Bankless - Polygon’s Endgame: Polygon 2.0 with Sandeep Nailwal & Mihailo Bjelic

Episode Date: July 25, 2023

Today on the show we welcome back Sandeep and Mihalo, the Co-Founders of Polygon.  Polygon is one of the most used chains in crypto. That in itself is a massive accomplishment. However, there’s been criticism of Polygon in the past, that it’s “just a sidechain.” That it’s not “Ethereum aligned.” The release of Polygon 2.0 will silence these critics. Tune in to understand why.  ------ 🚀Join Ryan & David at Permissionless in September. Bankless Citizens get 30% off https://bankless.cc/GoToPermissionless  ------ 📣 STADER LABS | ETHX LIQUID STAKING https://bankless.cc/Stader  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2   ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | TRACK & MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  ⁠ 👾POLYGON | VALUE LAYER OF THE INTERNET https://polygon.technology/roadmap  🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku    ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 6:35 EthCC  11:35 Polygon 2.0  20:00 PoS to zkEVM  33:50 What Will Users Have To Do?  37:10 Validiums & Wen Upgrade?  43:00 How $MATIC is Evolving?   47:00 The Evolution of Crypto Networks  48:50 $MATIC to $POL 50:27 Work Token 53:14 Why $POL Naming?  54:20 The Governance Framework  59:50 Is This Polygon’s Endgame?  1:08:48 zkSupernets ----- RESOURCES Polygon Roadmap https://polygon.technology/roadmap  Polygon PoS to a zkEVM - https://twitter.com/0xPolygonLabs/status/1671208777784209441  The Stack https://twitter.com/0xPolygonLabs/status/1668312616459030528 The Token https://twitter.com/0xPolygonLabs/status/1679427540790681600 ------ 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 ⁠ 

Bankless Nation today, we've got an episode for you with the founders of Polygon. We are talking about the Polygon endgame, this release, this software release, this upgrade that Polygon is doing. They call it Polygon 2.0. Why is this important? Well, Polygon is one of the most used chains in crypto. And I think that in itself is a massive accomplishment. There's also been some criticism of Polygon in the past, some critiques that it's just a side chain,

and maybe it doesn't have the Ethereum alignment that the marketing says it does. I think the release of Polygon 2.0 will silence the critics. There's a lot of decentralization going on in today's conversation, including a path forward for the Polygon proof of stake chain. A few things we talk about. Number one, how Polygon is scaling Ethereum using ZK technology. Number two, a promised Polygon made to the community to upgrade the Polygon proof of stake chain and change it to a roll-up,

more specifically, a Validium. We'll talk about what they're doing there. Number three, we'll talk about Polygon's big token upgrade. what they're doing with the Matick token, they're converting it to even more of a work token. Interesting discussion follows there. They don't see Madik being a money token. And number four, we conclude with what is going on with layer two is the infrastructure wars, as they were called in today's episode. David, what were your takes on this episode?

Well, we all know that we are in the middle of the layer two wars. So the layer two wars are definitely heating up, especially here at ETHCC. and Polygons transition to Polygon 2 also enters into the game their strategy for going from a single chain to many, many, many chains. We have, of course, have the OP stack, the ZK stack. Arbitrum recently has now orbits. Now Polygon has their fully fledged ecosystem to have what they call supernets to also fit into the world of all of these layer 2 platforms that want to turn into standards for horizontal scaling. so we could all have infinite block space, especially by the time this next bowl market comes around, which lately seems to be coming a little bit closer than a little bit sooner than I think we all anticipated.

So I think listeners are going to learn a ton in this episode about Polygon, about one of the most used networks that we have on Ethereum. Before we get into the episode, Quick Disclosures, Polygon is a sponsor to Bankless. Ryan here is also an advisor to Polygon. I also have some small amount of Polygon tokens as well. Polygon's been around for a while, and we're big fans. And so those are our disclosures. You can see all of our disclosures at bankless.com slash disclosures. All right, let's go in here from Sandeep and Mi Hollow, the two co-founders of Polygon.

