Bankless - Instagram Bringing NFTs to 2.9B People | Sandeep & Mihailo, Polygon

Episode Date: May 17, 2022

Sandeep Nailwal and Mihailo Bjelic are the Co-Founders of Polygon. They’ve been on Bankless in the past, but not during a time like the one we currently find ourselves in. However, the bear market is not stopping Polygon from building. Polygon is enabling Instagram to bring NFTs to 2.9B people. And that's not all! They're also working with Stripe to allow USDC payments via Polygon. Hear how exactly they plan on doing this, what they plan on building next, how they're thinking about the bear market, and so much more! ------ 📣 ALCHEMIX | Get a self-repaying loan today! https://bankless.cc/Alchemix  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALED ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across  🏦 ALTO IRA | TAX-FREE CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/AltoIRA  👻 AAVE V3 | LEND & BORROW CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/aave  ⚡️ LIDO | LIQUID ETH STAKING https://bankless.cc/lido  🔐 LEDGER | NANO S PLUS WALLET https://bankless.cc/Ledger  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 8:41 Instagram is Adding NFTs 15:01 Meta’s Crypto Team 17:40 What Instagram NFTs Look Like 21:30 The Potential of NFTs on Instagram 26:31 Is Polygon Ready to Support New Users? 29:58 Stripe to Allow USDC Payments via Polygon 35:35 Addresses, Stripe Wallet & Gas Fees? 41:12 Polygon’s Strategy Going Forward 49:04 Polygon Supernets 53:38 Weathering the Bear Market Storm 58:55 Thoughts on the Market Crash 1:02:24 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Sandeep & Mihailo's Previous Bankless Episodes https://youtu.be/Gf2aalPt8-k  https://youtu.be/rCJUBUTFElE  Sandeep Nailwal https://twitter.com/sandeepnailwal  Mihailo Bjelic https://twitter.com/MihailoBjelic  Instagram NFTs https://imgur.com/a/c1vBnM2  Stripe to Allow USDC Payments via Polygon https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/21/stripe-taps-polygon-to-allow-customers-to-make-payments-in-usdc/  Polygon Supernets https://twitter.com/0xPolygon/status/1517502692670640129  ----- 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 

Bankless Nation, welcome to another state of the nation. Got a hot episode for you today. We got Polygon on, but we're talking about this. Instagram is adding NFTs, okay? Facebook is getting on board with crypto. This is absolutely huge news, which you might have missed because it came out of Monday of last week. And crypto had other things to worry about rather than Instagram adding NFTs. But we're surfacing it to you today because we think it was one of the biggest news items and most bullish

content things that we've had happen in crypto, content events that we've had happen in crypto this entire year. And that's not even the only thing we're talking about, David. What else are we covering in this episode? Yeah, Stripe, also doing Web3 things. And really the theme of this episode, if you can, you know, expand your brain and project this into the future, this is really the web threeization of Web2 platforms. So we got Instagram doing both read and eventually write access to blockchains, two public permissionless blockchains with NFTs. Starting with Polygon, Ethereum, and also

Solana, and Flow, people have onboarded NFTs, creators, into their public profile. So we actually took some screenshots. This is live right now. Certain creators have this functionality where they have an NFT page next to their posts and videos and reels pages

on Instagram. So NFTs, going into the heart of the biggest web to app of all time, which is Instagram. At the same time, the week before this, Stripe announced that they are allowing people to, instead of using USDA to go into their bank account, they can allow USDC to go to their Polygon Ethereum address. And so as we just think about these things and ideate on these things on the future, we have Web 2 protocols, Instagram and Stripe, that are leveraging Web3 technologies,

and there's so much potential here. Twitter also allowing their creators who have ticketed spaces and super follows, which is allowing Twitter accounts to make money off of their brand and off of their network, which is very much Web3 ethos, allowing those people to receive money in USC on Polygon for the value of their web to profile. And so you can only imagine what happens

when Instagram enables the ability to mint NFTs for the posts that they make and sell those NFTs perhaps natively in the app. This is just ideation, this is just speculation. Instagram is slow rolling this thing out, but you can only imagine what happens when they allow Instagram creators and influencers to monetize

the power of NFTs directly in the Web 2 apps. Where I'm going with this, Ryan, and why this is such a long-winded intro is that you can also talk about the composability of Web2 apps because now they're based on all the same blockchains. Stripe and Instagram are building

both on top of Polygon. Stripe is a commerce platform for selling digital goods. Instagram is a platform for viewing digital goods and also has its own shop features. What happens when we can make these things composable with each other? Because they're now based on Web3 protocols. Ryan, there's not much.

There's a lot of stuff that's under NDA, and so we got as much out of Sand Deep and Mahalo that we could from the Polygon team. But this is going to be something that is a long developing story that I'm really excited for is going to keep us entertained during the bear market.

But really, like I said at the beginning, this is the web threeization of Web2 protocols. Yeah, it's certainly really cool. And I'll just say it, We say it in the podcast, I'll just say it again. 2.9 billion people are part of the Instagram, Facebook social network, okay? And they're about to get an onboarding path into crypto through NFTs,

you know, our best onboarding tool that crypto has ever produced. Full disclosure, David and I are excited, bullish about Polygon. I'm also an advisor of Polygon. We really believe in what they're doing over there and the pragmatic approach. Brian, I'm super eager to get into this conversation. with the two co-founders of Polygamy, Hilo and Sanddeep. But we also have got to talk about Alchemics is self-repaying loan technology

because this is one of the few things in the world of crypto that is uniquely created by crypto. You cannot recreate this feature, this function inside of the world of Tradfai. It's something that only crypto can produce. If you guys are not familiar with Alchemics, it's a self-repaying loan system. So if you take like $10,000, you put it into Alchemics.

It'll go yield farm that 10,000 die in D5 for you. just as yield farming aggregators do, but also at the same time, Alchemics lets you borrow 50% of your deposits while your loan automatically pays itself off. It is just absolute alchemy, if you will, perhaps why they call it Alchemics. Say self-repaying loans.

