polygon team is doing as well. But I'm not. So we're We're good there.

And just for everyone to know, we had a little bit of internet issues. Mihalo's in Eastern Europe. He dropped off a few times. Sandeep had some microphone issues. We're going to do our best to edit all of those out. So bear with us. We've got a little bit of a hairy bit of content quality. But hopefully we can get all of those smoothed out in the editing process.

So without further ado, let's go ahead and get right into the conversation with Mihalo and San Diep of the Polygon team right after we get to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Macha, everyone's favorite deck aggregator, has just launched an open beta for gasless trading. So if you're trading more than $5,000 in common eth and wrapped Bitcoin pairs, then your gas fees on Macha are free. And that's why you should be using Macha. Mata routes your orders across all the various DFI exchanges on Ethereum, Polygon, finance smart chain, and gives you the best possible price without any trading fees or unnecessary slippage.

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inside of Ledger Live to connect to all the other Defy apps that keep coming online. Defi never stops growing, and the Ledger Live app grows alongside with it. So click the link in the show notes to see all of the DeFi apps that Ledger Live has and stay tuned as more apps come online. And if you don't have a ledger hardware wallet, what are you even waiting for? Go to ledger.com, grab a ledger, download Ledger Live, and get all of your Defi apps all in one space. Bankless Nation, we're super excited to introduce you to our next guest. It's been a while since they've been on. It feels like 10, 20 years have gone by in crypto.

We've got Sandeep and Mahalo, who are the co-founders of Polygon. What is Polygon? We've done previous bankless episodes about it. But if you're not familiar, it's Ethereum's Internet of Chains, not just, one scalability solution. It's like a collection. So it's almost like a Swiss army knife of side chains and layer two technologies. This organization is completely focused on scaling Ethereum. Sandeep and Mahalo, great to have you guys back. How are you doing? You're doing great. Thanks, much. Sorry, Sandy Paul. Thanks, thanks. Thanks, thanks for having us here.

Really excited and honored to be here. This has become the best show in the entire crypto industry. And I think a lot of new people who join in, like I was very surprised. Like somebody in my family, I asked them to join. And then, I mean, to, you know, know more about crypto. And I think they found bankless on their own. And they said, yeah, it's good. And I said, yeah, of course, bro, that's the bullseye. You have to give them a shout out then, Sandeep, if they're listening to this podcast.

Guys, you know what? We're going to start with this. There's been some, a little bit of Twitter drop. here recently over the weekend. And I wouldn't normally start here, but I think we need to because it's relevant to today's conversation. And Sandeep, I noticed you changed your Twitter profile accordingly. It's now Sandeep, not abandoning Ethereum is the subtitle. And we just had a weekend of well-known VC investors, hedge fund managers stating their public abandonment of Ethereum. And here you are saying, you are not abandoning Ethereum. So first question,

question to Sandeep, why isn't Polygon abandoning Ethereum, Sande? Yeah. So I think the easiest answer is that because Polygon doesn't hold bags of other layer ones, right? Otherwise, there is no reason to even discuss this. You know, I think Ethereum, forget about abandoning anything on Ethereum. You know, it, I mean, in our mind, it is, it has actually already emerged as the global settlement layer for this web three. Like, you know, we have this internet of value. And we very strongly believe that Ethereum, the network effects, the native asset, Heath has now properties of a hard money.

And, you know, for any layer one, decentralization is the most important thing. And to have that decentralization, you need to have that the native. asset to be a very strong and hard money because that is being used for incentivizing and disincentivizing the people who are running this network. And Ethereum, both in terms of its app development network effects, as well as the native asset capturing the kind of features of hard money on both this fronts, Ethereum is way ahead of anything else. And already that is the scalability solution that are available on Ethereum, be it, you know, Polygon's POS chain, which runs on top of Ethereum, or it's like, you know,

our layer two products, let's say Polygon Hermes, which is already live with some production, with some payment ready payment use cases or other, you know, layer two's like Arbitrum, starkware have already proven that Ethereum can scale on the layer two. So it's only a matter of time, you know, where, you know, Ethereum and the layer two scaling is going, you know, is going to completely decimate, you know, other kind of competition in that sense and, you know, establish itself as the ultimate layer for the three and we strongly believe in that. So, Mahalo, I, you know, I know we were having a conversation pre-show about sort of you getting off Twitter and just getting to this place of Zen. And by the way, I envy that because

I could use some Zen sometimes to my life and all of the back and forth that goes on in all of various, you know, crypto social circles. But I want to you, and in case some folks aren't as plugged into that, I want to give some context to the question I just asked Sandeep and get you to weigh in on this, Mahalo. So this is a tweet that kind of started it all over the weekend, this debate between like abandoning Ethereum and going to other layer ones versus doubling down on Ethereum, which is what Sandeep just advocated and gave his reasons for. But this is the tweet that started it all. This is from Suu, who is kind of a VC fund manager at Three Arrow's Capital.

We've had them on bankless in the past, too. And you said this, yes, I have abandoned Ethereum despite supporting it in the past. Yes, Ethereum has abandoned its users despite supporting them in the past. The idea of sitting around, jerking off, washing the burn, and concocting security tests, while zero-immers can afford the chain is gross. And it's not just this tweet because there's tons of tweets that, you know, get sent out and no one hears them, right? This got almost 16,000 likes on it. And I believe that this provided a lot of people some validation of this opinion.

So I want to ask you, Mahalo, what do you think's going on here? What do you think was the reason for this tweet and why did it set off such a storm in the crypto conversations over this past weekend? Yeah, thanks for the question. As you said, I'm personally really trying. We have fortunately, and luckily, we're in very good position with Polygon right now, and we're extremely happy and humbled by all the success that we have seen in the previous months. And we're really trying to be laser focused on work and what basically our mission is and that is basically scaling Ethereum, bringing mass adoption to Ethereum onboarding the first billion users.

and I think we are in a very, very good position right now with Polygon, and we just want to be, you know, very serious about what we committed to do. And these things are in the long term, basically on a long enough time scale, they're just temporary, I don't want to say noise, but you can even say it like that. It's just everyone has the right to be within Ethereum or abandon. Ethereum or do whatever they want and this is like an open open society basically and open community But I don't know like this seems to me Really seems like some sort of coordinated action number one number two

With these likes that we're seeing this tweet obviously they are communities Or at or at least bag holders basically outside of Ethereum. And there is clear interest now to disrupt Ethereum, to take market share from Ethereum. It's not up for me to say that. But I think that maybe even some people feel threatened by all the scaling activity that is happening, including Polygon, I think it's in a way maybe even becoming somewhat obviously the Ethereum can actually scale with all these efforts, with all the activity that's

happening in layer two on the scaling front, people are questioning, you know, their choices, their investment choices, among other things. I guess there can be a bunch of reasons. But the most important thing is, and what matters, is where are the users, where the innovation is. And that is very clearly Ethereum, like there is like really zero doubt. that like that's where the users are that's where they're old smart people are I mean all 90% or 90% plus of the innovation and yeah I'm as bullish on Ethereum in general and the ecosystem as like as ever

basically guys what you think of this charge specifically all right because like you know let's let's try to steal man the argument just just a little bit right it's like I totally understand what what you're saying about like the bag bias and, you know, you know, pumping other alternative investments and, you know, no doubt that goes on. But like, the narrative of Ethereum abandoning its users, right, because gas fees on main net are high. The, the idea that users are livid, that Ethereum is just a whale chain, that it's not defy if only the wealthy can afford it, that Ethereum isn't shipping. Do you think that there are any point? in that, like any merits to that argument, or would you reject them all? And Cindy, I kind of,

you know, jumped in there. So why don't I let you jump in first. Yeah. So, I mean, I, I, I mean, I actually also had a similar kind of conversation on Twitter with someone is that, you know, when you see the adoption of Polygon or when you see the adoption of Star-Quaer, or when you see like Star Quet solution, let's say, D-Y-D-X and things like that, or when you see the adoption of, arbitram or even X-diper-se. All of these are essentially the adoption of Ethereum only, adoption of EVM, EVM users who own some addresses and then they can switch the metamask and then go to the layer two side chains, whatever you want to call it. And, you know, I mean, we have multiple times said that, you know, our kind of definition of Ethereum scalability

or scaling Ethereum is not, you know, extremely narrow as that, you know, this only is layer two and this only scales Ethereum. We believe that there is a whole spectrum. You have sovereign side chains and in original thesis of Mihailo also has originally mentioned that there are probably 100 plus side chains or enterprise chains which are connected to Ethereum. Similarly, you have chains like Polygon POS and all that. All of this is actually adoption of Ethereum.

