Bankless - Polygon and Immutable zkEVM Partnership with Sandeep Nailwal & Robbie Ferguson

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

David interviews Polygon Co-Founder, Sandeep Nailwal & Immutable Co-Founder Robbie Ferguson on their new zkEVM Partnership.  The three dive into the announcement, what it means for IMX and MATIC, how this partnership impacts the future of web3 gaming, and so much more.  ------ 🚀 JOIN BANKLESS PREMIUM:  https://www.bankless.com/join  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kraken  🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap  👻 PHANTOM | FRIENDLY MULTICHAIN WALLET https://bankless.cc/phantom-waitlist  🦊METAMASK LEARN | HELPFUL WEB3 RESOURCE https://bankless.cc/MetaMask  🚁 EARNIFI | CLAIM YOUR UNCLAIMED AIRDROPS https://bankless.cc/earnifi    ----- Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 5:15 Immutable x Polygon Announcement 10:47 Immutable zkEVM 13:00 Polygon’s Tokenomics  14:32 IMX & MATIC 16:50 Paradigm Shift of Gaming Deals  20:26 Topology of Immutable x Polygon 24:17 Immutable x Polygon Business Development  29:11 Web3 Gaming Competition  31:22 Current State of Web3 Gaming  34:00 What’s Next for Immutable x Polygon?  39:42 Resources to Learn More  40:25 Scaling with Ethereum  42:06 Closing & Disclaimers ----- Resources: Sandeep https://twitter.com/sandeepnailwal  Robbie https://twitter.com/0xferg  Polygon https://twitter.com/0xPolygon   Immutable https://twitter.com/immutable   ----- 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://www.bankless.com/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 David Hoffman, doing an extra show this week without my AI co-hosts RSA. But regardless, we are here to help you become more bankless and also perhaps more gamer. Because that is the subject of today's episode. There's an exciting new announcement out of two of the biggest powerhouses as it relates to crypto gaming and crypto gaming chains. This is a partnership between Immutable and Polygon, two massive chains who are coming together to align themselves rather than be competitive. And as it relates to this partnership, I don't know who is really left building out the world of Web3 gaming.

These are the two biggest Web3 gaming pioneers, and now they are joining forces. And so you're going to get all of these details here in this episode. In this episode, we are talking to Robbie Ferguson, who is the co-founder of Immutable, and Sandeep, who is the co-founder of Polygon, talking all about. out how these two brands, these two chains are melding their technology and melding their effort to become the same vertical, the same stack. So I'll drop the punchline here. Using Polygons ZKEVM, immutable is building their own ZKEVM using Polygon technology. And so we're having this combined BD force to push Web3 gaming onto the immutable ZK EVM. So that is the announcement. You'll hear all about the nuances and the details and the second order effects and the topology of

these networks because of course the layer three conversation is related here. And all of these details are coming in this interview with Robbie Ferguson and Sandeep. Quick disclaimers here. Both Ryan and I are investors in Immutable. Ryan is an advisor to Polygon. I am not. So those are disclaimers there. And let's go ahead and get right into the interview. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. crackin has been a leader in the crypto industry for the last 12 years dedicated to accelerating the global adoption of crypto crackin puts an emphasis on security transparency and client support which is why over 9 million clients have come to love crackens products whether you're a beginner

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Bankless Nation, welcome to this special show. We're recovering some pretty cool announcements out of both immutable and Polygon. So we're going to talk about exactly what is going on in this neck of the woods. And with me, I've got Sandeep, the co-founder of Polygon. who we've had on the show before. Sandeep, welcome back. Thank you, sir. Thanks, thank you.

And also we got Robbie, the co-founder of Immutable, who we've also had on before. Robbie, welcome back. Great to be back, David. So I got this email from you guys saying that you guys have this special announcement about a collaboration between Immutable and Polygon. And my first reaction was like, well, I thought they were competitors.