But first, at moment, to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Cracken, our preferred exchange for crypto in 2023. If you are not prepared for a bull market, you better get prepared. You can get prepared by getting an account with Cracken right now. There is a link in the show notes to get started. Cracken Pro has easily become the best crypto trading platform in the industry. The place I used to check the charts and the crypto prices, even when I'm not looking to place a trade. On Cracken Pro, you'll have access to advanced charting tools, real-time market

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What's missing is a value layer that lets anyone exchange, store, and program value. That's where Polygon 2.0 comes in. Polygon Labs has unveiled a series of innovations that will radically alter the Polygon ecosystem and Web3 as a whole. By leveraging groundbreaking ZK innovations, such as Polygon ZK EVM, the next iteration of the best-in-class Planky2, proving system and a first of its kind ZK-powered interoperability layer, Polygon 2.0 will give users and devs, unlimited scalability and unified

liquidity. Right now, there is a polygon improvement proposal regarding a potential ZK-powered upgrade of Polygon proof of stake. If approved, Polygon proof of stake would become a layer 2, ZK EVM, validity. So make your voice heard on this proposal by joining the Polygon Discord today. You have a chance to

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Bankless Nation, we are super excited to introduce you once again to Sandeep and Mahalo. they are the co-founders of Polygon. They are beaming in from ETHCC, the conference. So we're all in hotel rooms. Well, except for me, of course. I'm always at home, never on the conference scene. Sandeep, Mahalo, how are you guys doing? Great, doing great.

Doing great, doing great. Just taking Dr. Sandip's tattoo. What are you showing us? Wait, what's that? Temporing polygon tattoo. You got a polygon tattoo? Oh, it's temporary. Temporary.

But soon I should get one. And yeah, like, just hustling through eat CC is like arguably the best event in that type, very high quality. It's really great event. I'm glad it's been good for you guys. David's been filling me in and we've got a whole bunch of conversations coming out of that. But that tattoo, I'm a little concerned saying deep that it's temporary because, you know, we're all about immutability in crypto here.

So I'm waiting for the immutable polygon tattoo that is inked and cannot be removed. It's a test net. So in this episode, we're going to get into all of Polygon 2.0 because there's a big update. We're getting some changes to the Polygon token. We're going to talk about the technology transition from the proof of stake to the ZKEVM. But before, I was just a little bit more on ECC. I've had a fantastic ECC, but I want to get your guys' perceptions as to who is asking you guys about what about Polygon? What's been the response? Because this announcement went out earlier than ECC. So when people come up to talk to you guys and ask you guys

questions. What are they poking around about? Like, what, what's the hype about Polygon when they come to talk to you? I think generally, like, the Polygon 2.0 has been received very, very well in the industry, like, much beyond the expectations that we were thinking. And everybody's like, you know, this is like, I actually met like some of the researchers which, you know, including, you know, I mean, a lot of researchers from the, from Ethereum Foundation to cosmos to, to like, various different ecosystems. And, you know, many of them said that, you know, the Polygon 2.0 architecture that this, they see it's, it feels like the most, you know, kind of practical and probable architecture.

Like whether Polygon builds that or somebody else builds that, that's a separate thing. But point being that using the power of ZK, this looks, looks to be the architecture, which can actually provide this infinitely scaling Web3, you know, trustless computation. And, you know, also while, even though you are scaling infinitely, while providing a level of like, you know, proven composability or cross-chain, as we say, unified liquidity across this value layer of internet that we say. So I think that has been, that has been the highlight for us. And definitely a lot, a lot of discussion around ZK because, you know, arguably now are, you know, Polygon ZK stuff is like absolutely state of the art. So Jordie is like a rock star,

you know, here. So, yeah, a lot of ZK related discussions. and developers coming up to us. Yeah, I can just echo what Sandeep said. I think in addition to that, I think it's kind of becoming obvious. We at some point became not really irritated, but we felt a little bit sad that we were not really able to communicate

all the great development that's happening on the ZK front within Polygon now. And I think now finally community understands how strong Polygon ZK team is and how exciting everything that we're working on is. So that was my maybe second biggest kind of impression that people are starting to kind of realize that. And with Polygon 2.0, the feedback has been really, really great, and we are very excited to move forward with the whole concept.