And somebody was even saying, somebody was saying that the DAU on some other chain has grown past Ethereum. And first of all, that was, you know, was a wrong fact. And then second thing was that if you combine, even if some chain, let's say, starts approaching that DAU, but if you combine the DAU of Ethereum main chain, you combine the Ethereum, a DAU of, you know, Polygon, Star-Qware, and, you know, some of these other chains, that, you know, that DAU is way, way ahead of any other thing that you see. So I absolutely don't agree with this. do not agree with this, this narrative that, you know, the Ethereum is abandoning its users and all that. It's just that, you know, the technology, this is a very hard technology to build and,

you know, Ethereum achieved adoption before that, you know, scaling technology could come. But now that is, now it is here. And then, you know, the layer one is kind of becoming that, you know, last time also I think we were discussing is kind of the Manhattan's. Obviously, Manhattan is costly. It has huge amount of value going here and there. And, you know, like, I don't know any other chain where an independent investor who doesn't have any vested interest in the chain itself or some part in the underlying chain would be willing to put, let's say, $500 million worth of their assets on particular or maybe $1 billion worth of their assets on any other chain except Ethereum.

Ethereum is the, you know, the very essence of where you keep your core value. So I don't agree with this thesis. and then I agree that I feel that the gas fees are high because Ethereum block space is highly posh. Like, you know, kind of it needs a higher value to be transacted. If you want smaller values to be transacted, use any other layer two scaling solution or Ethereum scaling solution like Polygon POS or other solutions available out there. I think this is a great point. And by the way, when Sandeep was mentioning DAUs, he was talking about daily active users,

which of course is an important metric for, for, for, for, scalability and how many users are actively in the space. But I think you raised a really good point about this kind of Manhattan, right? It's like, you know, the main chain is Manhattan, but when you talk about Ethereum, you can't just measure Manhattan. This is like saying that, you know, it's impossible to live anywhere in the United States because Manhattan prices are high. Well, like the United States is like, it's a big country. There's a lot of places. There's like, all sorts of side chains and suburbs and like cheaper cities to live in. You can live in all sorts of on places. Mahalo, do you have anything to add to this, this idea that Ethereum is abandoning

users? What do you say on that? Yeah, I absolutely disagree, of course. I guess there are several aspects to consider there. The first one is the maybe closest to, I don't know, my heart is basically the technology or tech aspect. So narratives aside, and whatever someone says on Twitter, like the The reality is this. We have Ethereum ecosystem that has the main chain that is now expensive because the demand for the transactions on Ethereum is very high. And we have this whole fantastic ecosystem of scaling solutions, layer two solutions build

around it. And so many smart people, so many smart teams working on these hard problems. The alternative are alternative layer ones. And like all of them or majority of them are using EV. They're basically just a clone of Ethereum that starts empty. And in the beginning, they can offer these cheap transactions. And that's a given. I mean, that's simple.

But as the state load grows, as the activity on these chain grows, they are facing the same issues like Ethereum. So to put it succinctly, I, from the tech point of view, I don't see a viable alternative to what is happening on Ethereum. And that for me is the most important. Like I always try to put narratives aside, memes aside. Let's look at the technology. What technology here?

Is there any alternative to what is being built on Ethereum that can actually reach mass adoption and can support mass adoption and can support theoretically at least in the next five or ten years can support one billion users? I really don't see that technology. That can only happen on Ethereum. And that is what I consider the most important. That is the kind of essence. I could say a few more things, but I guess we have topics to cover.

But when you realistically look at it, and again, from the tech point of you, I really don't see any alternative approach. And just something to keep in mind is that people just need to remember that it's still very early. We are building basically this web free and there's this amazing promise of this open financial system for everyone. and to build infrastructure for something like that, that is far from trivial and it cannot happen overnight. And what is a real strength of Ethereum is this decentralization. There is no central party like no one, including Vitalik or whoever, is controlling Ethereum and controlling the innovation.

The innovation is happening completely organically. And there's this, as I said, smart teams all around. all over the world that are working on these hard problems. And that is like real, real strength of Ethereum that's, I'm really happy that things are happening like that. Because at this phase, that's basically the philosophy that we want to adopt, that we're trying to adopt a polygon. As you know, we already have multiple ZK-based efforts,

because we are in this stage of intense innovation currently and experimentation. And we need to, we need this decentralized efforts. And with time, they will start to crystallize the, these scaling technologies will mature, become more robust, more reliable, et cetera. And we will slowly, I believe, converge towards several, I guess, solutions that can actually support mass adoption. But this is basically a marathon. And I think Ethereum is by far the best.

position ecosystem to basically run and win in this marathon. So I want to play devil's advocate here. And I think there's maybe some of the newer listeners or newer entrance into the world of crypto. These are some complex concepts to really wrap your head around. And so what would you guys say to somebody that said, well, there really just appears to be this bias that people have where if you're building on Ethereum, that's good. And if you're not building on Ethereum, that's bad.

and it's kind of like the dividing line is there. It's that tribalism where L1, non-Etherium L1 experimentation is a waste of time and other people's resources. But if you just do what you're doing on Ethereum, it's good. What would you guys say to that critique? So first of all, like, I mean, I don't want to be demeaning towards any ecosystem. Like ecosystem building is really hard. And some of the other layer ones have done good work in. in trying to build those ecosystems

and they are in a very early stage where Ethereum was like, let's say, five years back and things like that, but still far away in that. But that's good part, right? But in terms of like, you know, the criticism, I understand, David, and sometimes back I also said that, you know, because blockchains are as much technical,

as much social as they are technical, so there is always bound to be some level of tribalism. Even like I go to an extent that if, let's say there is a particular, project, community-owned project which does not have any tribalism, that project does not have any real community. Any project which has a real community will have some level of tribalism, will have some people die-hard fans who are willing to go to any extent for that. So, I mean, that's kind of a necessary and important evil, I say to that. But there is some level

of tribalism where we simply, you know, from Ethereum community might be discarding and some people can be really harsh on Twitter. But the other side of the story is that if you ask me how many teams who are building on these alternative, let's say, layer ones, which are actually determined about building a product or which actually have a product vision and we who are not going for a quick token, you know, pump and, you know, pump and get rich cycle or, you know, get some large grants and all that. I can, because I heavily do this research on, I can probably count them on my fingers, right?

How many good teams are? There are some good teams, but they are very, very low in number right now. So even though there is some tribalism and, and there is that critique, some people can be really harsh. And they are, like Ethereum people are harsh within the community.

Like, you know, there are people are extremely harsh on Polygon at times, like, you know, for a variety of reasons. But that's the strength of Ethereum community. We introspect, we kind of question our biases. Like, you know, I mean, I am really highly appreciate you guys are also, you know, willing to kind of deep dive into it that whether there is any reality to it. And that's the power of theorem community.

But, you know, in terms of like looking at good projects, like some part of that criticism is actually true. Not some part, maybe like large part because 90% of those projects which I feel today are like mostly, you know, kind of not that much focused on building some product and doing. some innovation, but are chasing some sort of grants and rewards in terms of like token pumping and things like that. So that's my opinion on that. Mihalov. Yeah, I don't have anything special to add. I generally wish in an ideal world there would be less tribalism, especially in crypto. And crypto is especially industry because we have this crypto incentives on top of, I guess, human nature that is also not perfect at times.

So, yeah, it is how it is, I guess. But that being said, what I generally don't like, I am always in support, of course, of any sort of innovation, any meaningful activity, be within or outside of the Ethereum ecosystem. What I generally don't really like and don't appreciate is more or less constantly you see this pattern of trying to extract value. Of course, you have Ethereum that is absolutely the dominant player in Web Free, of course, and has like a lion's share of the market, basically, like 90 plus percent, I guess. And these competing ecosystems are trying to capture that market share, but in some way that I cannot always appreciate.

First, you try to piggyback of the technology and the community, and then some sort of attacks are kind of a common thing, I guess, there in a way. And that's something, of course, I cannot appreciate. And then you have this Ethereum's immune system that kind of was strengthened throughout all these years, fights with, I guess, Bitcoin maxis mainly. And then people have to react. And ideally, I think Ethereum community is very, very friendly. very, I don't know, supportive of innovation and inclusive in all sorts of ways.

But yeah, I just think it might have been better for these projects to kind of try to add value. It's better. It would probably work better, even for Ethereum competitors. If I can give any advice to Ethereum competitors, don't attack, I don't know, try to add value, try to contribute, collaborate. And I guess it would be better for everyone. Yeah. Well, guys, let's restore the Zen a little bit.

We're done with that conversation, right? That's like Twitter narrative side of things. I think the way out of this, as always, for any technologist is you build, right? And so in Polygon is building. I want to divide the rest of the conversation maybe in two parts. First, let's talk about the technology, right? So like all benefits, the decentralization, that sort of thing, everything you guys are building. And then secondly, let's talk about the users because there are some cool applications,

cool sectors, like NFTs and GameFi that we might want to talk to too. And you guys are doing some really neat things with Draft Kings and others. So lots of different applications going on in Polygon. But first, let's start with the tech. Because as David was saying, look, there are a lot of newcomers in the cycle, right? You know, 2022, people don't actually understand the difference between block space on Polygon. or Ethereum versus Avalanche and Solana, right? They just don't understand what the differences are.