Don't tell this to anyone that has student debt. They'll get mad. But it's pretty crazy. And not only can you do this with stable coins like Dye, but you can also do this with ether. And so if you just self-repaying loan, it pays itself back. And so you can get your future yield payments

for your stable coin yields, your ether yields, and D-Fi, pay to you up front and that loan will slowly pay itself back. You can avoid liquidations, because we don't like liquidations, because this is a liquidation-free protocol. You cannot get liquidated as a function of the protocol itself.

So there is a link in the show notes if you want to take a peek at some of this absolute alchemy magic at bankless.c.c. slash alchemics. That starts as a capital A at the beginning. Pretty cool stuff. Pretty cool stuff. David, I got to ask you the question before every episode, which is what is the state of the nation today? Ryan, the state of the nation this week is rebuilding. There was a lot of destruction last week. And so we are going into a new phase of crypto, trying to repair what's going on in the crypto industry.

But not just that, Ryan. Web 2 protocols, they're also broken. They also need rebuilding. And so we are reconstructing the entire broken system of Web2 because, like my genius co-founder once said, if you adopt crypto protocols, you adopt crypto values. And there is a lot of crypto values that I would like to inject into Facebook because they really need it and Instagram and all the other Web2 platforms out there. So, Ryan, we are rebuilding the world. And that's what we're doing here. We're rebuilding the crypto industry, licking our wounds, moving forward. And we're also rebuilding Web2 while we were at it. Ryan, we are rebuilding today. Well, who am I to disagree with your genus co-founder. You know, we'll just leave it at that. And let's get right into the episode

with Sandeep and Mahalo. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. If you're trying to grow and preserve your crypto wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem. Also, IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax advantage ways to help you preserve your hard-earned money. Also, crypto IRA lets you invest in more than 150 coins and tokens with all the same tax advantages of an IRA. They make it easy to fund your alternative IRA or crypto IRA via your 401k or by contributing directly from your bank account. There is no setup or account fees and it's all you need to do to invest in crypto tax

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If you want to bridge your assets quickly and securely, go to across.tto bridge your assets between Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, or Boa networks. Bankless Nation, super excited to introduce you to Mahalo and Sande. They are the co-founders of Polygon. Won't introduce their full backgrounds in bio because you know them, you've seen them before. on bankless.

Polygon, of course, offers a suite of scaling solutions for Ethereum, from side chains, proof of stake chains, all the way to ZK roll-up layer two. So there's a lot going on here, and we've got so much to cover. I think we want to start with some of the massive adoption we've seen, with meta, with NFTs, with Instagram, also talk about Stripe. There's so much to cover here. Mahalo, Sandeep. Welcome back to Bankless.

How are you guys doing? Thank you so much, Ray. and David, for the invite, you're doing great, as always. So much work. As are you guys, you guys are building so much. And I think, so we are coming off of a week that was very hard for a lot of people in crypto. And we've never seen anything like it, I think. This week, we can start to get back to building some of the news last week that was missed in the whole Terra, Luna, UST, fiasco,

was absolutely monumental, and any other newsweek would have been something that would have echoed all around crypto, Twitter, echoed around all of our media channels, and that was this. Instagram is adding NFTs, okay? Instagram adding NFTs. Mark Zuckerberg released some statements where he talked about the integration of Web 2 and Web 3, how he was going to build components of meta social network spanning 2.9 billion people. he was going to build components using decentralized protocols and NFTs. And so we saw the first edition of NFTs to Instagram, something a lot of us hoped for and predicted for a while.

I think we want to start there. Can you guys summarize for the audience what Instagram is doing with NFTs? Yeah. So maybe hello, I can start. Of course, of course. I just want to basically mention that we are, of course, super excited about this. we still have some NDA sign. We cannot talk about everything,

but I just want to say that we are super excited and that I'm very thankful to Sandhip for all his business development efforts. And yeah, I will like to know. So basically on the, you know, Facebook meta side, like, you know, the most important thing is the vision that meta team is carrying on this. Like, you know, we were so, you know, like happily thrilled

to kind of, you know, the kind of vision they have, like, you know, they want to, I mean, the teams that meta has, like, you know, they are pretty strong, defy, you know, defy degen. We had even, you know, the, like the blockchain Digen, basically, crypto Digen kind of communication discussions also with them. Wow. So they are pretty naked. They know stuff like pretty deep and their strategy and everything that the leadership team

over there, both on the product side and technical side is absolutely deep into the blockchain space. and we were very, you know, I mean, as I said, that we were thrilled to be in those conversations. And right now, what they are starting is that, you know, it will start with the read. They have, you know, as of yet announced, the read of the blockchain.

Like what all, they will be reading from these four blockchains, the NFPs where Ethereum and Polygon will go live first and then eventually, you know, one or two other blockchains will also be added. And then post that, like basically, it's like Twitter. The phase one is like Twitter where, you know, people can display their NFTs as a profile pick or wherever they can on the

Instagram and you know the user experience also their built around NFTs is pretty crazy like you know we should wait when it comes and then they have a pretty long and you know pretty deep and very interesting roadmap in terms of bringing Web 3 to you know

Facebook so I was actually you know even I even joked with them that you know Facebook is going to be the you know be the Facebook or Web3 Like, you know, a lot of projects will come to you and say that we want to be the Facebook of Web 3. So, you know, Facebook is going to be the Facebook of Web 3. So it's pretty exciting. Yeah, I think this time, at least, we know the history with Libra and everything.

I think this time, the whole team and the whole company gets it right. They understood that they cannot own. If they really want to kind of survive this evolution that we started with Web3, if they really want to survive it, they need to embrace it. They need to do it the right way. They need to do it properly. They need to accept items or assets that are actually on these public networks and become, if you want, the interface to these networks and maybe something more in the future.