One of my favorite memories of ECC, Mahalo was in 2021. It was you, me, and Mariano Conti. And it was the last day of ECC, a lot of people had already left. and it was just us three left, it felt like. I remember exactly the other that was. Yeah, and we were just grabbing some beers, and I remember you get a phone call, and you jump up from the table and go take this phone call for five to ten minutes, and just me and Mariano just like chatting, just chatting drinking our beers.

And then you come back and you sit down and it goes, oh, really good news, guys, really good news. And me and Mariano are like, oh, great, what is it? Tell us. And you go, I can't say. I can't say. I'm like, Mahalo, come on, bro. What? You got to say.

It's like, no, I can't say, guys. I can't say. And then like six weeks, eight weeks later, Polygon announces the acquisition of Hermes, which later turned her into Polygon Hermes, which is, of course, Jordi's project. And then next EC, a year later, was the announcement of Polygon ZK EVM. And then now here we are at the ZKEVM Polygon 2.0 stack. So it's just a nice little, like, quick story about like ECC and the progression of these systems over the years. And, you know, the players that stick around through the years and relentlessly build forward.

Totally. totally and then at that point as you know and as you understood later I had that kind of oath of NDA type of oath where because Hermes had a token right and we could not have publicly said anything in order to

avoid any sort of speculation and whatnot that was the only reason otherwise of course I would have shared with you with pleasure but yeah Paris is very significant kind of for development of Polygon and this short but very exciting history and yeah we also announced ICVM here in Paris

And now we were kind of wrapping up the whole Polingon 2.0 thing here as well. Yeah. And I think for Jody, it's even more historical. Like, you know, he actually presented the first time the idea of a ZK-based role-up. Like he's the,

many people don't know that he's the one who came up with this idea originally presented it here. Next year, presented like the Hermes 1.0, which was only a payment thing, launched that. Then next year, we announced the Polygon, you know, working together.

And they announced last year, they had announced TestNet, I think, right, in the ECC. And this year... Last year was the completion of the code. It was feature complete. We released the code base completely.

And yeah, now the main internet. It's incredible how crypto has kind of grown. I remember time where I could keep track of all of the major projects. Even all of the major projects that were building on Ethereum, right? It's just like I had them in my brain.

And now, it's getting difficult to even keep up with all of the major projects on top of Polygon, right? Like the Polygon ecosystem is probably bigger than the entire Ethereum ecosystem, circa 2019, 2020, right? That's how fast it's grown. And so I think we want to start this conversation, because this is a conversation to really unpack this thing called Polygon 2.0. And I want to make sure that listeners understand what Polygon 2.0 is and what it contains.

because there's a lot going on here, right? It just inside of the Polygon ecosystem. And I think the way I understand this is maybe divided into three parts that we want to touch on today. The first part is Polygon Proof of Steak moving to a ZK EVM and what that means. So that's the first thread we'll pull on. Secondly, I think we want to talk about the holistic stack here, the tech stack, you know, the layers and what you're doing here, because this will give people a sense for what the capabilities

of the polygon ecosystem and architecture are. And then thirdly, I think we want to talk about token economics, the token economics of Matic and where this is moving forward. So those are the three kind of pillars we're going to touch. Does that sound good? And there's a fourth one, which is the governance, the release of the new governance framework

that you're proposing for the whole ecosystem, for governing three important or three pillars as we define them of polygon ecosystem and polygon governance. Lovely. Okay, so we got three pillars and then we got this governance wrapper around those three pillars that we're going to talk about. So I mean, the polygon 2.0, like I'll first take a stab at it, like at a high level. Yeah, yeah.