And, you know, I think we want to talk about the difference between Polygon and some of these maybe alternative layer ones. And I've got like three differences that I really want to drill into to kind of highlight this. But let's start at the top level. And the first is this. I think people need to understand about Polygon that it's not, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not just one technology and one chain.

It's a portfolio. of chains, right? And so this is a picture I've seen often. And I think we need to spend some time actually describing this picture. And for those of you listening to the podcast, this is a kind of a diagram. It's a hub and spoke diagram. And in the middle in the hub, there's this icon of Ethereum. So Ethereum being the hub. And then all of the spoke positions are these various chains. And this represents the polygon ecosystem. But we see an spokes different solutions, right? So we see something called Polygon Hermes, and we see something called Polygon Nightfall, and we see something called Polygon proof of state, and then Polygon

Midin. And then we also see Polygon Avail and the Polygon SDK, right? So like, again, that's Swiss Army knife analogy, okay? Like now we're opening up the Swiss Army knife. We got the scissors, we got the, you know, the pocket knife. We got the compass. I don't know what comes with the Swiss Army these days. But let's go into each of these component pieces. And we'll just touch them on a high level, because I want to get back to what you guys are doing with ZK. And I want to talk about the metrics of proof of stake. But just at the high level, what are the various functions of the Swiss Army knife? So what are the chains themselves and the other pieces? Maybe Sandeep, do you want to kind of go around and give us the high level, you know, sentence or two summary of each of these

parts on the spoke. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I will start and then, you know, Mihailo, if some part you want to go deep on some of the things, you can take up. So basically as, you know, the story starts from here, right? So as we said that, we consider, you know, Ethereum scaling as a, you know, I mean, as a broad-minded, you know, concept.

Like, we don't think that, okay, only this particular kind of solution adds value to Ethereum. So we think of it as a whole spectrum. Okay. And on the left extreme of the spectrum, think about sovereign, like fully sovereign chains which have simple bridges with Ethereum. And, you know, some of those chains also add value to Ethereum. Like, you know, with a simple bridge chain has having a completely separate consensus or whatever. And then, you know, enterprises. And if you go to like really big, big, you know, kind of participants who want to come into the Web 3, they all of them, they don't want to

be on a shared chain as of now because we don't have full blown zero knowledge, you know, EVM compatible, talent available kind of, you know, chains available as yet. So many of them want to choose Polygon SDK type sovereign chains. And we have some big examples, you know, soon launching some of the, you know, probably Fortune, you know, 50 kind of companies launching some of their products on that. Similarly, then if you start, you know, going from this left side to somewhere in the middle, you will find something like Polygon POS, which is not a separate chain like a side chain. It is built on top of Ethereum.

The consensus, the validator set is on Ethereum. It checkpoints every 30 minutes just like any other layer two, but that checkpoint contains less information. So you cannot verify everything back to Ethereum. But then all the activities in the chain are posted on Ethereum. And every transaction on Polygon with relevant. data can be verified that, okay, this happened on polygon, you know, POS chain. So that is like, you know, let's say the middle part.

And then on the right extreme, you will find, you know, the pure layer twos, which are actually putting both their data as well as the dispute resolution related to that data, if something wrong happens in the off-chain computation, back into Ethereum. So they are very heavily pegged into Ethereum. They put all the data and, you know, this. And these are the most secured kind of solution, the pure layer two, optimal ZK roll-ups. But a problem with these kind of solutions can be that since you are putting all the data back into Ethereum, it can be costly.

And some of the layer twos which have recently launched, we are already seeing the cost to be $5, $6 per transactions and things like that, and they will scale linearly. But that's the trade-off that you are taking with the security. If you come somewhere in the middle between Polygon POS chain and layer two's, you might find solutions like validums where you have an off-chain data availability where you don't put the data back into Ethereum, but you only put zero knowledge proofs on Ethereum and the data is kept in an external data availability chain. So idea is that there is a whole spectrum and you can provide solutions on the whole spectrum. So if you see this diagram and we actually should publish

that spectrum also, you will see that polygon, you know, the polygon SDK is on the left side of the spectrum. Then you have polygon POS. Then you will have the value. DEM solutions which will include Polygon avail as the data availability layer, and then the validums with, you know, validam flavors of all of our zero knowledge solutions. And then on the, on the right extreme, you will have these, you know, the layer two's like zero knowledge roll-ups. Because, you know, on the layer two, we are heavily focused on the zero knowledge because we believe, and our thesis, you know, says that zero knowledge is the ultimate, like, you know, holy grail for the Ethereum scalability. So we have not one but four different solutions on Ethereum on the zero knowledge, you know, solutions out of which we have only announced three. So there is, you know, something very exciting coming soon.

So, you know, stay tuned for that. But then all of these solutions are having some sort of differences in their approach. Recently we announced Polygon-Miden, which is actually a star-based solution, which is like, you know, zero-knowledge technology has two different, you know, kind of larger streams. and Stark's, and this is a Stark-based solution. Before that, we had announced Polygon Hermes, which is a snark-based solution, and then, you know, Polygon Nightfall, which is very closely developed with Ernst and Young, which has privacy components to it, which is very important to the enterprises. So, you know, the Polygon Nightfall is basically part of our enterprise

play, which we believe that is, will become more and more important in, you know, maybe 18 to 24 months from here. So this is the larger kind of summary of this, this ecosystem. system that we are building, but all of these solutions are focused on providing additional scale on Ethereum and bringing the mass adoption on Ethereum. This is super cool. And I think a lot of people don't, you know, don't fully realize that. And so I guess the recap is you've got solutions at all, you know, the entire spectrum of the whole decentralization spectrum, right? And as we said on bank lists before, the difference between a side chain and a rollup is a rollup depends on the economic security of Ethereum,

whereas a side chain doesn't. And so you guys have, you know, a side chain, right, which is kind of the Polygon S-CK, and then you have a Polygon POS system, which is like a souped-up side chain. So it has some of the economic assurances of Ethereum, it's not quite a side-chain. It's a bit more advanced. And then you have all of the ZK roll-up solutions, Hermes, which uses, did you say, Snarks? Polygon Snark, or Z-K-Snarks. And you have Midin.

which is an EVM chain, and that uses Stark's technology, and that's kind of new. And then you have Nightfall, which is a roll-up on the enterprise side of things. And then you have something new, which is coming down the pike. So this hub is about to get larger. So I think that is one of the key differentiation points is when you compare Polygon to alternative layer ones, you know, generally people compare like the Polygon POS solution to those alternative layer ones. But all of Polygon is really this, you know, this grouping, this portfolio of different side chains and roll-up solutions. That is the entire ecosystem.

That's a little bit different. Mahalo, would you add anything to this? Yeah, I don't have too much to add, but these are all great points, of course. I guess what I can say is I can just repeat or iterate on what I already said previously. So we really believe we're still in a very early stage when it comes to building scaling Ethereum in general. and building blockchain infrastructure in general. And again, like, we have millions of users on Ethereum, but we want one billion plus. And it's still going to take a lot of time to get there.

We have a very good direction, I think, now. But this is, again, a marathon. This will not happen overnight. And that's why we at Polygon believe we have that, I guess, philosophy to let 100 flowers bloom at this point. and we just want to become, we want to facilitate innovation. We are very fortunate and humbled by all the success that Polygon has achieved in previous months since we were on your podcast the last time. And now we have, I guess, huge network effects.

We have a very strong treasury. We have a lot of experience. We have great team, fantastic people on the team already. And we haven't even announced yet, everything as we mentioned. And I think we, our mission and our, how can I say duty, if you want is to become the innovation facility, I guess, for Ethereum. And we really want to support all meaningful scaling efforts. And as Sandit said, we are indeed a little bit biased. We love, we see merits of optimistic roll-ups, side chains, enterprise chains.

We want to support all these solutions. But we are definitely kind of biased towards ZK-based technologies because of several fundamental. the mental reasons and we recently published our ZK thesis and alongside with it we committed $1 billion from our treasury to fund the development of ZK based solutions. And yes, we are like heads down and working around the clock basically on introducing and then building these solutions. We will see along the way in the coming years, we want, as I said, Polygon to be at the forefront of this innovation and building these great solutions and they will slowly kind of converge in

my opinion towards several types of solutions and even in the long run like there will never be a one size fit-soules solution there will be not there will be no one solution to rule them all because always different users different projects will have different needs enterprises will never have the same requirements like native web-free startups basically and small applications. And we will always have several scaling or infrastructure solutions in the Ethereum ecosystem. And yeah, I think Polygon is to the best of my, to the best of our knowledge, the only project that really follows that vision and bets on all these solutions and supports all these solutions instead of focusing on one solution only.