But in general, I think they get it right now. And I can just second what Sandeep said, especially on the tech side, which is closer to, I guess, to my heart. The team, their tech team is extremely competent. like extremely, they grilled me for quite some time over there during our sessions that we had. And yeah, I was quite impressed. Yeah. And in terms of the functionalities, like I think we already said that, you know, the read is coming first, and I think they have a pretty long plan.

But yeah, a lot of things remain on the under NDS. So maybe, you know, they will announce and let them announce. It can be, we believe it can be really exciting and it can really make a huge impact and really bring web-free mainstream. potentially to actually their whole user. Yeah, I mean, it goes beyond NFTs, beyond this thing, like whatever, like without devulging too many details. Like, you know, I mean, it's pretty impressive.

And again, the point is that I think, at least, that they understand that they cannot make Vault Gardens anymore if you want to support this Web-Free asset movement inside and outside of this whatever meta-ecosystem needs to be permissionless, needs to be allowed. And, yeah, it's pretty exciting. Amazing. Amazing. And something that Ryan has said a number of times before is that when you adopt crypto protocols, you adopt crypto values. So maybe, cautiously optimistic, of course, but maybe Facebook is turning a page when it integrates Web3 things. It's going to have to actually induce some Web3 values into its product. Ryan and I, before we started recording, we're ideating about what potentially could be done, both with Twitter, because there's also a Twitter conversation here as well, but also with NFT creators about how. they can finally monetize their own platform in self-sovereign ways. So I think we'll ideate a little bit

further, further onto this episode. But before we go in and start actually showing some screenshots as to what the actual functionality is, as of today, as of right now, screenshots that I took live from my own Instagram account, I just want to double down on the whole technical competency of the team. Because whenever I see some sort of Web 2, you know, TradFi, Boomer entity coming into Web 3, I'm like, all right, what are you guys really doing, though? Because there's always, it should always be met with some sort of healthy skepticism. You know, there's, there's good and bad ways to integrate Web3 protocols. And what you guys are saying is these are crypto natives at Meta.

These are crypto natives at Instagram who know what they're talking about, who know the values and know the potential here. Yes, yes. Yes. David, like, you know, what I want to say here is that, you know, we coming from the Ethereum, you know, Ethereum ecosystem and all that. thinking about all those Web 3 values, how the world will change and all that. Like, if you guys are also there in the room discussing all those things, the vision that they presented,

you would get goosebumps. Even now I'm getting goosebumps in terms of those values where they want to take Facebook. Like, it's absolutely amazing. Yeah. And we really have to be also careful, completely transparent, as we're always trying and responsible. Once we heard the long-term vision that they had, we had to basically make a, make it clear that at this point, the infrastructure that Polygon has simply cannot support the scale that they have in mind, potentially. But we're up as you as you all know, we are

working around the clock on improving our infrastructure, scalability, and other all other aspects of our technology. And we again, we are 100% sure and we told them, you won't find better partner than Polygon. You won't find it. But really, like, the vision is so grand that we are aware that there's a lot of work ahead of us to really be able to support and facilitate all of that. I think for me, I mean, it's been an exciting year for crypto in many respects last week aside, but this is actually one of the most exciting things I've seen this year. And I'm going to get David to maybe pop up his Instagram account and show us all what this looks like. And of course, you know, Polygon team, you don't have to comment or speculate.

I know there's a lot under NDA that you can't say. So allow us to do some of that for you, if you will. The other thing I'll say, and I'll do a plus one on what you were talking about, is actually the Instagram Facebook team reached out to us, too. Apparently, there are many people internal to meta that listen to the bankless podcast and listen to the bankless newsletter. And I do think that they are absorbing this content. And as David was saying earlier, starting to adopt crypto values.

So when Mark Zuckerberg on the podcast? What's up, Zuck? Hmm. We'll see. But David, let's show us what's happening. What's cooking in your Instagram account? Because I've been so busy this week, man. I'm like, I'm barely on Instagram anyway.

But first of all, by the way, do you use Instagram for crypto stuff? Or is this all personal? I'm just curious. Me personally, it's staying connected to old college buddy. while also connecting to newer crypto. The crypto socialites, the Web3 socialites, are all on Instagram. So yes, there is a growing crypto culture

brewing inside of Instagram. But now it's actually in the actual app. So here is a normal Instagram page. I'm not sure if my mouse is going to make it into this green recording post. We see it. But like, this is a normal Instagram page, but there's this new hexagon with a checkmark

next to, in people's profile. So you have the typical grid of pictures. That's normal. And then recently they added. added the whole Reels thing and there's tagged photos as well. But also there is a new tab that has the checkmark with the hexagon, which is the same format that Twitter used to talk about its NFTs. So the hexagon with the checkmark verification seems to be the new status quo.

This is one of the few artists, the NFT artists that have been rolled out in this beginning stages of NFTs on Instagram. The handle is the blue grate. I don't know who that person is. But this is their, this is a digital collectible. This is what Sandeep was talking about, about the read side of the blockchain. So Instagram is reading the Polygon blockchain to look at this NFT, which is now embedded into the actual Instagram app itself on the actual profile. So this got the little hexagon checkmark with the digital collectible tag.

And then you can, when you tap on that and shows up as it just gives you, giving you a little bit more details, who minted it, who the artist is. and then also at the very bottom, you can see this collectible is an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain with a Learn More tab. There's not too much here. It's basic read functionality, but the world is the oyster here. There is so much to open up. Here is the Adam Bomb Squad, who did an NFT drop on Ethereum a while ago. So here's his picture, which is just an NFT with the digital collectible tab. and then here is just like, again, the same sort of like the profile for like people's NFT page on their Instagram account. So they have a dedicated NFT page on your own Instagram account for the creators out there.

So this is just a very logical first step to like displaying and reading the blockchain and displaying the data on the blockchain on people's Instagram pages. I think listeners can start to ideate with their own imagining. is about where this could go from here. Yeah, it's like maybe I'm easily impressed, but I don't think so, because this is just a flag in the ground for what Facebook, meta, Instagram,

are going to do in the future, okay? And crossing the Rubicon of actually connecting and basing your strategy on Ethereum, on polygon, on other blockchains, that is the thing. I wasn't ever sure, and I think a lot of people weren't sure they'd actually cross.