Give us the high level. And then Mihailo can, you know, go more deeper into technical stuff. But basically the whole design of Polygon 2.0 is the philosophy is exactly how or is derived from the current Web 2 internet, right? Like, you know, this is Web 3. And we want to say that if Web 3 is going to achieve or is, you know, we want Web 3 to achieve that level of scale of Web 2, then it needs to have two key characteristics that Web 2 has.

The first key characteristics as Web 2 has is practically infinitely scalable. More websites, more apps, more, you know, softwares are going to, you know, need to be created. You create more and more servers and, you know, it keeps on growing. Like, you know, every year we have like millions of millions of apps join the system. So it needs to be infinitely scalable. Second, the second part is even more important is that this is, this web two is basically this internet of information, internet of data, where the information can seamlessly flow

from like, it doesn't matter whether I am, you know, sitting in Paris and you guys in US and the website that we are accessing in between is from some other part of the of the world. And, you know, we can seamlessly, you know, use this or share and create and exchange that information with each other, right? Whether it's video content, this content, that content. It's seamless, basically. It wasn't like that, you know, 30, 40 years back when the internet actually came, it was named internet because it was a network of networks.

Previous to that, there was a lot of networks. but they were like DARPA net and things like that, they were dis-separate networks. And previously, you know, if you wanted to have some information or data moving from one kind of network to another network, it almost felt like that, like it feels today, when you have to bridge your USDT into other chain and things like that, right? So the information also was not seamless, but today it's seamless. So these two should be the characteristics like infinitely scalable and unified liquidity that we say. Because it's a internet of value, we say unified liquid.

means value can move from one layer to another layer seamlessly. And how we achieve that is basically, you know, we have a very nice diagram also very simply which says that, which shows that, you know, Polygon is basically going to become this multi-chain network of layer twos secured by ZK. So everything needs to be secured by ZK. And we will discuss about like our Polygon POS converting into ZK and all that. All that combines and aligns into this vision. That all the chains here, whether it's super net,

super nets previously used to be like individual side chains and eventually they were going to have ZK proofs. So that moment has arrived now that where all you can have like Polygon POS chain like chain, public chains, ZK AVM chain or these supernets. Everything, you know, acts as a layer to, you know, proven on Ethereum on top of Ethereum using the power of ZK. And then we have an aggregator layer which actually combines the ZK proofs in one recursively and puts one single proof on Ethereum. What happens with these recursive combination in this aggregator layer is that one chain, like let's say you are on a chain number 100 and you are, you want to swap some value from chain number 10 to chain number 100, right? What do essentially there is simply the moment the chain number 10 has put some put the ZK proof on the aggregator layer, the chain number 100 can

easily see that that ZK proof and knows that the X, Y, ZE transaction that is coming on chain number 100 is a part of this ZK proof that has been submitted. That means you can allow that cross-chain transaction to happen. So, and imagine like how big, big this concept is that you don't care whether that chain has one validator, two validator, 100 validator doesn't matter. It's a private chain doesn't matter for you. As far as the transaction can be proven that this transaction is a part of this ZK proof, the other chains in the ecosystem will be able to simply, you know, take that, right?

So essentially what is being solved here? First, you can have as much block space if you want, like as many chains can be seen. So it's infinitely scalable. Second, because of the power of these ZK proofs, all the value is seamlessly able to move across these chains. So unified liquidity. And this is the architecture using this power of ZK and recursion, what we have figured out in last two years with these multiple ZK teams. This brings us to this culmination of this polygon 2.0, which is like infinitely scalable. and unified liquidity.

And yeah, like, you know, that's why, you know, some of these interoperability features and these features, like, this all aligns into whatever next things we said, like Polygon POS becoming ZK and things like that. May hello? What do I? Not so much to add, I guess.

Maybe I can just say that we are very, very kind of happy and confident about this tech, that you're proposing now. and it is the result of this practically two years long period of, I would say, divergence that we have had in Polygon. So we understood that we shouldn't really try to predict the future to, from the get-go, propose one single approach, one single tech stack, and that has played out pretty badly for some of the projects out there in the past, right?