We were just, we're very lucky and thankful that Polygon is definitely by far the most adopting now scaling, scaling effort in the Ethereum ecosystem. And this POS chain that we introduced was definitely, I would say, a necessity. So we have definitely reached the point where using Ethereum layer one is, it wasn't really, possible for average user, I guess. And that's a good problem to have, of course. But the Ethereum community has really strong criteria when it comes to building infrastructure. We make no compromises about some things like decentralization, security, et cetera. And that makes the researchers and engineers job much, much harder.

And of course, we shouldn't give up on this. principles but I guess it's important to understand that sometimes you just simply need to accept some trade-offs at least temporary so that's what we did basically with the PS chain PS chain is not an ideal solution but it is a solution we just realized that we need Ethereum ecosystem needs a scaling solution today like we could not have waited any any longer so we needed an EVM compatible solution today and it was we consider it secure enough and functional enough and it has proven so far with, I don't know, like

21, I guess, million blocks produced without any major incident and all the value and 100 million plus users and 5 billion plus in TVL. It has proven to be the right move, basically to keep users within the Ethereum ecosystem. And yeah, now moving forward, we are in a good position. We provided some relief at least to this pressing scaling need. And now I think all the teams, Polygon and all the other scaling teams are slowly basically going into production with these more advanced solutions. And I believe in, I don't know, in several years from now, I believe the Ethereum ecosystem

will look impressive from the tech point of view. Mahalo, one question I have that I think a lot of people might be interested in is we have the Matic token, which is the token for Polygon. And most people associate that as the token for the Polygon proof of stake chain. It's the token that you must stake in order to be a validator. It's also the gas for that proof of stake chain. But how does the Matic token relate to all the other chains as well? Is it really just for that one chain or how does everything actually connect to the Matic

token if there are so many different chains? And I'm actually curious even more broadly than the token is like, is there any unifying force that like unifies all of these other chain solutions that we're just talking about in Polygon? That's a great question. I mean questions. But basically it boils down to the same thing. So the Metic token or Polygon's native token is the unifying force or is supposed to be the unifying force of all these solutions. Again, like we are now really focused on innovation. It was really important to us to facilitate and start several great projects like the ones that we have now,

like Polygon Maiden and Polygon Nightfall and Polygon Hermes and the one that we are about to announce soon. That was very important for us. And we just didn't want to constrain yet these projects. This is now the core process of innovation and building this bleeding edge cryptography and all the other components that are necessary for these solutions. And then when these solutions are somewhat ready for production, I mean, along the way, we are already working on redesigning basically our token. That is something that we are not really speaking a lot about publicly because it can,

I don't know, cause speculation, I guess, certain points. We don't want that, of course. But the thing is that we have a very clear vision that Polygons native token will unite and how it will actually going to unite all these solutions. So, yeah, there's definitely very clear idea on our head. It's just that we don't want to impose and we don't want to do that right now. We just now need to ship these core components. That is the most important thing now.

And later, the token economy will be adopted, basically, and improved will already be working on that behind the scenes to tie kind of all things together. And I think people will generally, I don't say love, but I think we're going to do some very interesting things there and we're very excited about it. So if that's the first thing that's different about Polygon, just in general, that it's just not just one technology and one chain, it's many different chains, it's a portfolio, it's a Swiss Army knife.

The second thing that's different that we touched upon a lot, I just want to drill into that Polygon really isn't pretending to be a layer one, okay? So like, what's the difference between Binance and Avalanche and a polygon SDK or polygon side chain. Well, it's like the polygon ecosystem isn't pretending to be a layer one. Okay? And we'll get to our point about modular designs maybe next. But let's talk about that for a little bit.

So at the center of your diagram is Ethereum, which is economic security, right? We've talked about the role Ethereum plays a little bit. But I want to bring this up because it's interesting. I think for a while people in the Ethereum community and people in the crypto community actually doubted Polygons intentions a little bit, I think. And this is like, look, the crypto ecosystem is best when it's like, you know, verifying, not trusting, right? It's like that's what this entire industry is about.

So like, I totally get the criticism. I totally understand it, right? And the concern at the social layer was like, hey, we've seen so many Heath Killers. buddy up to your Ethereum and pretend to be its friend, and then just as soon as they get escape velocity, just take out the knife and stab it in the back, right? And so the question is, like, is this more decentralization theater, right? Is this another your feigning friendship? And then once you come big enough, then, hey, the Polygon is actually the layer one. Bye, bye, Ethereum, we don't need you anymore. And that's, of course, a more centralized solution than Ethereum natively. But I feel like

at some level, you know, because I saw some of this back and forth on Twitter, you know, over the last, the first half of the year, let's call it. And there comes a point where you actually can't tell them, you have to show them. And I feel like recently, especially, Polygon has been doing a good job showing them, a $1 billion investment in ZK technology, a heavy investment in ZK roll-ups. You just talked about three ZK roll-up solutions, a fourth one on its way, a Apparently, let me ask you the question, Sandeep, do you think this has finally answered the critics on this question of, is Polygon an ETH killer or is it, you know, yeah, Ethereum synergistic? Do you think the critics have been answered finally? Are there still some in the shadows there? I mean, the people who want to understand, they understand it very clearly now.

And even before also, you know, people who actually cared to dig through, they realize that Polygon, even the Polygon POS chain was never built. Like, it is actually, it resides on Ethereum. Like, you can't become a Polygon validator by going to Polygon chain. You have to come on Ethereum, stake your, you know, polygon tokens or Matic tokens, and then become a sticker. So even that chain was not never intended to be built like that. Why would we build a chain like that?

Like, we would simply build a chain like that? bridge and then you know have it like a side chain so you know that actually is the narrative like i think always like that narrative has been you know painted by at times detractors or you know competitors and things like that but the sad part today is like ryan and this is actually i also wanted to mention is that you know the like there is there is a there is a segment of the community which still for the retail still tries to kind of you know push that narrative that no this is only POS, Polygon POS is a side chain and things like that. And conveniently ignoring all of these like Polygon, Hermes, these other things that we are

doing and whatever, you know, a lot of things that we do for the Ethereum side. And even though now we are, you know, launch these layer 2s and all that, many people will simply conveniently ignore and only talk about Polygon POS so that, you know, they can nail that narrative. Right. Even with the, for example, that multi-sic thing that you kept hearing, right? All the layer 2s have multisic, all the ones, right? Like, name one layer 2 which does not have a multi-sac upgradable rights because, you know,

this is such a new technology. If you find a bug, how do you upgrade that? And then, you know, the same people, even after having, you know, them also having the multi-six, they tried to nail this narrative. And that's exactly the narrative part of the crypto community. Like some core people who run some of these alternative, you know, chains or, you know, whatever, they know how to nail some narrative into the retail. And so that everybody starts knowing and nobody cares enough to dig through the real thing.

So as you said, that Polygon never intended to be a layer one. And, you know, our conviction on Ethereum when we started, it was Ethereum based. And that conviction also grew, you know, at that point in time in 2017, when Ethereum was also fairly new, we always used to say that right now we don't see any other competitor emerging as a layer one. If let's say in future, Ethereum loses out and some other, maybe we can think of it.

But our conviction also on Ethereum is like, you know, super strong because of the last three years of network effects, multiple, you know, multiple, you know, kind of these waves, D5 wave, NFT wave, DHA wave, all of these have happened on Ethereum itself.

And there is absolutely, you know, if somebody basically is still trying to pretend that no, Polygon is like, you know, trying to be a layer one, I would question the, you know, kind of intentions over there because it's very, very clear if you spend like half an hour on polygon ecosystem, you find it very, very clear that we are absolutely, you know, focused and dedicated towards Ethereum. And I can actually, as a founder, I can, you know, I can say here that if, let's say there is, this situation happens, like on a

personal level also I'm saying. And this is not like some part of tribalism or anything. I have, you know, this is part of my conviction that, you know, know, if in future, let's say, Polygon starts focusing on somewhere else, you know, I would not be there. Like, I'm so, you know, deep into, deep into Ethereum that, you know, I, I mean, I'm fully dedicated. Like, as a team also, we are dedicated and personally also fully dedicated towards, towards Ethereum. And I keep citing a lot of things like this is actually, you know, like not, not technical part, but, you know, like, why I feel that there are so many smart people people who are dedicating their lives toward Ethereum because they feel, you know,

owners of this network. Like everybody of the Ethereum community feels that they own the network. They are not building on somebody else's network. This is not Vitalik's network or, you know, Ethereum Foundation network. And that is the core community feeling that Ethereum has with among so many smart people. I don't see it developing in any other, you know, any other kind of ecosystems. And that also, you know, day by day, every day. like strengthens our conviction on Ethereum and, you know, hence we are dedicated on Ethereum.