So who wants to walk us through what this actual announcement is and how this turned from competition to collaboration? Robbie, can I throw this to you first? Sure. So maybe some context, which is, you know, we've been building for a very long time now in the blockchain, and specifically on Ethereum. We started in 2017 building the first decentralized game on the blockchain, and it was an absolute nightmare. And we realized we had to start working pretty aggressively to make this easy for developers to build on, but also to have this scalable for billions of users one day. At first, we looked at solutions like plasma.

We looked at solutions like state channels. Neither of these really worked. Some of these teams rolled into some of the scaling solutions available now. Now, we looked at sidechains, and we were never really happy with the security tradeoffs that they had. And then we saw ZK roll-ups. And for us, this is really the end game. And we've been on an app-specific ZK roll-up up until now, which basically means we have only been able to have very limited logic, no smart contract compatibility. And for us, this partnership is the end game, which is we get to build on, you know, essentially what we think is probably the best ZKK tech in market right now, the ZKVM powered by Polygon.

but we also go to market force that is really going to be a very considerable sort of mechanism. How can we actually take all of Ethereum gaming mainstream? I think there's been a lot of infighting between competition and not a lot of focusing on who the true competition is, which is ultimately the hundreds of billions of dollars spent by players on in-game items they don't own. So I think this will be one of the biggest partnerships in the space to date. We're extremely excited to be working with the Polygon team and Sandbin. But Sunday, feel free to add any color on this. Yeah, I mean, for me, like, I've been a big fan of immutable for, you know, since their early days, right?

Like, you know, I mean, they have been two pioneers of ZK tech, you know, like they took this plunge on building this ZK and taking the hard route. I remember speaking to James and Robbie both trying to convince them to, you know, come to the, you know, polygon or magic chain, matic network that time and they were very clear that, you know, they want a like a full-blown layer two and everything. you know, in my mind, they are one of the biggest Ethereum maxis, you know, out there. They are like so all in on Ethereum. And, you know, when we kind of started approaching our main net on ZK, it automatically, you know, made a lot of sense for me to, you know, reach out to IMX. Because in gaming, like, IMX and Polygon are kind of like the biggest of the names, right? Like, you know, by far and orders of magnitude bigger than anybody else in the third place, right?

So basically I thought that, you know, let me, you know, take this shot and, you know, speak with them also, like, you know, where they are up to. And obviously they are, as Robbie was saying, that they are currently on an app-specific roll-up where, you know, there are only few functions they can support. Whereas on ZK EVM, it's like full-blown EVM programmability available to them. And, you know, we speak to the games. We have a lot of games which have some part of them built on polygon, some part built on IMX and then, you know, things like that. And we have always heard very positive reviews about them, about their relentlessness to provide the best developer experience and all that. So for us, it made like total sense.

And, you know, I'm really glad that, you know, I reached out to them instead of not thinking, because, you know, that's where our Web3 ethos come in, right? So I thought that, you know, what is, like, as Robbie was saying, there is no competition here. Like, we are all in this small bowl, which is Web 3 and the world is like a big ocean, right? So I just reached out to them. And then, you know, this, and here we are today. and probably arguably the largest, you know, kind of inter or intra-Web3 partnership, you know, which is going to happen.

And hopefully we are able to do some good work for the, you know, game developers who want to come into Web3 and build nice games for Web3. And David, I might just add one thing on which is I think we actually launched on a bank list, which is our cross-roll-up liquidity infrastructure. Because ultimately what a Moodable wants to do is create a one-stop shop for gamers that they can build with APIs if they want to, stripe-like, ridiculously easy, all they can build with custom smart contracts. Our viewers, this will probably be the sort of 5% of advanced long-tailed devs, building infrastructure for everyone else to use.

But the second most important thing is that, even with ZK EVM, even with 5,000 TPS, which we're hitting sort of the upper limits, Fortnite alone will take up all of that on a single roll-up. And if we have hundreds of different, say, ZK EVMs, then what we're doing is we're fracturing liquidity across hundreds of difference of roll-ups. So really, I think the second part of this is we get to bring a lot of that value to

Polygons ecosystem. We can have hundreds of ZKs, which can be specified for a game or for financial infrastructure or for running housing in the future. But you can buy assets with any currency from any wallet on any individual roll-up, completely atomically and with zero loss of security. And this is kind of our cross-roll-up, cross-marketplace liquidity infrastructure, which is really at the heart of what we're trying to build out, because I think that's probably the least paid attention to layer of the stack today.