And proposing or creating the architecture that is indeed that can support mainstream adoption, that can support practically unlimited scalability and seamless interoperability is not an easy task, obviously. And we have intentionally encouraged this period of experimentation. And as I said, it has lasted for almost two years. And we have had multiple client development efforts, multiple ZK projects, experimenting even with data availability and whatnot. And we have really learned a lot during that period. And we slowly, some time ago, started converging, so to say, towards a more concrete architecture.

And now we are, I would say, very confident that this is the way to go. And, yeah, by leveraging, as Sandeep said, the power of ZK and advanced implementations like ZK AVM that we have been able to ship. and this advanced, to the best of my knowledge, the only interoperability protocol that allows scalability and global consistency across the whole ecosystem. I have never seen such approach. We are very confident that this is the optimal architecture to build basically the value layer of the internet.

This is very cool. There's two themes I'm kind of drawing upon, maybe for the listener and what you're describing for Polygon 2.0 here. The first is what you were just talking about. Mahalo is this journey for Polygon from divergence to convergence. And I'll just say one of the strengths of Polygon has always been, I think, it's practicality in that you guys didn't just test one approach. You tested all of the approaches at once.

Like even I remember for a while when it kind of Maddoch was doing like the plasma-based approach as well. And so you had side chains. You had plasma. You had proof of stake. you have roll-ups, you're doing all of the approaches at once. And the concern about that, the benefit of that kind of divergence is you get to test all the experiments, you don't have to bet on a single experiment.

The concern about that is, well, what if it fractures? What if we're not able to create a unified experience? What if we're not able to scale this? What if it's brittle? And so now the next move, and why this is a 1.0 to a 2.0 is because this is a move towards convergence where you can unify all of these approaches. And I've heard you say it so many times that I want to emphasize, it feels like ZK, this term, zero knowledge,

these ZK proofs have been kind of the unlock that allows for that a convergence. And I don't know that I sufficiently understand how that works. I'm hopeful I get a better understanding by the end of this episode. But that, if we can unlock ZK, that gives us the scalability and the unified one network. type of user experience that we're all looking for. So let's talk about that.

And I think a lot of listeners will be familiar with or will have used Polygon's proof of stake network at some point in time, you know, with Matic tokens and doing all sorts of defy-type types of things on top of Polygon proof of stake chain. That is moving to ZK EVM type of technology. Or actually, why don't you guys describe

what this proof of stake chain to ZK transition is going to look like. So the before state and the after state and the increased kind of unification security guarantees that we get after this changes in place. Do you want to start, do you want to start, Sandeep?

Yeah. So basically, first I want to give a very, you know, kind of layman definition of ZK. Like what exactly, like, why are we able to use ZK for the zero knowledge technology, which was used to be a privacy technology? which was initially popular for privacy technology, how it is used for scaling.

Essentially, in ZK, what you were doing is that, what you do is that you prove to someone that you have something or you did something. It's a very simple way, especially in the case of computation. Like, it might sound simple. But let's say today, if, let's say, Ryan, like you said that, Sandip, I'm going to pay for your, if I was a student, you say, I'm going to pay for all your education bill for next one year. And at the end of the year, I came to you and I gave you 1,000 bills and I said that Ryan, like total was a total expense was $20,000, right?

The only way you can actually verify that this is actually $20,000 is you have to go through all the bills and then you have to do the total yourself. Right. If it's plotted in Excel, you have to total it yourself. There is no other way. Now, imagine if my whole billing process was a bigger, you know, computational process. Like I was doing a lot of things, right? and I wanted to prove to you, there is only one way I have to give you all the data. You have to run the whole program yourself and then prove something, right?