So let's talk about the, we talked about two things. Let's talk about the last thing, which is the difference between kind of alt-layer ones, let's call them, and Polygon is is really like embracing the modular blockchain design and becoming that execution layer. Okay. And so if some of these terms are unfamiliar to bankless listeners, I'd refer you back to an episode that David and I did on modular blockchain design. Go listen to you. in that episode. This is absolutely fundamental to understanding the future of blockchains and scalability that's happening. We'll include a link in the show note as well. But a quick recap is the modular design, in a modular blockchain design, all chains today are kind of monolithic,

including Ethereum right now, but it is moving into a modular design where you have consensus data execution. And these are three different layers. And a quick mental model, if you want to understand these is execution is what's happening. So it kind of records what's happening at the moment. Data is what's already happened. And consensus defines what's true. And in the Ethereum modular blockchain design, the Ethereum mainnet is really the consensus layer. It does provide some data availability, but there are some other data solutions too. And then execution happens on the polygon side of things. And so when we laid out like that, the execution layer for Polygon, you've got, you know, proof of stake and the SDK and all of these ZK

roll-up solutions. And then you've got also have Polygon Avail, which is the data layer. And of course, this brings like specialization. So I feel like many of the, all of the other layer ones, besides maybe Tezos and NIR, are pursuing this, this monolithic design rather than this modular design that you guys are pursuing. But let's just touch in detail on, you know, a couple of the things here. So the first is Polygon proof of stake, right? So if we're going to compare that to like avalanche and a finance smart chain, I'm wondering if we could we could do that really quickly. So one thing they have in common is they're all geth forks. It's my understanding, right? So like that's kind of the underlying. But how is Polygon proof of stake different versus an

avalanche or Binance smart chain when it comes to resource management when it comes to like the long term play? like, is the proof of stake chain ultimately going to become a roll-up? Maybe go into some of those differences, because that is maybe a point of comparison. Like you could kind of compare Binance smart chain to polygon proof of stake. What are your thoughts? Mahalo. Yeah, sure. So just to take first a step back, I guess, there are two components, I guess, to consider there. So strictly technical, we can talk strictly technical, and we're going to talk about it now.

I can cover that briefly. The other component is this kind of cultural or component or I don't know, component of intentions. I don't even know how to put it exactly, but to try to explain it is that it is basically the reason why we see this layer once and why they want to capitalize on Ethereum is because there's a clear market there. So you have a very big player, which is Ethereum with 500 billion market. cap and it is lucrative to attack that market basically. You have even if you capture 1% you were at $5 billion. You can make a ton of money there as an investor or whatever, founder if you will. So there's a very clear incentive to do that.

And with Polygon, like if you want to do what we did at Polygon, at that time, that wasn't really popular. If you asked, I don't know, probably even some prominent VCs or big investors, they would have told you that it's better to start your layer one because what is the actual market for these scaling solutions? What market are we, you know, targeting or attacking here? It wasn't really clear. And with Polygon, we are, one of the things I am personally very proud and happy about is that with Polygon we have proven by now that it is possible to capture value. It is possible to add value to Ethereum and at the same time capture value for the project. And that

capturing of value was really important for us because it significantly grew the dollar, the value of our treasury in dollar terms and made us much more capable to contribute far more to Ethereum and the Ethereum infrastructure. So that is kind of just a quick context before that and just some just wanted to add that to what was said previously. And that being said, if we're talking about the POS chain, for example, compared to, I don't know, BSE or Avalanche or whatever. So there are several components right there. First of all, our whole validator set is implemented on Ethereum, and there is no other chain that has done that. And that means several things.

First of all, it means that without Ethereum, our POS chain doesn't exist. if Ethereum shuts down, if we imagine that happens, I mean, it's theoretically possible, but if Ethereum stops, our chain also stops. We cannot produce blocks. In that way, it's integral part of Ethereum, if you will. It's like an extension of Ethereum, similar to a roll-up in a way. The second thing to mention there is that we have periodical checkpoints where we actually commit to the Ethereum chain and in that way achieve stronger finality for the whole POS solution.

So once the checkpoint is submitted, everyone can transfer the assets back to Ethereum, assuming two thirds of two thirds plus one of the POS stake has voted correctly. And that's something none of these other chains support. And the direct and very important, consequence in terms of security from that design decision is that actually that transfer of assets back and forth from the POS chain and Ethereum is secured by the whole validator set of the POS solution which currently I haven't checked the latest data but I guess it's above $2 billion at stake which is like basically huge level of economic security that is behind basically these transfers. And it is, to the best of my knowledge, again, like the, I guess by far the most secure

breed between any EVM to EVM kind of chains. These bridges are normally basically operated by a small set of PUA signers, basically, just externally on addresses, basically, that have no stake whatsoever, sometimes even a single address. So, yeah, all these things are adding significantly to... the security of the chain and basically make important differences compared to these other alternative chains that we just mentioned. And on top of that, there is again that component or overlay of intentions, I guess, because

with Polygon it's obvious that we do not want to only extract value from Ethereum, we want to add value to Ethereum. We really consider polygon an integral part of the Ethereum ecosystem, system. And the more activity we see on the POS chain, the more kind of value the the foligon ecosystem and subsequently token captures ideally. And the more the bigger our work chest is to basically continue working and contributing to Ethereum. And with us, basically the third and the last thing I can say, there is, as you mentioned, Ryan, we would be actually very happy to consider upgrading the POS chain to some more advanced architecture that fits into this modular Ethereum modular blockchain

philosophy, basically. By the way, like, we really like that philosophy. In that philosophy, I was, like, thrilled when I saw basically recently that whole concept of modular blockchains being widely accepted because that is the core of polygon philosophy. That's literally what we set to build when we announced polygon. These independent components that together can form different, different, basically, architectures that fit different needs. That's literally what we set to build. So we are, of course, huge fans of that approach, and I'm pretty convinced it's here to stay.

And that's the right way to do things. And, yeah, just to finish, we are now in the process of building these advanced ZK-based solutions. Once we have decentralized enough, scalable enough, battle-tested layer 2 solution, we would be more than happy to consider upgrading the POS chain to that specific architecture. But we're not there yet. No one in the industry has that yet, but we're all working around the clock, working very hard, and I believe we will definitely reach there soon enough. And I don't see any of these other chains that we mentioned.

I don't see that even being mentioned or not to say on somewhere on the roadmap. So there are, I guess, at least three major differences from the tech side, the side of the kind of intentions. And basically when it comes to Ethereum and how do you participate in the Ethereum ecosystem? And the third one are these plans for the future and the future architecture itself. Mihalo, that was a fantastic illustration of the differences. want to go back and just double down on on one of them in specific and that is the the checkpointing that polygon proof of stake does with Ethereum. And then also what you said with the economic security of the actual bridge. And so you can actually, maybe listeners don't know this,

you can actually go from Ethereum to Avalanche, which is a similar geth fork, which is similar to what Polygon is, a Polygon Proof of Stake is a geth fork. And there are two bridges. One goes to the Polygon proof of stake, one goes to Avalanche. And so, like, as far as, like, the user experience and what the user is presented with, so far, like, pretty, pretty similar. But the difference between Avalanche and Polygon is Avalanche is its own layer 1. So you're going from bridge, from layer 1, Ethereum to layer 1 avalanche, using a bridge, versus going to a polygon, which is layer 1, Ethereum to layer 2 polygon.

And what makes Polygon a layer 2 is it checkpoints itself to Ethereum. Checkpointing is like a save game. right like there's the state of polygon that is progressing and then every once in a while it saves to ethereum and this is a fundamentally different than just porting from a layer one to another layer one because as bankless listeners will know Ryan here especially really harps on the power of property rights blockchains are property rights systems and the best systems that can ensure the best property rights assurances is what this whole industry is about do you actually own your own assets. And so Polygon, with this whole checkpointing, is actually tapping into

these strong property rights that Ethereum has. And that checkpointing is not found on alternative layer ones, because they are trying to be their own layer ones. They want other people to checkpoint to that layer one. And so that is a fundamental difference. Is Polygon has comparable property rights assurances that Ethereum does. And I just wanted to reiterate. on that point. Do you want to add something to that? Yeah, thanks a lot for saying that. But I would just try to clarify it completely and just to, we're really trying to be careful.

And we don't want, there were a lot of debates, basically, when we started Polygon. And people generally don't consider POS chain, a true layer too in the sense that it doesn't fully inherit security of Ethereum. But now if we go there, we're literally opening a can of form. and there's a lot of details we can discuss there. But still, like, as we said multiple times, POS is a solution that has certain trade-offs. Trade-offs are mainly the fact that there is still this independent

validator set that is kind of independent that exists alongside Ethereum and that certainly has a lot of power in the POS chain. But that is just the, I guess, again, the solution that we really needed, we had to accept certain trade-offs in order to ship something today, basically. And so far it has proven with these levels, high levels of economic security with more than $2 billion at stake, you would basically need two-thirds, which means like $1.2 plus billion to collude to actually try to do something malicious.