So, guys, as a moderator, I really appreciate all the context and all the backstory here, but I think we've accidentally kind of buried the actual real announcement. Robbie, you kind of said it and stuck it in there, but I wanted to kind of zoom out and just drop the punchline. What is happening? Whoa. What's the announcement? Robbie, what's going on here?

So we are expanding from our current roll-up on Starkex to be building across Polygons version of ZK EVM. using this technology to create the immutable ZKEVM. This will be available to the standalone. The immutable ZKEVM. Brand new spiffy ZKEVM chain. Correct. And so in addition to beyond the app-specific chain

that you guys have been talking about, there is a new chain, which is Polygons technology operated by immutable. Okay, we're calling this the immutable ZKEVM. This new chain that we're talking about. I just really wanted to drive that point home. Precisely. Maybe we should put this junk first. And in addition, we're going to be able to offer hundreds of custom ZK EVMs to say an Activision

Blitz or Ubisoft or a major enterprise company who might want to have their own version of this roll-up. And our goal is we'll be able to unify all of this liquidity with our infrastructure, have them build on incredibly easy to build APIs, and we're bringing this ease of use to polygons in Ethereum's ecosystem, and continue to run all of our services to make sort of games incredibly successful, everything from economics assistants, tokenomics. passport, which is self-custodial email onboarding for end users. We'll also be joining forces with a lot of the go-to-market arms, so working on helping to onboard more games onto Ethereum and really take, I think,

like, honestly, this is for us, the end game. I think people have been iterating scaling solutions and iterating approaches to what will be the final tech architecture that goes mainstream. This is it. This is ZKEVM. We have full customer smart contract compatibility. You have full scalability. And we have now user onboarding to.

technology, which can take a user playing a game and they can earn assets and they can sign up for a self-custodial Ethereum wallet without ever even knowing what an NFT or a blockchain is. And that's really what I think is needed to take this to the next billion users. Yep. Beautiful. And if I remember correctly, Robbie, the way the immutable interface with Starcware, your previous and still the legacy chain of your product. That will continue to run. Right. Absolutely.

And it was like immutable licensing Starkware technology. Is that how we should think about this with Polygon? Polygon ZKEVM or like how does this relationship work out? No. So let me take that. So this is basically, so polygons, technology is fully open source, right? So there's no licensing agreement. Instead, like when immutable base chain, right?

So immutable chain, this immutable ZK.EVM, when it decentralizes, it will have matics staking on it. And that's the only, you know, kind of the token economics model for Polygon, where the staking, you know, polygon wants to be, or polygon validators want to be. the infrastructure engine, which provides infrastructure to run these chains, and they get the gas fees in return. And we are guessing that with the way mutable today is like 150 Tier 1,000, AAA, AAA games, you know, we expect like hundreds of millions or, you know, in fact, billions of transactions during a year, and all that gas fees will go to the Matic validators. So that has been like,

you know, that's the main thing. That's the main end game for us. Fun fact, we had 20 billion API requests last quarter. So we are posting insane scale. Sure. Okay, well, Robbie, that begs the question. If this is a Matic chain, what does the IMX token fold into in this new world? Yeah. So if you go to immutable.com slash IMX-hifen token right now, you will see four boxes.

And for us, the really exciting thing is because this is now a smart contract compatible chain, rather than just an app-specific roll-up, we can basically add on a whole ton of utility that was previously impossible plus ad. So, Maddo could be the cool staking token, but the gas token, which is a new app, effectively used to sequence and prior as transactions on immutable ZKEVM will be IMX. So for us, that's extremely exciting. You know, that's effectively like taking the utility of a Solana or some chunk of utility of Ethereum or an apt dose and adding that on to the existing utility of IMX. Each month we then have two more sort of forms of utility will be announcing. I can't share more

deals on those right now, but we will be sharing those very soon. Okay, so the idea is that Maddoch is the staking token. It operates the validators. It receives the, gas fees of the network. The gas fees are paid in IMX. Is that correct? Correct. Okay. Absolutely.