Back in 2018, it was very much the narrative was Web 2 was going to come and build their own chains and knock out Ethereum, knock out Bitcoin, sort of centralize the universe. That paradigm has completely shifted this cycle. Now it's not about replacing. It's about building on top of, which is the perfect space. So, David, you know how we talk about the D5 mullet all of the time, okay? This is the Web 2 mullet, man. We got two mullet going.

The creator mullet. Yeah, it's the creator mullet. And what's happening is we're getting kind of like Web 2 social in the front. And then we've got Web 3 in the back. We've got crypto and we've got blockchain. So you can imagine a listener, if you saw some of the demos, if you're watching on YouTube, what the possibilities are, the ability to now write back to a chain like Polygon or Ethereum,

a creator minting their own NFTs, a link out to a place to purchase these NFTs through OpenC. My God, like, NFT passes where there's like pieces of Instagram that are exclusive and you have to have an NFT in your wallet in order to access them. There's so many different ideas here. And if there's one thing Instagram and Facebook and Medica do, it's actually build features that their communities want. So super bullish on what's coming down the pipeline. David, you want to say something before we throw it back to these guys? I know we're having fun speculating here.

Right. Yeah. Since you guys are on NDA, the world. is our oyster to think about. And we see similar activity going around with Twitter. And we'll get to this later in the show when we talk about the Stripe integration with USC on Polygon.

Twitter is going to be allowing the users, their users, their creators, who have ticketed spaces and super follows. These are current features inside of Twitter. The creators can receive payment in USC on Polygon for this activity on Twitter. You can only imagine what happens when Instagram elevates itself from not only just reading the blockchain, but reading and writing to the blockchain.

As you upload an Instagram post, a movie, a picture, something to Instagram. You can, maybe there's a toggle button saying, would you like to mint this as an NFTE on Polygon? And then it's as you make the post on Instagram, it becomes an NFT. And there's already, like, Web2, TradFi, Normie shop features embedded in Instagram to day. So it's not that far, like, away from reason to think that USC on Polygon can be made to purchase NFTs uploaded by creators that got minted on Polygon directly from the Instagram app itself. I know you guys are under NDA. So these are our ideations. Is there anything that has come to mind about these hypothetical use cases about what you can do with Instagram on Polygon?

Are we in the ballpark, guys? Yeah. Maybe you are Maybe you are Maybe you are not I didn't I didn't really listen to what you guys were talking Yeah No you guys

Have great ideas And as we said This team really knows their thing And as you said They're listening to bankless And yeah But but David Like one more thing

Like you said You presented very nice ideas that what could happen on Instagram, I would say, you know, think even beyond. Like, I'll just leave at that. Like, their vision is pretty grand, like I would say. I have never been told that I need to think bigger, Sandee. That is first. It's even more bullish than you think, David.

But Ryan, you really nailed it. Like, this is a big paradigm shift from, you know, co-opting and hijacking Web Free to embracing Web Free and becoming the interface or the gateway. to Web Free. In a manner similar, the centralized exchanges are. Centralized exchanges definitely contributed to the ecosystem significantly by onboarding users to the actual Web Free and actual protocols. Here we have basically a company with multi-billion user base and they are really, really taking this seriously. And this is really a big opportunity for the industry and big opportunity for Polygon, first of all.

Now you are basically challenged. Previously, we were building tech and we were hoping, you know, we will onboard this, this one billion users and on board the world to Polygon and Interior as we were hoping. Now we have the chance and now we're actually challenged. Now we need to actually even speed up our tech efforts and everything that we're doing to basically prove ourselves and take this chance that we have. So Instagram, the way that they're rolling out, they've only rolled it out to a few creators. I think they're doing a slow rollout plan, making sure nothing breaks and nothing goes wrong, which is a logical rollout plan. This is part for the course. As they onboard more and more creators, they'll figure

out more and more things to do and be able to iterate better. But I can only imagine that when they finally roll this out, too, the entire Instagram app for all creators and then also all for users, that's a lot of activity. Is Polygon, is the Polygon L2 have the capacity to support Instagram if they release the NFT minting, NFT transfers. Like, are you guys, I mean, L2s are scalable, but like there's limits to everything. Are you guys ready to be able to host an entire Instagram app of activity? As I said, like we made it really, we had to be responsible and disclose to them that this technology, this is still very in early days of Web Free of building this infrastructure.

This infrastructure will not be built in one years, two years or three years. Like internet wasn't built in five years, it was built over the span of 30 years. Something similar, maybe we probably don't need 30 years, but you'll still need, I guess, three, four, five years, maybe even seven until we really have robust, scalable, proven decentralized technology that can support this massive global scale. But that being said, sorry, Sandy. So we are definitely planning accordingly. We have so many efforts under the polygon umbrella on the the cryptography side, improving, optimizing our provers on the actual infrastructure side,

the remaining of the stack, how we are trying to deal now with state bloat issues, with everything that counts. Once you achieve scale, for example, on the ZK side, then you need, then you have other problems, like, for example, state bloat creeping in. We need to see how to address that, and we're actively looking into that on the harder side. So we need basically with some of our efforts, for example, like Plonky too. I don't want to go too technical now, but some of our ZK efforts, they are really, really optimized to the maximum limits of the software itself. Now we have internal, very strong hardware acceleration team that is working on now accelerating more in hardware actually. So we have custom-built hardware like FPDAs in the future ideally ASICs that we're currently working on. We have

internal team very, very competent working on that. So we are really, I think we have have the right approach, we are taking this very seriously, and we are trying to improve on all possible sides and aspects. Yeah, and one more thing I want to say that, you know, we just mentioned that the team there is pretty, you know, crypto-native, right? So they understand all of these challenges, like, you know, what is the current scale of blockchains, where you can go and all that, and the way they have designed their product launch strategy is actually takes into account. You know, that's what I'm saying, that, you know, they know it pretty deep as good as us, that what can be done today, what can be done in six months, in 12 months and all that, and they're planning