And then we can, again, debate. There are some ways to mitigate. even if this validator set decides to do something malicious, it can be argued that we can still have, we still have some counter-weasures or ways to kind of defend in that case. But again, like, POS chain is not a perfect solution. We never claimed that. We never want to say that.

But it is definitely good enough. And it is definitely, I would say, quite a lot better than alternative layer ones. Yeah. And let's unpack that even more a little bit. because so when I say the checkpointing saves to Ethereum, that's backed up by the economic security of Polygon, not Ethereum. And that's the differences between a roll-up and a proof-of-stake side chain, right? Where the roll-ups are secured, economically secured by Ethereum security itself. Polygon proof-of-stake is economically secured by its own proof-of-stake network of nodes,

which you're saying is $2 billion worth of network security. Is that also true, how does that differ from the bridge between Ethereum L1 and the Avalanche L1. How is that bridge? Is that bridge also have economic security or is it just a bunch of multi-sig signers? If we want, I really like to discuss these things, to discuss technology in general. I just don't want to go too technical and don't want to, I don't know, confuse your listeners at any point. But let me just try to also touch upon this quickly.

So when it comes to a security of certain scaling solution, Let's say we have these constructions like sidechains or Polygon PS, which is some sort of hybrid between a side chain and layer two solution and these layer two solutions like roll-ups. So what we're focusing on is the community right now is the security of your assets. And that's like super important. Like with roll-ups, you can always take your assets back to Ethereum. So you have very strong property rights, as Ryan likes to say. And that's fantastic. That's like really important.

But we somehow also or often tend to forget there is another very important component of security. And that is basically this operational or running security, whatever we can call it, is basically what happens when the assets are on the roll-ups. So currently the state-of-the-art roll-ups are these centralized operators. And if I'm a centralized operator, I can basically do all sorts of things. Like your assets are safe. You can always take them back to Ethereum. And me, as an operator, I cannot do anything about it.

But what I potentially do with some architectures, I can basically censor your transactions. Maybe you want to, I don't know, prevent the liquidation of some wall that you have or whatever, CDP or whatever, and I can just simply censor your transaction and you need to submit it in the next, I don't know, one minute. If I censor it, you lose a ton of money and then I can potentially blackmail you. Like all these things, I can front run. extract MIV.

So there's all sorts of things that when it comes to actually running the chain, your assets are safe. You can always take them back. But some other things pretty kind of are comfortable or problematic things can happen with centralized operators. With the PS chain, for example, you have a fully decentralized operator set, which is basically the validator set. And there is practically it's not possible for a very much.

want to censor you. So it can be argued realistically that operational running security of the POS chain is actually much better than the operational running security of roll-ups in this point of time with state-of-the-art tech that we have now. So there are different components also there. Like security is a complex thing always. Like it's not really, and again, I'm sorry, I just don't want to derail the conversation too much. It just, these things are, I guess I just like to talk about this. No, I think, but David's

question was like, you know, how does it compare to other layer ones, right? You know, this checkpointing of Polygon POS chain. Yeah, and for that we said, like, I'm not aware. I don't think there exist any other solution like that. None of the layer one solutions are submitting checkpoints to

Ethereum. None of them is paying, like we're paying millions literally in ether. And that ether gets burned through 50-59, then none of the other chains is doing that to the best of my knowledge. And there is no economic security especially not

validator set that leaves on Ethereum. Like none of these things exist. With these checkpoints, like some parts, like you actually summarized it very well that. You know, with the layer one, you take your assets to the other bridge, I mean, to the other layer one, which right now are very extremely

like, you know, centralized. For example, with Avalanche, I have heard that there are three SGX machines where three signers only sign. In case of Polygon, there are 100 public validators who like two by three have to sign and all that. But even if you leave that, the checkpoint that is coming. I think it was one. I think it was one signer on Avalanche or at least it was initially one. Maybe I'm wrong. I was thinking now there are three SGX signers. But you know, if that got get compromised, it's like all three of get compromised. Like, you know, if there is a way to compromise one. So it's like really problematic. But.

But the most important thing that David said, that, you know, this checkpoint, like, imagine that you created an NFT, like, you know, there was a punk-like project on Polygon. And let's say Polygon chain stops existing. It got, it stops sometime in future and all that, right? Even then you can bring back the data. If there is an archive of the data, you can actually confirm that this, this NFT was actually minted on Polygon. That checkpoint that you have, you can actually verify the transaction.

It's just that because the plasma is now depreciated. originally plasma, we use only, you know, payment confirmations. You could actually verify payments on the main chain. You know, you can't verify and slash people on the. You can still verify, but you can't slash the validator slot for the other generic transactions. So there's a long technical part of it. But that checkpoint actually, you know, anytime in the future you want to check back the immutability of the transactions, whether a particular transaction happened or not, all of that is verifiable

back to Ethereum. And the fact that any other layer ones is not doing that because they have an intention to kind of, this is like an emblical cord, they can cut it down any time. Like, okay, this bridge is over and they have a separate ecosystem. But whereas in case of Polygon, if this bridge is cut,

the chain consensus stops. Like, you know, that checkpoint is the consensus mechanism to change. The reward, how as a validator on Polygon you get as a reward, that you have to, two by three of the validators of Polygon, they have to sign. And one of them had to submit. the transaction only then when they submit the transaction the you know the the the the the the smart contract verifies that okay there are two by three signatures and then they get their

block reward so the even the block rewards of the of the of the of the blocks they don't get on polygon chain they get on it so it is that you know intermingled with ethereum if let's say etherium has an outage polygon chain has an outage immediately right so it's that connected with Ethereum. So I love your, you know, summarization with the, with the checkpoints. Like, you know, what is the difference? Right. Yeah. And the Sondi point is great. And if you want to say basically, I don't want to go into any sort of tribalism, of course, again, like, but in a sense that from the design point of view, you, I think it's fair to say you need to kind of bend the need to Ethereum or acknowledge basically the Ethereum as the hub at what we're doing and what

we're happy to do at Polygon in order to get these security benefits. If you're planning on, you know, staying layer one or being layer one from the get-go and then you don't want to kind of acknowledge, you know, Ethereum as the hub in any way or depend on it in any way. As Sandeep said, you just simply cut off the chase and, yeah, you're fully independent. And with this, like, moving, there is no, like, it's actually very hard to move and achieve these same security properties if we wanted to move staking to the POS chain. Actually, we're now working on the version three of the POS chain.

You want to introduce some significant improvements there. And one of the improvements is we're thinking of moving at least parts of the logic of the staking to the POS chain, basically while keeping these security properties, and it's really not easily. Do you know what somebody on Twitter mentioned to me? I thought this was really colorful illustration. You're talking about the benefits of just getting economic security from Ethereum's, like what other layer one chains are trying to do is founded an entire country in order to open a deli.

Right? It's like you have to bootstrap this entire security apparatus, right? And all you're trying to do is actually just create a set of apps. You're just trying to open a deli, man. And it doesn't make sense to me long term either. Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution that's going to be. going to completely change how we use defy and NFTs. And now it's live and has over 100 projects deployed. Gas fees on Ethereum L1 suck. Too many people want to use Ethereum and it doesn't have

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Now and start bridging over your eth or any of the tokens listed. And start having the defy or NFT experience that you've always wanted. Alchemics is one of the coolest new defy apps on this scene. It introduces self-paying loans, allowing you to spend and save at the same time. Deposit the die stable coin into the Alchemics vault

in order to get an advance on the interest it generates. Borrow up to 50% of the total amount of your deposited dye in the form of Al U.S.D stablecoin. Here's the craziest part. The loan pays itself back and you cannot be liquidated. Unlock your assets potential in the ultimate DeFi savings account. And brand new to Alkmix is the ETH fault where you can deposit ETH into the application. Borrow Al-Eth against your deposits while having your advance gradually paid back over time. V2 is rapidly approaching, which will allow for even more collateral types, plus a variety of yield strategies to choose from.

Harness the power of Alchemics at Alchemics.fI. That's A-L-C-H-E-M-I-X dot F-I. Follow Alchemics on Twitter at AlchemicsF-I and join the Discord to keep up to date with Alchemics V2 and to get involved in governance. At the beginning of the show, I present to the devil's advocate argument of there's all this Ethereum ecosystem, and when the Ethereum ecosystem sees this development going on, if that development going on is on Ethereum, then it's good. And if it's not going on Ethereum, then it's bad. That's sort of like the tribalism bias that people, you know,

critique the Ethereum ecosystem about. But if you want to rephrase that differently, the reason why this bias appears to exist is that when you are checkpointing or saving or rolling up to Ethereum, then you have strong economic property rights. And if you're not, then you don't. And it's Ryan in my opinion, the bankless thesis, is that strong property rights is what makes its whole entire industry work.