And it's like, you know, David, for me, like not only for IMX, like the general idea that is emerging is that, you know, for the, you know, like middleware platform like IMX or app layer platform. It's like basically asking what is the utility of, let's say, uniswap token, right? So uniswap is on the app layer. You know, IMEX utility is much, much bigger. They are a middleware. They are plugged into various, you know, hundreds of games.

plus now they have the gas fees also in their token and all that. So this is basically, if you see on a higher level, the idea of like, you know, where Polygon is evolving into is that Polygon, you know, simply only wants to play on the infrastructure layer, right? Which where you statematic, you provide the security to run the network, right? But on top of that, on the app layer, all the utility goes to our, you know, partners like, you know, IMX or like, you know, whoever, like, you know,

they're going to be many like that. So that's the base model here. Like, you know, Polygon remains on the infrastructure layer. Everything else above it is fully IMX to, you know, capture in terms of the utility. Beautiful. And Robbie, you mentioned things like if Activision Blizzard or EA wants to come in and build their own ZKEVM. They have that optionality through immutable. Can you unpack that relationship and how that relates to the whole economics of the whole system?

Of course. So I think the only reason we really would sort of lose a gaming deal today would be lack of smart and rack compatibility. And I think for the biggest enterprise companies in the world, they typically want either one of three-six. They either want their hands held and the entire thing to be white glove or they want basically a playground for them to build an experiment with. And a lot of these larger companies also want to control their destiny in terms of being able to have influence over their own check. And the exciting thing I think we can now do is we can essentially build them their own customs, EKEVM. And they can have their own 10,000 transactions per second. They can have, you know, their own nodes.

they can have their own process of sequencing transactions. But importantly, they're not on an island. All of their players can still be interoperable with assets and wallets and funds, but every single other roll-up built on immutable. And also, it means that we'll be able to basically take this scale, customize that specific game, and then let them have a huge amount of destiny over it, use their own tokens involved in the chains as well.

So for us, this is sort of, if you look at a broad spectrum, you can either have sort of complete white glove, you can have complete control of your own destiny or you can have very, very simple infrastructure to build on. And appealing to this entire remit is really important to actually take this mainstream. David, a simple mental model for that also is basically these chains will simply be L3s, right? Like, you know, which might be matics stick. Like, you know, if they want to decentralize, they might be mattockstack. Or they settle back into the IMX base chain, which is the immutable ZKVM chain. And, you know, they're also like, again, they contribute back to the liquidity.

contribute back to the gas fees and things like that. So this is basically like the layer three, like a lot of people have, you know, kind of talked about layer threes and things like that. Like we are not talking about that, but, you know, Polygon like, I mean, we have like higher double digit layer threes which are getting ready across the year. And you will see so many of them launching with them. And then, you know, with this kind of strategic partnership with IMX, like imagine IMEX alone itself will be able to launch

like tens of them, right? Because all of them are then, you know, utilizing IMEX middleware platform and things like that. Right. So that's where like, you know, it becomes very strategic for us because as a infrastructure provider, as a, you know, fully decentralized protocol and things like that, you know, we cannot provide a lot of hands-on service. Whereas IMEX is built in a way where they have a, you know,

kind of a studio and a, you know, equity company plus the decentralized middleware protocol, right? So they can actually scale with hundreds and hundreds of such large scale, you know, games which build with their technology and can also provide, because it's revenue making for them. They can provide close-handed white glove services to them, right? So, you know, that is where the biggest advantage comes to Polygon. So for us, like Immutable becomes that partner, which, you know, can then, you know, not only like this one single partner, but they can actually, you know, help people run like tons of Polygon chain. So that's why, you know, it's very exciting for us. So let me show you what's in my imagination of like the topology of this whole network and make sure that I get this right. And so, okay, so this ZKEVM, the immutable ZKEVM settles to the layer one Ethereum. It does not settle to the Polygon proof of stake. It settles directly to Ethereum. It's the ZKEVM, which is Polygon technology staked by Matic, but it's the immutable domain, the immutable ZKEVM. And immutable and all of its on-chain gaming can exist on top of that layer two, the ZKEVM layer two. Again, Matic staking.