accordingly. Yes, yes, that's also very important to say. Maybe it wasn't clear for what I was saying. They have this gradual plan of embracing, basically, they're free and slowly onboarding. And it's also an important thing for them. They cannot bet all in immediately, you know, and just open the fault gates of their whole user basis and all that. So I think we're aligned there. So, guys, this in and of itself is absolutely massive. Instagram, Facebook, again, 2.9 billion users potentially have a way to now on board into crypto socially. That's like, that's a lot. So I know like, Mahalo, get your technical capabilities ready. We should also mention that, of course, in the Facebook announcement post, it was Ethereum and Polygon,

and also Flow and Solana, where other chains that are going to be added to this. So some of that burden might be alleviation. but that in itself is amazing. No, I think right now, Ryan, it's only the read. And read also is going live with Ethereum and Polygon only. The Solana and Flow are going to come later on. Yeah. Got it. For the right, it's like undisclosed from them.

They only will disclose when the right time comes. Got it. And so, of course, for bankless listeners, if that wasn't clear, the read portion is where you can actually connect your NFT, be able to see it within Instagram. That's kind of step one, phase one. the right portion, that's where things get super interesting for creators when they can actually mint things on Instagram straight to the blockchain. And of course, they're going to need a scalable solution in order to do that so gas fees aren't super expensive. Okay, but that's not

the only onboarding path we have. David alluded to it a little bit further up in the episode with a stripe actually coming on board. And this is, I can't even keep track of all of this, but I think it's within the last 30 days, that Stripe just announced they are going to let clients make payments in USDC, the stable coin, of course, on Polygon. Again, I'm going back, like the old crypto grandpa, I'm going back to the days of 2018 when none of the fintechs would even touch crypto. Okay? It was sort of like, is it a scam? You know, what is this thing? FinTech's completely staying away.

blockchains don't really have a use case, that sort of thing. And now we've got Stripe, a major payment processor. Stripe actually does the payment processing right now for the bankless newsletter. For example, if you want to become a premium member, we use Stripe under the covers. So they, I don't even know the scale of Stripe, but almost all of these SaaS Web2 platforms use Stripe in some capacity. And now here they are allowing USDC payments and they're using Polygon to do it, starting with Twitter. So again, it's a pilot test, right? The floodgates haven't completely opened.

Mahalo and Sandeep, do you guys have any comments on this? Give us some insight. Is this all part of the business development effort? And what are fintechs and the stripes of the world thinking about this? Yeah, sure. I'm going to leave it again to Sunday. I just want to say it's really, really excited, as you said, exciting, as you said, that we are seeing these big names with huge user bases, infrastructure,

embracing, basically, and being ready to embrace Web-Free. and on our side it's again like one one great been from from Sandeep's side and the team that he established yeah so I'm gonna leave so yeah on the on the stripe side like you know I mean the the basic part is very clear that you know now the users can actually pay via USDC using stripe right to their I think Twitter already is going to pay the creators if the creators choose via USDC so it's not like a product announcement there is a client which is actually, you know, Twitter in this, in this scenario where the creators can

actually opt in for the USDC payments. And the other part is that, you know, this is a, you know, kind of, you know, place where like, for example, this is basically into payments, right? So we, our business development is like, you know, multi-pronged, right? So, you know, DFI, there is defy this gaming like polygon studios everyone knows which has gaming and nft then you have a like you know web two segment and there also we are seeing such a huge growth actually you know meta is a part of that our web two division itself and then enterprises and all that which nobody right now even talking and all that and we have a pretty strong you know base that is forming over there also so so so payment is is one part which you know has not grown as as much it was expected I think because

both BTC and Ethereum payments were not, you know, tenable before. But now with, let's say, the layer two, you know, layer two is coming along. We have a Ethereum, like Polygon Hermes roll up is already live, which only supports payments. And then, you know, Polygon POS chain is there, which supports all these stable coin payments and all that. So the payments are one particular division where we keep, you know, we have a long-term strategic focus. We have like probably to the scale of stripe or some even bigger players on the payment side, who are, you know, dabbling with it and probably will reach a place where, you know, hundreds of millions of payments can be routed through, you know, Polygon.

And, you know, when people think Polygon right now, they all think only Polygon POS, but Polygon is a multi-chain, you know, ecosystem. Maybe, you know, maybe there could be a roll-up which is only optimized for payments, which could process like, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of payments in a single day. And, you know, those roll-ups can be there on. on top of Ethereum and all that. So there is a lot happening in that sense. And, you know, this particular Stripe announcement

is a part of a larger concerted effort on the payment side of things from us at Polygon. Amazing. A technical question that I have is with people who are using Stripe, like businesses, creators, the Stripe is really doing a great job allowing individuals to create their own shops, stuff like this. Where does the address come from?

If creators can get paid in USC via Stripe on Polygon, do creators need to bring their own Ethereum address or does Stripe provide one for them? How does that work? No, I think, like, you know, in terms of the implementation, I've not seen that interface, but, you know, basically when you are getting the,

from the early discussions, I remember that, you know, it is basically the end user actually brings their address, Ethereum address, on polygon. It's on their side. Maybe they can even allow to, they can even create an address for, for a user, if user doesn't get one.

It's a matter of kind of front end. Yeah, on the front end, basically you can allow multiple wallet. So you can allow metamask, then you wouldn't have to bring your own address. You can allow, let's say, a custodial wallet, like, you know, all of these like, you know, Torres, Ben Lee, Portis and all that. And you can, you know, with your email,

you can create an address and get over there and things like that. So all of them are on the cards. Is it crazy to think that Stripe might actually get into the custodial game? Because they kind of already are with other payments, right? Like if you are building up a balance based off your sales on Stripe, regardless of whether it's USD from like Visa or USC on Polygon, and you are building up a balance because you're making a bunch of sales, Stripe is holding that balance for you either way.