The fact that you have your own independent, self-sovereign assurances that you actually own the assets that this chain says that you have. And so this tribalism, which definitely appears like that, is actually grounded in the same theses that prop up the value of these assets to begin with. So, like, if you do the same exact behaviors on Avalanche or Polygon, you get the same properties. You get sped up blockchains. You get cheaper transactions, faster transactions. But on Polygon, because it settles and checkpoints to Ethereum, you also have strong property rights.

Just wanted to summarize that, this section for the listeners. Exactly. And this tribalism, like, you know, one more part I wanted to mention is that, you know, why this tribe, I have also thought about that why this tribalism at times come from Ethereum community is because many of the times the facts that are being represented by the other layer ones, right? They are at times, at times they are outright disgusting. Like, you know, you start talking about that, oh, this Ethereum has already been defeated and all that. Where you are like something is just getting born. Like, imagine the amount of hacks that Ethereum has happened.

And those hacks actually strengthen the ecosystem. I mean, can you even, you know, imagine the amount of D5 smart contracts that have, that have, you know, been hacked on Ethereum. Like, I think it's been, it's around $2 billion. And right now on any of these layer ones, we have not seen many of those attacks because those like hackers are not even looking into it. Because, you know, it's not worth their time. They're spending that time on Ethereum.

And then when those hacks happen, those wallet hacks, those multi-six, you know, kind of, that is the battle testedness of an ecosystem. and that has not happened with any of the layer ones. And then at that point in time saying that, okay, you know, they can, they are on the path to kill Ethereum and all that, that actually, you know, at times becomes disgusting and that kind of fuels some part of the tribalism at times. And, you know, I mean, I just, you know, I'm just trying to say some of the tribalism at times is justified because, you know, it's like too much from the other side.

So, yeah. I definitely agree. And I think it's, you know, many traders, many people in the space, many speculations. are just playing kind of short-term narrative games, right? And that's a big reason. There's an incentive to inject these kind of narratives and this sort of thing into the space. But you guys are builders. And let's talk a little bit more about another thing that you're building in some more detail.

So it seems like Polygon is making a big bet on ZK-style roll-ups, right? And I want to ask about the difference between Hermes, Midin, and Nightfall. So here's my high-level sketch of it. is Nightfall is an E&Y sort of collaboration, and that is more of an enterprise style of roll-up, right? Because it is focused on privacy. Because it's focused on privacy. Okay.

And then you've got Hermes, which at least at first appears to be a bit more payment-type-centric. And then you have Maiden, which is the newest addition to the Polygon family, which appears to be a general purpose, you know, EVM-like. you know, ZK platform. Is that the difference? You got privacy, you got payments, and you got general purpose EVM, or there's some more subtleties here.

Yeah, it's more, more, you know, more of it is correct. But let me kind of summarize it, right? So Hermes currently has payment live, but they are also working on a full-blown ZK EVM, right? And how that, and the differences lie in how that EVM or the ZK EVM is being constructed. For example, compare that with,

Polygon Midden, which is the third solution, which also is trying to build a ZK EVM, but based on stark technology, not SNARC. Hermes is based on SNARC, right? And then there are sluttal, like, you know, I mean, as I already tease that, you know, there are more solutions coming. And then some of them will have slight differences, let's say with Hermes, in terms of how the VM or the solidity code, which is the Ethereum code, is being constructed and being deployed on the VM, like how the virtual machine is processed.

processing that code, those are the subtle differences which actually on the developer experience point of view create large different, large kind of differences. Although on the execution side, it's almost the similar. But the developer experience can be starkly different on these two different kind of approaches. But otherwise, apart from the EVM, like the privacy EVM or the polygon nightfall, the purpose of other solutions is actually to build a ZK EVM, like EVM-compatible compatible. zero knowledge roll-ups where you can pick up your smart contracts deploy and they still have, you know, Ethereum-level security using the zero-knowledge proofs.

That's cool. So understand. So, and I think people have heard the Hermes story before because that happened, you know, a few months ago. But the Midin story is relatively new. That just happened the last like a couple of weeks. So can you talk a little bit about that story? So how did Midden become part of the family who are kind of the developers behind there? What about the technology?

Talk about that for a little bit. So Midan is led by, you know, the developer with a pseudonym Bobbin Threadbear. He was previously leading the Winterfell protocol of Facebook, which Facebook recently open sourced. So he was the lead researcher on that, and he, you know, technically wrote 80% of it. And, you know, I mean, we were, and this is a Stark-based solution. And then Bobbin is looking to build, and his team is looking to build ZKEVM solution, which is built on Stark, and it is also fully open source.

So that's where Bobbin was developing this. And he can already see that one of the reasons why Oligon is able to attract these many protocol developers to its ecosystem is because of the app developer app ecosystem. Like many of the ZK developers are like, you know, hardcore researchers, right? And they see that Polygoners already build this huge developer ecosystem. By the way, I should share some insights on that.

So recently, Alchemy, which is, which is, you know, after infuri, I think, or, you know, I mean, these are the biggest RPC providers that is linkages into blockchain. They are actually a new entrant into Polygon ecosystem and they had published a report that they have now 3,000 plus, you know, you know, weekly active teams on Polygon, which is, you know, it's absolutely among us. These are all apps, Sandeep. Yeah, yeah. These are the teams who are building apps.

And if there are 3,000 plus teams only on, only on alchemy, you can imagine that, you know, they would have at least 500 to 2,000 apps deployed on Polygon, right? And similarly, and this is only alchemy, which is the latest entrant. You have before that we have in Cura, before that we have, you know, block vigil. and there have been tons of like other, you know, chain stack and things like that, the, you know, service providers and they have their own set of team. So probably, you know, if I just extrapolated, I think Polygon would be having like around 5,000 different teams developing various solutions on Polygon.

And that's absolutely crazy statistics. Also, in terms of the daily average users of Polygon, you know, it recently surpassed like few weeks back. In fact, it surpassed, you know, the main chain also. And it has that like now, by DAU, it is probably the number one chain. Because a lot of other chains are not talking about the DAU stats. It's probably the number one chain in terms of as a platform where people are building

these these daps. So all of this DAP adoption and also like, you know, when we were talking about various different layer ones, by any measurable statistics, whether it's the TVL, whether it's the DAU, whether it's the number of DAPs deployed, number of developers working on policy. polygon POS chain alone will be far ahead, maybe 5x bigger than any other layer ones that we are thinking that, okay, are going to kill Ethereum probably. And Polygon is one of the small projects in the Ethereum ecosystem. So, I mean, I don't want to go into that.

So now we have a huge DAP ecosystem. And these developers and researchers, they believe that if they build within Polygon umbrella, they will be able to achieve adoption. because at the end, people will be, we have this ecosystem, will be able to achieve or use this ZKVL. All right, guys, we've been talking so much about kind of the technology side of things, but the other interesting piece about Polygon is, of course, the apps layers. Like, why do users actually come to Polygon? Where are the apps in different features, the stuff that users care about?

Maybe that should be our next section. And it seems like there's been some interesting PR around Draft Kings, and I know, David, you've been following this fairly closely. So let's talk about that for a minute. David, what's your question on this? Yeah, I think it's really interesting. By the way, congratulations on onboarding Draft Kings for using Polygon for sports betting. And I think everyone who's been around in crypto understands that sports betting is coming to crypto more or less. It's a very optimum use case for crypto. But another interesting thing about the story is draft Kings is also becoming a validator

on the Polygon proof of stake chain. And as we know with these kind of juiced up geth forks, it actually requires more intensive computational power, more direct attention towards the actual validating of these networks because just, you know, you need beefy or hardware. So my question to you guys is, is this kind of a security model for Polygon Proof of Steak moving forward is that we have larger, beefier nodes being operated by larger,

beefier entities, like the security model for Polygon Proofestate, proof of stake is actually secured by these businesses that are using Polygon for their own products. Talk about the model behind Draft Kings and them becoming part of the governance and validating process for Polygon. Yeah. So it's not at all about the nodes. Like even if drafting is going to run it, they are also, you know, one of the reasons like Polygon nodes are still fairly light, you know, compared to a lot of other different

kind of nodes in other ecosystems. And then you still don't need like, you know, like beefier notes. So this is not about the beefier notes. This is about like Polygon ecosystem or the validator set being run by the apps which are running on Polygon. And this is something that we want to promote. There are existing other apps also which are, you know, trying to run.

There are, you know, enterprise partners like Infosys who are running this and all that. So not only they have, you know, people have stake in running polygon chain. Plus, you know, apart from that, we want more and more data. apps to be, you know, incentivized and encouraged to be running the validator notes. I mean, the thoughts from these big weeks, like, you know, I mean, there are multiple such institutions and, you know, some of them, you know, in the past days, you might have also seen, like, Macy's, you know, did something on Polygon, Dolce and Gabana did something on Polygon. And most of these enterprises, like, you know, when they approach us, you know, I mean,

we are very, very surprised, like, you know, clinic, which is a multi-billion dollar brand, like they launched NFTs without even, you know, we knowing. And that's actually the best thing that, you know, they don't even need any support from the teams because it's like so close to Ethereum Development. It was like, Sandeep, I read the NFL was doing something. This is like a week ago, two weeks ago. NFL also launched some, you know, NFTs.