IMX is the gas token. And then also, if people have been paying attention, immutable's BD skills are strong. And so the idea here is that independent game studios, whether they're like as big as Activision Blizzard or as small as your local mom and pop indie game studio, if that's the right word to use it, they also have their ability to make another ZKEVM, also Polygon technology, that settles onto the ZKEVM, the immutable ZKEVM, and they can become their independent ZKEVMs per game studio for whatever they desire for that to be. And the rules of how that becomes validated or staked or whatever is probably up to the individual studio itself. But that is the service that Immutable is offering towards the greater world of gaming. And so Immutable is offering

it's like perhaps like top of funnel BD skill set to the underlying polygon technology, the Polygon ZKEVM chain. So that's what's in it for Polygon. And then Immutable gets the whole technology to really scale out and onboard all of these game studios onto a ZKEVM with Polygon. Is all of that correct? Because that's my interpretation. I think bang on David.

And maybe I can kind of share a bit of insights into why I think this is such an easy kind of strategic choice and an easy partnership, which is, you know, essentially the layer of the stack which we're building out is, I would say, you can break the layer of the stack into three today. You have NFT marketplaces, which is where people actually trade. These are open sea. These are the rarables of the world. These are the game stock marketplaces.

And ultimately, I think with gains, we're going to see a whole ton of sell-side liquidity that is in-game marketplace or contextual marketplaces. And a lot of buying on sort of big aggregators. But this is where our global order comes in, which means we can take all these marketplaces, provide them the same source of exchange liquidity, and every single participant can take their own things. So our goal is really actually like, it's sort of the existing way NFT marketplaces is built is quite limited. And they'll actually struggle to have volume over the long run because they won't be able to tap into people, say, a 13-year-old earning a skin in Fortnite and wanting to sell it then and there in the context of the app.

And what we've built actually allows these people to monetize far better and maximize liquidity. And then at the bottom, you have sort of like actual scaling protocols, people working on consensus mechanisms, on ZK Tech itself. You know, this has never been our business. I think it's pretty clear that with Polygon and their two previous acquisitions, they're going to be a frontrunner in this race. And so for us, it's completely complementary for us to expand and build cost while up liquidity. But the major benefit we get is Polygon and Immutable have really been sort of fighting quite hard and competing quite doggedly. You know, starting to deepen. I have laughed over this for the last couple of years. And I think that's been

fantastic. I think it's been we've really had to hone our skills and learn what is the most appealing to web-free game developers. But now I think it's time for the industry to mature and realize that the real competition are the giant $100 billion industries in gaming, built off exploiting players and giving them zero rights. And with the final endgame technology stack we now have, and with the final endgame sort of go-to-market movements, this will be the year that we see games with tens to hundreds of millions of players, and we start to see Web3 truly go mainstream. Uniswap is the largest on-chain marketplace for self-custody digital assets. Uniswap is, of course, a decentralized exchange. But you have to be a decentralized exchange.

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Polygon's ability to land some very big non-crypto, importantly, non-crypto teams. Now these BD efforts, they're not combining into the same BD team. Y'all are still two different companies, but now the idea is like the BD teams are pointed towards the same goal. I don't really have a question on that, but either of you would like to reflect on like what happens when these two gargantuanly successful BD teams are aligned towards the same vision. Like what happens next? You know, so I always used to say like, you know, especially in gaming, like, you know, Polygon has a much expensive portfolio, but on the gaming, like, you know, obviously because