And so is it that crazy to assume that Stripe would also custody private keys for their users? this probably might be a question for strike better yeah and i guess we can only speculate but i believe many of these big traditional payment companies or even whatever centralized exchanges etc they will probably most of them will enter this custody custody business and it's it's a fair game as long as everyone are still able to own their assets and own their private keys as long as that is not the default but an added feature for people who actually want it, or service, sorry, as long as we keep the core ethos alive. Right, and Polygon is not the only, like, crypto integration.

They also have a partnership with FTX as well. So one can not only, one can start to begin to imagine what all of these features look like when they start to get stitched together. One last technical question. Who pays Polygon gas feeds when a USC transfer happens? So, you know, many of the times the, like, for example, in case of Stripe also, as far as I'm aware, they are using meta-transactions, and, you know, they pay, they cover for the gas for the payment and it's adjusted within the transaction fees. So, Sandy, we also have a. Oh, go ahead, Lala.

No, generally just we also have a budget and we are generally willing to cover these costs because I, fortunately, they are still. very much negligible most of the time. So it's not really a huge expense either for us or for the, that company is doing the integration actually. AVE is the leading decentralized liquidity protocol. And now AVEV3 is here. AVEV3 has powerful new features to enable you to get the most out of DFI, including isolation mode,

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which is really what we're beginning to see in a way we've never seen in previous cycles, right? And this is all happening during the so-called bare market that crypto is in, this crypto recession. So this is why we are so bullish on bankless still. All of this building is getting done. Sandeep, you were kind of talking a little bit about how Polygon fits in, this strategy, this Swiss Army knife of tools that you have. And so now we're seeing the two themes we've discussed so far as Web 2 entering the game, the big social media platforms.

Boy, once you get Facebook, I mean, who's bigger than Facebook, right? So we've got that going on on Polygon. We also have the stripes of the world and the fintechs that are starting to build on crypto rails as well. What is Polygon's strategy in the midst of this? Are you trying to provide a suite of technical solutions with different degrees of security settlement assurances across the scope? I know we haven't had time to talk enterprise. That's another thing or gaming.

We'll talk about that in future episodes. But even if you're just scoping it to all of the potential opportunities in social media web 2 and defy, how does Polygon fit in here? Yeah. So see, on the technical side, like as we said on Mihaluk can speak more, that the technical solutions, solutions are, you know, multifold. On the business side, like my goal is that, you know, simply that, you know, if, I mean, I feel that, you know, in this current, since 2020, mid-2020, when some of the proof of stake chains went live, Polygon went live and all that, like the amount of users that we

could address on blockchains, you know, suddenly grew from like a few million users a day to probably 10, 15 million users. and with this new wave of scalability solutions like layer 2s particularly which are you know which we are at the you know approaching the dawn of layer 2s very soon and then once that comes in I think we will reach a place where overall as an industry I'm not talking about only polygon overall as an industry we could probably support like 50 to 100 million users right so you know my goal at polygon is that you know if 100 million users are going to come into web 3 how can we you know make sure that polygon is that you know the transaction layer and and you know then being layer tools like you know Ethereum becomes the settlement rate and all that so that is the way we are approaching into it and from the like I am looking from the business side like okay these these these are the various segments and here all we need to speak to the partners and and you know people who are looking to build and bring them on board and then you know you know our other co-founders like mihailo

Jayhanti and Rhaeg and you know like Polygon Hermes team zero they all are you know working on providing all those tech pieces in place to reach or to realize that vision so you know that's like on the higher level the strategy and for Polygon yes like you know we want to be present across the spectrum for Ethereum scalability whether it's like supernet kind of dedicated chains because you know all these public chains that we see today are kind of like those shared hosting servers that used to be there in 2003, 4, 5, and many of us used to be in college and we built our first website,

we always hosted on a cheap shared server. So these current public blockchains are, you know, shared servers in that sense, right, in that analogy. But as in when these bigger players are entering the field, many of them would need public dedicated chains for them. Like the chains are still public, fully, like fairly decentralized or fully decentralized depending upon the player and everything, but it is dedicated to one particular application or one particular DAO, which allows certain

applications to be run on that particular chain. So that future is approaching. And our goal is that that multi-chain future for dedicated chains, for public chains, for fully secured chains by Ethereum or, you know, just connected chains to Ethereum, all of this, you know, should fall under this Ethereum ecosystem. and within this multi-chain blockchain vision that we are building at Polygon. Yes, yes. I mean, I can only second that. We see Polygon as Ethereum's multi-chain. We see Polygon as a massively scalable multi-chain system that consists of multiple public nets, if you want to

call them that way, like Polygon POS, Polygon Hermes, etc. And potentially a limited number of these dedicated networks, which are, as Sandeep said, we, can be thought of as an equivalent to dedicated hosting in Web2 world. So nowadays, when Web 2 is mainstream and we have these applications with big user bases, no one is even thinking of shared hostings. They all have their dedicated, dedicated servers, et cetera. So we see as the industry matures, Web-free matures, we see Web-free applications reaching product market fit, establishing big user bases.

They will, a number of them will move to this dedicated network. and then it's important to basically provide powerful enough technology for these networks to be built and remain secure with something like Ethereum Mainet. Yeah. And one last piece I wanted to add that with like our other, like, you know, I mean, this looks like more crypto-shilly statement. But, you know, the goal is that, you know, with all these polygon tools around, can we take Ethereum to a 1 million TPS? like, you know, where we were saying that can we take Instagram scale if there are 100 chains, right? And somehow the interoperability is figured out and all that. Like, you know, imagine 100 or 1,000 chain probably. And each chain has its own, you know, reasonable amount of TPS fast chain, but there are multiple chains on Ethereum. Can overall TPS in the Ethereum ecosystem with polygon, with other layer tools also, can that touch 1 million TPS or even beyond?