Hollywood is coming in very big way in Polygon. Bollywood, which is the Indian, you know, like the biggest movie producer industry. They are doing a lot of crazy things on Polygon. So it is kind of like, you know, becoming quietly becoming the, you know, the Web 3 layer where, let's say, many of these do not need a lot of money. Like, they are not incentivized by the money. They end up choosing Ethereum and then for scalability, they end up choosing Polygon right now. It's that strong.

And then, you know, in terms of some of these, like you were asking that, what is their thought process? The thought process is, I think many of these publicly traded companies, their thought processes start small, like start doing something with the chains. learn along the way, be crypto-native. And when we also talk to them, we also tell them that, you know, if you kind of run your blockchain strategy advised by, let's say, big four consultants who are on the enterprise side, you will never be crypto-native.

And some of these teams have very, you know, the good thing is that the people from our community, the crypto community, they are like, you know, already a part of some of these blockchain teams in these big enterprises. And some of the ones, some of the teams who are, fortunate enough to have crypto native people, they are, you know, you know, driving this or championing the cause of, you know, becoming crypto native and, you know, starting small. So, you know, the strategies start small, maybe do some consumer things, NFTs and things like that, become validators, learn more and then launch more and more products on that. But eventually,

I think the intention is absolutely to become, especially for the prediction markets and all that. And we don't have time to hit on all of this. But, There's so much going on with Polygon NFTs, which is really, I've seen that sort of take off over the last few months. Also, gaming and the Metaverse is a whole. So everything you see that's been kind of priced out of Mainnet is happening in Polygon, which is really cool to see. And it's especially cool to see in Polygon because you guys have such a nice on-ramp to even more economically secure layers, like roll-up type layers as well. You know, one last question before we kind of wrap this up, too. to mention right about metaverses.

So, you know, when we are talking about metaverses a lot, right, when people don't realize that actually all the most of the top metaverses who are live, they are on Polygon. Yeah, name a few. Decentraland is on Polygon, the biggest one. Sandboxes publicly mentioned multiple times. They're coming to Polygon. Somnium spaces polygon.

Sandbox, the guys with Snoop, doing something with Snoop Dog, having Snoop Dog parties, that, yeah. Yes, yes, yes. Snoop Dog himself is doing something on Polygon. There you go. You know you've arrived. So, yeah, I mean, there are like many of these celebrities are doing, I think, messy, Messies NFT drops were there on Polygon.

And, you know, like, it's just absolutely, you know, crazy over there. But meta versus like, you know, meta versus like, I think Polygon is like, I know the fast becoming the defecto kind of solution for metaverses. And gaming also, like, I mean, I want to leave users for, with this interesting survey. I would say that, okay, you know, talk to randomly 10 different teams gaming, blockchain gaming teams who are building Web3 games, talk to 10 of different, and then find out how many of them are building on Polygon.

If six or seven don't tell you that they are building on Polygon, then there is like, I'm, you know, I'm being a liar here. Like, you know, it is that strong. Polygon is that strong in terms of gaming. You know, every game, all gaming studios, you know, they are doing something or the other on Polygon. We'll make it a draft king's bet if Sandeep is right or wrong on that. Last question, Fiat on ramps, super important, right?

How's that coming along with Polygon? Oh, I mean, I think we, again, like, you know, we like the best thing about this chain is that the most production readiness. So all the on ramps that you have in the, you know, crypto ecosystem, be it wire, be it moon pay, be it simplex, all of them are integrated with Polygon. And most of them are providing direct on ramps onto Polygon. And that is actually one of the biggest attraction points for many of these, you know, builders. And also like now with the, you know, Coinbase has also publicly said that they are integrating Polygon Mainnet.

It's integrated with Binance also. So that is also, you know, going to add a lot of these network effects into it. And OpenC being there also like, you know, is a big add-on for most of the game developers and all that. Yeah, it's amazing. Significant growth since we last talked, February 4th. earlier this year. And I can't even believe it's, it's only been like eight or nine months or so. It's, it seems like it's been years of growth here. But let's finish with this question, Sandeep. So as we look forward to, you know, 2022, it's been a fantastic year for crypto in general.

But what can we expect in 2022, do you think? And I want to ask this question, maybe what can we expect from Polygon? And then what can we expect out of Ethereum? So two sides of that question, Polygon and then Ethereum for what's going to happen in 2022. So on Ethereum, we definitely, you know, feel that, you know, we should go into the proof of stake mode, like the much should happen and, you know, Ethereum becomes proof of stake. And this kind of this nasty narrative against POW, you know, that is going around. That also gets, you know, resolved. Ethereum gets some scalability out of it.

Probably I've heard that, you know, I'm not sure, but I've heard that, you know, the main chain will have 30 TPS. There'll be a big, big, you know, kind of breather for all the people who are, you know, running layer 2s and polygon POS chain also because it checkpoints into Ethereum, the cost will be alleviated a bit. So that's what I expect from Ethereum. And then, you know, like the Ethereum engine is like, you know, like the momentum with Ethereum is so big that, you know, it will keep happening. And I hope, I just wish that, you know, we have one more D5 wave probably because, you know,

DFI is in a limbo for quite some time. And I feel that Tadfai in coming into DFI will probably become a very big theme in the next year. And then we might be in for one more DFI summer, which obviously will be driven by, you know, Ethereum as the main chain. Then apart from that, in terms of Polygon, we like biggest thing that we are looking forward is the zero knowledge rollups. We want like, you want to be able to go live with some of these. ZKEVMs like full-blown ZKEVMs in the first semester, you know, or maybe the Q2 or something like that, hopefully. And then if that happens, which, you know, it feels like right now,

if that happens, then, you know, post that, you know, there is no limit to, you know, the polygons eruption because we feel that with this, and we are also building this data availability, like polygon avail as a data will be a chain. So with zero knowledge validums where you can have the data availability on this, you know, data availability layer and, you know, dispute resolution back to Ethereum, I think that could usher in a, you know, big scalability era for the whole, you know, Web3 space. And then, you know, we expect big, you know, applications and enterprises and Web2 startups coming into, coming into Web3 and, you know, probably opening the floodgates and probably having, you know, maybe 10 to 50

million, you know, somewhere between 10 to 50 million DAUs, daily average users on the Web 3. That's what is our goal. Very, very specific as well, Sandeep. That's fantastic. Mahalo, do you have anything to add to that? So it sounds like Sandeep is predicting 2022 is the year of scalability for Ethereum. Anything to add? 20202 is definitely going to be very excited, both for Polygon and for Ethereum.

We are going to see finally some of this. ideally EVM-compatible solutions, layer two solutions hitting mainnet, and some of them are going to come from our side. Basically, we have at least two that are targeting main net and EVM compatibility in one way or another in the next year, and that is going to be very, very exciting, of course. And yeah, in terms of actual usage, I hope to see some other trend. We have seen this huge D5A, which was amazing. Another, important validation basically of Ethereum's product market fit. We have seen this whole NFT craze.

It was also very, very impressive and onboarded a lot of people that were previously not involved in any way with blockchains and we were free, like a completely new, huge segment of people that is now basically entering web free. And I would like to see some new trend. Personally, I really like this concept of play to earn that was, pioneered by I guess Sexy and some other games now and I think we might actually we might be on track to something amazing there in a sense that I imagine basically everything to earn concepts I don't know like learn to learn like do whatever to earn and we can basically I think open a Pandora's

box basically of innovation and adoption mainly there that is my personal expectation basically so yeah a lot of exciting stuff, of course. But again, just to stress that once again, nothing, I don't expect anything to be, you know, Ethereum will not scale next year. Things will not be resolved next year. This is a marathon. We still have years to go, but it's only going to get more and more exciting, moving forward. Well, fantastic, guys. We've covered so much today. I hope listeners walk away with a deeper understanding of Polygon and of Ethereum scalability roadmap. This is really part of it. Ethereum is a roll-up-centered roadmap,

and you guys are executing on that roadmap as part of the ecosystem. So we appreciate everything you're doing. Thanks for spending some time with David and I on bankless. Thank you so much for having us here. Action items for you, bankless listeners. First is the ZK thesis that was mentioned. We'll include a link to that in the show notes. We'll also include a link to a link to,

the episode I mentioned on a modular blockchains episode that David and I did. We'll also include a link to the Polygon diagram that we were going over earlier in the episodes. You can check all of that out in the show notes. Also, got to end with this. Risk and Disclaimers, guys, ETH is risky. Bitcoin is risky. All of DFI is. So is crypto.

You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But thanks for joining us on the bankless journey. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast, and community as a bankless premium subscriber

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