IMX, like, with such bright people and like, you know, they have a massive, like, you know, 250 people team only focused on gaming and we're at Polygon we'll have like 10 people. So it's like, you can imagine, like, you know, they have given us very, you know, kind of tough nights in that and I used to sometimes joke that you know it's basically whenever there is a you know competition for a particular let's say client building on this one I always used to say that this is to the to my team that this is basically unstoppable force meeting an immovable object right which is unstoppable force which is imx and if you will object that is polygon and you know obviously now suddenly when these two

things join hands like you know polygon ecosystem and the immutable steam and all that I'm not sure like, you know, it becomes very difficult to compete with that combination. But yeah, like, I mean, for us, basically, Polygon, as I said, that is a much larger, you know, kind of this thing, DFI and this and that, like so many things are going on on multiple fronts. So we are very happy to have a partner like IMX on the gaming side. So, you know, we can be rest assured that, you know, Polygon technology on the infrastructure level keeps winning with them. And so who's left in the world of Web3 games? games. When Immutable and Polygon are now on the same team. Like, there's gaming on Salana,

but Solana, the ecosystem's not super healthy right now. I remember once upon a time, Avalanche was going after gaming, but I haven't heard of anything in Avalanche. So, like, who's your guys' biggest competition that's left in the crypto arena? I think the real competition are the massive, you know, billion-dollar games companies who are ripping players on. And I think this is the whole point, which is there's a lot of sort of introspection and infighting in an industry that is ultimately should be collaborating and working to just make this stuff mainstream. Like we have, you know, 30 million Mao in crypto at max. It's terrible.

And like this technology is incredible, but really the only thing that has mainstream traction today is payments. The first actual mainstream application outside of payments are going to be gaming. And we have a single mainstream game, which is, you know, a hundred billion players is not even crazy. That's like the hundredth biggest game in the world. As soon as we have one of those, we triple cryptos now overnight. And we make sure that it's value.

proposition could be heard without requiring people to know what a private key is, what self-custody even is, we onboard them through the actual value they experience rather than shouting at them, hey, the future is decentralized, which might work for people who love talking about every day and VCs and tech people, but really, there's sort of 3.1 billion gamers out there, all they care about is, hey, do I now have the ability to sell some stuff that I used to spend money on and completely have it as a sunk cost. And what we've heard is, as soon as those gamers switch, and they try a game, like gods unchanged or alluvium, they feel sick going back to all versions of those games, because they realize what essentially scammy, one-sided economy it is.

It's very similar to the Fiat to real money conversion that I've seen. I think was it Balaji or was it someone else who said, this recent crisis showed there's only two banks in the world today. There's the Fed and there's Bitcoin. And I think it's getting pretty clear that there's only going to be two forms of real economic ownership. And there's one that's scammy and people have been using for the last 30 years. and there's one that will actually empower players.

Beautiful. Beautiful. Well, something I've personally come to the realization of recently, like I've heard the narrative of like, oh, gaming is going to onboard the next billion people. It's going to be gaming, gaming, gaming, gaming. And for a long time, throughout 2020, is like, okay, fun narrative. We'll see how that rolls into this. A few things lately have shown me that this is more than just a narrative at this point. And that was one seeing how far along some very beautiful games are,

at East Denver with game native people who have now discovered the utility of assets. And then also just all the maturity of the underlying infrastructure that has allowed for kind of what you're talking about, Robbie, which is just like abstracting away the complexities that non-cryptowners don't care about. So like, for me, it's gone like, okay, this is a fun narrative. We'll see how this plays out to like, oh, no, this is way further than I thought that I was. So, Robbie, I'm hoping you can kind of just like, give us a snapshot lay of the lands of like, what is the current state of gaming? And as it relates to people who are gamers, but perhaps they're more crypto people than their gamers,

what's going to be the first thing that they do? Like, what's going to be the first exposure that they have to this world of crypto, Web3 Gaming? And Sunday, Bill could add-on, but really, to me, Web3 Gaming is the before the flood stage, right? Over the last two and a half years, there's been $15 billion U.S. dollars invested into Web3 gaming. It is the most invested in category of crypto,

and this is basically more investment in any nascent tech category than we've seen over the last couple of decades. And all of this money is building games and infrastructure that typically has a lead to production time of between two to four years. So this year is where 40 to 50% of them actually start to go live. And I think the most interesting thing has been, despite the bear market, and you know, hear this language all the time, this is the bare market where we've seen people still going to conferences, still building, developer activity and traction is up?