Technically, it should be, you know, Mihailo can comment more. technically it should be infinite TPS on top of Ethereum, right? Where Ethereum as a settlement layer providing all that security and decentralization and, you know, the transactions are being done on these layer two chains. Yes, yes. In such set up, we're very confident about scalability. Scalability is basically practically unlimited. In that case, we figured out how to secure all those transactions by Ethereum.

So regarding security, regarding throughput, there are no particular concerns at this moment. It's just a matter of time and we're basically racing against the time. working around the clock and we strongly believe we're going to be the first ones to offer this ZK powered EVM compatible solutions. We are very confident about that right now. So these challenges, we don't consider them as, we consider them solved, basically. We're going to, what we need to focus on is interoperability at some point and how we're going to connect this multitude of chains and enable them to exchange messages in some seamless

manner. That is something that we need to focus on. these other challenges like security and throughput, I think they're practically solved. They're just a matter of time now. I do think for people who haven't listened to you, our previous episode that we did with Polygon, where we sort of broke down the Swiss Army knife of different chain tools that you have and the degrees of kind of security and settlement risks spanning from like side chains to like POS chains all the way to all of the ZK roll up stuff you're doing, should go listen

to that episode. or refer bankless listeners back to that to get the full scope. But there's one thing that you mentioned Sandeep, and I'm wondering, Mahalo, if you could comment on this. So this thing called supernets was also launched within the last 30 days or so. This is another tool on the Swiss Army knife, if you will. What specifically are super nets, Mahalo? Yeah.

So supernets are exactly this concept that Thai and Sandy previously mentioned. this dedicated blockchain networks. So as we said, as the industry is maturing, as Web3 is maturing, we will see more and more applications, ideally, with huge user bases. And these applications really need high throughput and the other day even dedicated throughput. They cannot allow themselves to share resources with the 100 or 1,000 other applications and hope for the best, basically.

So this is the concept of these application or use case-specific chains that we are now offering to the whole community. What is specific about supernet? So the concept of application specific or use case specific chains is not new, of course. What we're offering with supernets is, we have several, I guess, unique value propositions. Polygon supernets are first of all based on Polygonnet,

which is our framework for building these dedicated blockchain networks. But on top of it, we're offering several things. First of all, we're offering this shared security concept, where we offer this polygon set of validators that can provide out-of-the-box security for these chains. And in the future, these chains, once the L2 technology is ready, ideally based on ZK, they can upgrade seamlessly

to layer tools if they decide to do that. It's completely up to these projects. So basically, we cover this whole spectrum of solutions, and we provide different options for security, which is not really the key. or which was not the case with this previously used application specific chains. On top of it, we are offering this managed service, what we call it. So unfortunately with this application specific chains, launching them, it is easy with Polygon

Edge to launch this application specific chains, but maintaining, upgrading them is not really a trivial task, especially for application developers that don't really have that protocol level expertise, don't have expert knowledge, domain knowledge, etc. So unfortunately, we have recently seen some high-profile hacks, not in the polygon ecosystem, but in these application-specific chains. And that is partially because the teams were not really fully ready to maintain this somewhat complex architecture. So what we're offering with supernets is basically a team of certified partners. These are experienced dev shops and dev teams that can actually help these applications, teams manage their chains, manage upgrades, manage security, DevOps, etc. So it's like a convenient

thing for these application developers to basically focus on what they do the best, to focus on their application, focus on their users, on adoption. Don't bother kind of with securing the chain and operating it. And the same goes for this security. Whether you opt in to use this polygon on validator pool or you opt in to become a layer two, you don't think about security anymore. If you want to bootstrap your own application-specific chain, you need to bootstrap a validator set. You need to, if you have a token as an application, you need to think, okay, how I'm going to reward the validators now? You need to incorporate that in your token design. So all these things are consuming a lot of bandwidth of you as an application developer. Instead of this, you kind of

super nets, you get your dedicated Ethereum compatible chain out of the box. It is a lot of the box. It it is optionally managed by one of Polygon certified partners. And what you do, you just build an application the same manner in the same manner like you would on Ethereum. You deploy it to your dedicated chain. You're part of the wider Ethereum ecosystem. It's being managed for you. And you just focus on your application and what you do the best way.

A line that I recently heard out of Hazu actually has stuck with me. And it was that Ethereum has deregulated the market for execution. And I think that is actually a great way to describe what Paul. Polygon is up to is that there are infinite many ways to construct an execution layer on top of Ethereum. And Polygon is doing every single one. And it's just throwing everything at the wall and whatever sticks and whatever's in demand is in demand. And I think that is a really elegant way to find product market fit because you let the market determine as to what they want. And so this openness and permissionlessness about literally the design constructions that can go into Polygon layer two's I think is particularly elegant.

But Mahalo and Sandip, I have one last question for you guys. You guys have grown. Polygon has grown insanely. And Mihalo, I ran into you at DevConnect, and you talked about just like the scale of the Polygon team and how that's grown. And there's so many different chains and so many moving parts. And also, crypto prices, ether is down 65% in the last, like, four months.

And so I'm wondering how you guys are going into this, quote, unquote, bear market? Like, how would you guys plan on weathering the storm? And just overall, do you have any sentiments into the, the layer two side of this industry as we go into a bear market. So, I mean, you know, I mean, as we, we do like some of the critical things, like, you know, we, you know, even though we are moving at this exhilarating, you know, speed, but there are some critical fundamentals that we always, you know, take care of. And you guys know that, you know, recently, uh, the part of like that $450 million dollar fund that we raised, the reason for that was in anticipation of something

as catastrophic as this like, you know, that we experienced. And then we, We are fairly, you know, I mean, I would say that we are one of the most capitalized, you know, teams in that sense. And one more thing that, you know, for Polygon, how we are seeing this, you know, this decentralized transaction layer that will emerge out, like, you know, how Polygon is built. It's kind of a, you know, conglomerate of various different independent autonomous teams like Polygon, Hermes, Zero. All these teams collaborate with each other, but they have their full autonomy within their divisions and all that. And eventually, when it emerges out like now, with the including the Polygon, Hermes and zero co-founders and all that, we have probably like around 10 co-founders, right? Kind of like, you know, who will act as the leader figures in the, in the coming day.