And when we are trying to scale Ethereum, now think of it from Ethereum's point of view. We are trying to scale the execution power on Ethereum, right? The only way, like for example, how it works in, let's say, in case of previously like, you know, ZK or the Solidity, Soul VM and all those attempts were there. And kind of like optimistic role-ups also, they don't execute the. the whole transaction, whole data, but what they do is in optimistic roll-ups, you put all the data and all the, you know, state route and everything on Ethereum. And then you expect that somebody will run the whole chain and if there is something wrong is found, you will raise, you will raise the fraud proof, right? This is why there is a limit to the scalability optimistic roll-ups can

provide. And that's why you have a seven-day withdrawal period, because it's inherently optimistic in nature. You are assuming everything is correct. But with the power of Z-K, I can prove you a full-blown computation like in the same example i was if i was a student and uh you paid 20 000 my had thousand bills but we can agree on a simple you know kind of a proof in between or a prove layer in between and i will just give you a proof like ryan i need 20 000 i will need 20 000 because this was my bill i give you that succinct proof you put it on that validity proof layer and you are 100% sure that sundip is saying correct he's not fudging the bills the same case goes in this situation like if i am a layer too and i am doing a lot of computation like

you know, the smart contracts are happening and billions or dollars are being transacted. But on Ethereum, Ethereum doesn't need to run all those, you know, source code on Ethereum to be sure that this layer two is working fine. That's the whole point of layer two, right? You want Ethereum's final guarantee that everything that layer two is doing is correct, right? So instead of that, instead of giving the whole transaction, like what happens with optimistic role of saying, giving the whole data and the state route and everything to Ethereum and then assume somebody will run and, you know, run the fraud proof.

With ZK, you simply provide the whole proof of the computation. You say, this is a succinct proof. This proves that whatever I have done is correct. And as per the rules of the EVM, like virtual machine, I'm not changing values from my side and all that. And Ethereum just needs to run that small proof and is 100% sure that the sequencer, whether it's one single sequencer or it's 10 sequencer, no matter what, everything was executed correctly.

That is the power of ZK. And imagine how big this concept is. Now you can do huge amount of computations off chain and just bring back small proofs on Ethereum. The final guarantees provided by Ethereum, but you can do huge amount of compute. This can provide you that level of scalability. That's the simple magic of ZK. And then it's only about how much you can optimize those ZK proofs, how the cost of creating those proofs can be simpler, lower and all that.

And that's where it's like, you know, the differentiation comes where polygon and especially Polygon ZKVM and Polygon Zero teams and Midian teams, they have combined, like, completely like smashed it in terms of the performance of how fast you can prove and how low costly, in a low cost manner, you can prove on or validate on Ethereum. That's why ZK proofs are called validity proofs. Another benefit of ZK is that since it's a validity proof, the moment you put the proof on Ethereum and Ethereum accepts the proof, that means everything was correct. So you don't need a seven-day withdrawal period compared to what you need in

optimistic rules. If you are putting a proof every five minutes, you can withdraw your funds every five minutes using the power of ZK. And this actually, like, this is why I'm saying that this, again, let's revisit the polygon two point Ovision. All these chains, layer two's on top of Ethereum using the using ZK proofs. So it doesn't matter. There are five chains, 10 chains, 100 chains. And who is running those chains? If it's a college dorm room guy running the chain, you know that this proof is coming on on this, on this aggregator layer. And each chain knows that the execution is done correct. And once the proof is submitted to Ethereum, Ethereum also verifies that all these

hundreds or thousands of chains, they all are executing correctly. So now you can have millions and millions of users individually running those chains and the interconnectivity between those chains is there. So it feels like one single large chain infinitely growing block space because there is interoperability between them and the chain, you can add more and more chains to add more and more capacity. That is the whole concept of Lereto. and you said absolutely correctly that ZK is the unlock,

like these fast ZK proving and these recursive proofs is the unlock that, you know, are these three, four teams working together, we're able to crack. And that's where we are at Polygon 2.0. Yeah, and going back to Polygon POS chain and the upgrade that you mentioned. So currently, as I guess a lot of people know, Polygon POS chain is one of the most used chains in the industry. basically it has currently way more transactions than Ethereum, pretty mature or quite mature