No more is that true than in gaming, where even the enterprise companies we are talking to are still more interested than ever in learning how they can actually utilize this technology. all the bare market has done is give them breathing room to not have to show face to public markets about expertise, but instead build products that genuinely consumers love. And so for me, I think this is the year where we have 200 to 300 games each with at least $10 million in funding start to go live. And one of these are going to be a hit. Gaming is massively power logic. A lot of these games will not end up being successes, but that's fine, because the 5% that do will redefine user traction and mass appeal for Web 3 for the rest of it.

Sandeep, Robbie, what's next for this partnership? How does this partnership roll out? Is there like phases or like what are the actual like near term next steps here? I think like the obviously the most important step is that, you know, when Amex fully launches their immutable middleware solution on this one, plus we have a lot of like ecosystem relationships that's being built in a way because, you know, for gaming you don't only need one particular part of the stack. There are multiple other stacks.

So people are looking to integrate into this. there are community like YGG, IndieG and multiple different, like, you know, who are like looking to partner into this kind of consortium or something. You know, so I see a lot of collaboration already happening. And one's first step one is the platform going live. And then I think some of the, I think IMAX team and also Polygon League, like, you know, for Polygon games also because this is, you know, for us on an infrastructure level, this is Polygon chain only. So there's like, you know, many of them would also choose to, you know, work on the IMX middleware, which allows them to have this cross-chain liquidity and all that, right? So we expect, you know, obviously the launch of the platform,

then some top games launching over there from IMX side. I'm pretty sure from Polygon side also, some of the games looking at the overall proposition of the platform might end up choosing to build. And that's where like the main, like, you know, I would say end game begins where after that, Now we have the scalability. Now we bring as many games as possible, as many experimentation that happens as possible. We also have an infographic like Robbie was saying that,

you know, how much billion Robby has been put in in the gaming side? And I think if you see that that graph itself looks so interesting, like the top three is Ethereum, Polygon and IMAX. Like I think that includes the roughly 80% of the funding that has gone into these games. And, you know, like many of those like are double A, AAA games and many of them are and you know some of them are going to figure out the real models like you know in gaming it's like once somebody figures out a particular model let's say freemial model or

all the previous models everybody then jumps in and i think this is as robie was saying this is just that stage where the flood gates get open and that's why also it's very exciting and we hope that you know some of the games building with us are able to crack that and are become the pioneers in that in tracking that model and then from thereon, it's just, you know, kind of a game or bringing as many. And can I say, I've mentioned this now to immutable's, like the majority of games thought it in a mutual today, that we have this CKEVM with Polygon coming out, and the level of uptake and in Simon has been insane.

I think people are extremely excited to have, say, swaps, which they can use in their games now, or defight be incorporated under the hood. And for us, our timeline is launch immutable ZKEVM, launch custom ZKEVMs for sort of, you know, major partners because I think, David, as you said, this is just one part of the ecosystem, but together immutable and Polygon are actually quite a deep layer of the platform stack, where we have sort of easy APIs to build on, we have this cross-roll up liquidity infrastructure and obviously have all these services, but ultimately there's going to be a whole heap of people building on top of this. They might be platforms which are helping games to launch.