So it's not dependent on one single party or one, you know, single person in the future when we fully sort of decentralized. So, you know, we had to take care or, you know, that these die separate teams are amply capitalized for at least three to five years of work, which we believe is, you know, kind of, you know, at max should be the, unless we get into a great depression kind of situation, you know, like, it should be like a one or two year maximum beer cycle. And, you know, we have enough amount of firepower to reach there. And on top of that, we have a, you know, one billion plus dollars worth of, you know, Matic tokens also in the foundation, you know, even at these prices, right? And, and, you know, maybe probably even more than that. So I think we are fairly settled on that for a long haul. And in fact, like yesterday only I wrote the mail to my team internally also that, you know, to everyone basically.

And then, you know, all the founders are also chipping in over there is that, you know, this is the time for us at Polygon to double down. This is what we were preparing for, right? You know, this is the beer market where we really shine. Because everybody will get throttled out. everybody will slow down and this is the time where we go aggressive on hiring marketing you know business development building the cutting edge infrastructure getting the maximum tile you know best talent into the into the company and we are already 400 people strong and we probably you know like

as a whole i'm saying the whole polygon various different different entities which are contributing to polygon protocol and uh we'll you know we believe that within this beer beer market i think we will grow to probably 800 or 1,000 people also, who knows. But, you know, the goal is to build this, you know, large conglomerate, which have individual small, small protocol teams, but they're highly autonomous at this thing at their level, but they collaborate and, you know, share resources with each other. Each one has their own well-defined role. So that's the goal we see. And, you know, that's how we are preparing for the market. Modular polygon, just like modular Ethereum, huh? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And as Sandi, sure,

We're really well capitalized at this point, so we have no concerns on that side. We're more motivated than ever. We're more optimistic about the future than ever, both in terms of the interest that we're seeing now on the adoption side, on the tech side, we have really, really great teams. I am humbled day after day by the quality of the talent that I'm working with the people who are building these advanced solutions at Polygon. So we cannot be really more bullish on the future. And as Sandeep said, he yesterday sent this email because some of the people working on Polygon got basically concerned. You know, with this whole market crash, what is going to happen? Are we going to cut down our costs and whatnot?

Actually, we're planning the opposite, as Sandeep said. So we cannot be more really bullish and optimistic about the future. Tell us your thoughts on the market crash. So what happened last week? How do we recover from this guys? I think this was expected, really. And I think what happened with this project that we all, I can even say, with Luna, basically, it was a Minsky moment, basically, for crypto. And the funny thing, the term MISC moment first was used as far as I know in 1997, when speculators were putting increasing pressure on some Asian dollar pegged currencies.

So in this case, history repeats itself. So I think the whole market went a little bit irrational. We became a little bit reckless as an industry, as the whole community. We kind of saw signs of something like this happening. And I can only say that it's really fortunate that this happened now, not in, let's say, one, two, three months from now. The impact would be probably even bigger. So we are still kind of lucky. And I would say crypto gods still saved us to certain extent.

And yeah, I think as every market correction, at the end of the day, it's really healthy. Like, we really need to get rid of speculators, people with monster egos, people who don't really approach the whole founder concept responsibly. And people who are investing irrationally, we really need to kind of level down and calm our heads. And that's basically a healthy foundation for us to move forward. That being said, the fundamentals of the industry have never been this strong. The fundamentals are, I don't know, my blowingly strong, I would say. So we have really zero concerns about the long-term perspective of the industry. But this correction was really kind of, you could see it coming, and I think it was unavoidable

and better that it happened now than in one, two, three or six months. Yeah. But, I mean, I as a human being, like, you know, I mean, I feel that, I feel, I feel for the community, like, I mean, I think you guys also multiple times said that, you know, overall, it was no fault of Luna community, which, you know, many of them were very passionate supporters also over there. And I hope that the builders in that community somehow are able to survive and, you know, figure out their challenges. Obviously, we invite all of them to Ethereum because this is, you know, we believe that, you know, this is the, this is the place to be. And individually, as the team members also, like, you know, that I also tweeted out, like, you know, as human beings, like, they, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I know that I think that Doe recently had a baby, and I also, like, last Friday had a baby, and, you know, imagine I had to spend, like, four days without even, you know, looking at five minutes at him, you know, I'll be going crazy. So as a human being, like, I also, you know, trade out that, I hope team maintains that, okay, at the end of this, this is not beyond life, right? So, okay, you know, this was a big mistake, big, you know, problem that, that got created or, you know, you know, you know, they created, I still find, like, hopefully they would have more chances in future to come back. But nothing is, you know, bigger than the lives that we, that we have. So everybody, like for the community, for the team members, I would, you know, request them to calm down

and, you know, think about the future instead of like, you know, being sad about this, like, of course, it will take some time, but this too shall pass. Well said. Well said. Let's, let's end it there. Let's end it there. This two shall pass is a great, is a great ending. And at the end of the day, if you were affected by the lunar events of last week, you know, life goes on. You can pick yourself up. All of us have been, have done things in crypto. We've regret. We've all aped into things. We have gotten back up and we've recovered and been better for it. And I think the industry will be better for it as well. And this is still the greatest financial opportunity of all time. And so we still can't forget that. Absolutely. The best opportunities are ahead. Guys, we've gone through so much today.

We just talked about onboarding the world through Instagram, adding NFTs, and the fintechs, like Stripe, adding Polygon and Ethereum capability, stable coins, USDC. And then we talked about how do we build through the bear market. So Sandeep and Mahalo, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a fantastic episode. Yep. Thank you, guys. Thank you for inviting us here. Thank you so much, guys. Of course, as always, risks and disclaimers, guys, crypto is risky. We say this every episode. I hope you realize it. We make it a point. You can definitely lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.