ecosystem, etc., 300 million plus end user wallets or addresses, whatever you want to call them. And we definitely don't want Polygon POS chain to be left out with this Polygon 2.0 vision, right? And this proposed upgrade has two main consequences, I would say. One consequence is currently Polygon POS chain is operated by a second. set of validators. They are 100 plus metric stakes validators and they are providing the security for the chain. And theoretically, there is this bridge that connects Polygon POS chain to Ethereum. And these validators practically and factually controlled this bridge. So theoretically, they

could try if they collude, if they gain a lot of or enough or super majority of the stake, they could try to attack the chain and maybe withdraw funds for from the bridge itself. And now with this proposed upgrade and ZKAVM that is showing great performance, already as a reference, we have latest benchmarks, which are the proving costs for ETH transfers are 0.0085. So 4.085 for a need transfer in ZKEVM. These are the actual proving costs.

So practically, these costs are negligible, and to be honest, orders of magnitude lower than what we were initially expected when we started working on ZKAVM. And that's for the type 2 that is already in production on Mainet. We are making great progress with type 1 and basically we will have opportunity to choose whichever approach is better for the community and for the POS chain specifically. but long story short, our ZKVM tech is definitely mature enough now, so it can support the level of activity that POS chain has, hence why we decided to put forward this proposal, to upgrade it to ZK Validium.

So as I described, the chain itself and the bridge is currently controlled by this set of validators. After the upgrade, we can continue to have these validators, but in a form of decentralized sequencers and use the power of ZKEVM to turn this POS chain, which is practically a side chain at the moment, into a full-blown layer two. We are proposing the Validium solution because we currently have Roll-Up already live on Mainnet, this ZK-AvM roll-up that is already active, and ZKVM Validium and ZKVM Roll-Up would become kind of like a nice product mix, where you have these trade-dose between Validium and Roll-Up.

Roll-up has full-blown security of ETH. because it uses theorem also for data availability, but it has lower throughput and higher costs, whereas the disvalidium has much higher throughput, much lower footprint on Ethereum, hence can offer much lower transaction fees. So basically any application can pick one of these two solutions. So that's currently what we're proposing. We're also in discussions with people from the Ethereum Foundation in Denkrad, we just discussed here in Paris and

Justin Drake, we are practically not even against turning this POS chain into a full-blown roll-up, but for that we would at the very least need 4-844 EIP-4844 active on Mainnet. We will have some sort of working group in the following weeks to just basically explore even that as an option, but the current proposal

is to turn POS chain into Validium and we have this roll-up already on Mainnet. So that would be, as I said, kind of like a nice product mix. That would increase significantly. There are two, as I said, major consequences of that. One major consequences that the security of the POS chain would be dramatically, I would say, improved in a sense that all transactions on polygon POS chain would be proven back on Ethereum. And it would become the first decentralized layer two in the, in the Ethereum ecosystem,

to the best of my knowledge, at least. and by far the most used ones. So we're very excited about this proposal because of that. And the second major consequence is that polygon POS chain would become compatible, so to say, with the wider Polygon 2.0 version that we are proposing now. Given that it's going to use, or it will use ZKVM, it can plug into this kind of interoperability protocol and seamlessly exchange value with any other chain in the polygon ecosystem.

So there are these two major consequences of this upgrade. And yeah, it's a very big event for the polygonic system. And we are very excited about it. So we've seen layer two's upgrade themselves, both Arbitrom and optimism. They've had their nitro and bedrock upgrades. But that's going from one optimistic roll-up upgrade to just a better optimistic roll-up upgrade. We haven't seen an optimistic roll-up proof-of-stake chain upgrade to a ZK-EVM. Can you talk about the actual details of that transition?

what will people have to do? What will users have to do? What will node operators have to do? How should we think about that actual upgrade event? Yeah, for sure. So it's going to be pretty seamless upgrade, and it's generally pretty straightforward. Building the tech components that will enable the upgrade

was the hard part. So practically, what we have to do. Currently, Polygon POS chain runs the block, the validators are producing blocks and extending the chain. and every half an hour, there is a checkpoint on Ethereum. The checkpoint, in order for a checkpoint to be accepted on Ethereum, there has to be a set of signatures from the super majority of the stake in the Polygon POS chain. That's the only way the checkpoint can get accepted on Ethereum.