They might be community gaming guilds. They might be people who are building on ramps or compliance solutions. And I think the goal is to help really to onboard each of these. And the third piece, hopefully by the end of the year, is to have cross-wall up liquidity expanded for the immutable ZKEVM and all other versions of ZKEVM, which we're custom spinning up. And for us, that is pretty much essential. You can already see through our global order book, so the unifying sort of marketplace solution. More than half of all trades are created on one marketplace and filled in another. That's with like 10 games life. Imagine with thousands, a huge amount of sell side liquidity is going to be in game and a huge amount of buy side is going to be on these major aggregators.

and giving them the volume that ultimately they're creating the user experience for. Our second thesis is cross-roll-up liquidity will basically multiply liquidity by however many roll-ups you're aggregating. Like, we have more than a trillion dollars in TVL in crypto today if you take every single chain. Providing cross-roll-up liquidity of it actually gives us a level of exchange liquidity that can compete with the big boys in real financial markets or the gaming markets in the real world. And this is what is necessary for crypto to not be this sort of, you know, fragmented series of solutions, where we have inferior prices ultimately for assets,

but to be the default place, that unique value is exchanged. And gaming is at the vanguard of that. Well, guys, I can hear the excitement in your guys' voice. And anytime, really just like success has always comes from alignment, right? And we can get our protocols to align. If you believe in crypto, everything else becomes easy after that. So I'm excited to see what happens in this future.

And like I've been saying from the get-go, like, I just want Diablo with assets, man. And so if this gets me closer to that, that gets me excited. Robbie, Sandeep, thank you so much for walking us through this very exciting announcement. You name Diablo, like, I know Robbie and team, they are working on so many such kind of IPs. When you hear, you're like, oh, shit. Oh, like, this is coming in yet? Like, you know, yeah, these people are beasts and we are also beasts. So we are going to do some cool stuff in the gaming stuff.

Like, yeah. I'm excited to get very distracted from my job here at Bankless to go play some video games when they inevitably do come. If people are curious and they want to learn more, what's the website that they should go to to dive down this rabbit hole. Well, to come and build, I guess, on both solutions, it's immutable.com. I think there'll be a bunch of press going out. Obviously, at Sunday, everything, it's polygon.com for you guys as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But then on this platform, this is called IMX immutable ZK Evm platform. And I think Immutable will host, like, extensive documentation and everything around it for the developers, you know, both on the cell service or like kind of the enterprise side. So, yeah. Beautiful. They are the place to go there. Awesome. David, if I can make one final plug.

Sure. I think ultimately the greatest affinity that I shared with the Polygon team, and part of the reason we were so keen to make this partnership happen is since day one, our solution was always to scale and work with Ethereum rather than competing with it. And that was actually quite a, like now I think it's a reasonably popular view. Back then it was extremely contrarian, because VCs wanted L1 chain hypothesis, value accretion thesis, they wanted you to make a competitor, they wanted the next son of ETH killer. I think it's pretty clear that Ethereum is going to be the default liquid smart contract platform of the future. Polygon is going to be a huge. huge portion of that scaling, and we want to make gaming the mainstream part of that. And I think that having aligned with Ethereum as part of the reason we've been able to have the community success today, a lot of games want to make sure they're building on the biggest platform. And our goal is really how can we just make that easier than ever for game developers to build on and help make not only Ethereum, but the entire crypto ecosystem win.

Sure, yeah. But from our side, like, you know, like David, like people say like, you know, Polygon BD is great and all that. But I feel that, you know, like, you know, that everybody's same. but where Polygon has an edge is that we really feel for our relationships. Like, you know, for IMX, like as a part of this relationship, we'll put every bit of our effort to make sure they are successful. If they are successful, we are already successful.

Right. So that's where, like, I think the biggest attraction because that, you know, for a lot of builders come to Polygon because our core DNA, like, it's not only me talking. Like, you know, all my team feels like that. And once we have a partner in place, we are like Kangho and we want to make sure they win. and they win and we win with them together. And that's why, like, you know, you see so many people building with Polygon. We'll do that for the IMEX also.

You love to hear the alignment. And I know both these teams were building before this last bull market even got started. And here we are. The bull market's definitely over and y'all are still building. So you've got to be appreciative of people who are building across markets. Well, not if the Fed keeps printing two trillion extra dollars debt. We'll see what happens. All right, guys.

Thank you for walking me through this very, very cool announcement. and disclaimers, everyone, as you know, crypto is risky. Gaming, probably also risky. Not only can you lose what you put in in Defi, but you can literally die in crypto gaming, but at least you might also respond. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you are with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.