What we practically need to do is to modify smart contracts for checkpoints on Ethereum instead of or in addition to these validator signatures, it will also require the ZKADM proof. So that's more or less the only thing you need to do on a high level to upgrade this POS chain to ZKAV on Validium. And obviously there has to be a client upgrade and all validators will have to upgrade their clients, but that is pretty similar basically to any other upgrade or hard fork

that, as you said, other layer 2s or Ethereum or ZKAVM or POS chain, all of these chains are doing generally regular upgrades, i.e. hard forks. And that's going to be just another one for the validators. There is one additional component is now this unified liquidity and this interoperability. This bridge that is already holding some assets, basically billions of dollars of different types of assets, we'll just have to merge with this interoperability, pool or bridge that we are proposing now and that Sandib kind of described. But that is a separate process, so to say, of the upgrade itself.

So long story short, and that has to be done. Also, you know, community has to be involved. Only on that part, like Polygon community has to get involved where they have to vote and there has to be a governance process and how this bridge moves into this ZK secured bridge. But otherwise, like for end users, it will be just like, Ethereum much. Like, we actually wanted to call it.

Like, at one point in time, I was a, you know, proponent of calling it Polygon much because it's that unprecedented kind of thing. As you, David rightly said that it has never happened before. So it's kind of a very big event. And, and, you know, if and when the polygon team pulls, pulls through it, I think is going to be a technological feat, like the way Ethereum much was. And, you know, it will look like and feel like exactly almost like the same. event that happened.

Yeah, I will tell you for me personally, the movement in this direction is kind of like a promises made, promises kept moment for me, because it could have been easier and it probably would have been easier for you guys to keep Polygon as a side chain and not pursue this whole ZK path. It would have been easier, probably less expensive, you wouldn't have to kind of make the investments that you're making. And so for me, and I just want to be clear in kind of the summary of what's happening for listeners who aren't in the weeds here, but the polygon proof of stake chain moving to be more secured by Ethereum and settled on Ethereum is a really big move and a really big moment.

And David called it unprecedented for kind of a side chain to do this. And what's happening, it sounds like to me, is the polygon proof of stake chain is converting to what's called a volidium. and if bankless listeners aren't familiar with that, the term validium means, it means basically like the consensus layer settles on Ethereum, the data layer settles not on Ethereum, somewhere else for now. That's what a validium is. And there are other validium examples that, you know, on layer 2B, you can see immutable X is one such example.

Arbitrum has some, you know, validium types of architecture. So that's where the proof of stake chain is going. And Polygon also has a chain that is fully fledged ZK-EVM, that the data layer and consensus layer completely settles down to an Ethereum. And these are kind of two chains that are working in parallel right now and two different options. When about is this change going to happen? Will the Polygon merge actually occur? Is this sort of up to the community? Are we talking weeks, months, something longer?

Definitely up to the community. We have this governance process for currently for the Polygon POS chain, which is coordinated through the concept of PIPs polygon improvement proposals, which are kind of equivalent to Ethereum improvement proposals. So we will put an actual PIP out there for the community to discuss very soon, I believe in a matter of VX even. after that it depends on the feedback. There is a set of public discussions on forums, on polygon protocol governance calls, etc. But so far, we have proposed this upgrade as what we call a pre-peep. It's like a document official document meant for a kind of temperature check of the community and whatnot. And the responses have been extremely positive so far, which means that the governance process can

can we can go through it pretty fast. I would say after we post the actual PIP, I believe maybe one to two months to kind of gather the community consensus. And then it's a matter of actually implementation. Implementation will happen in several phases, but I believe definitely end of year should be realistic at least for the first phase, in my opinion, given the great kind of community feedback we have received. so far. Metamask has something new. Introducing Metamask portfolio. Metamask portfolio is the best way to view

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Hedera, Gitcoin, and many more. So if you want some help in navigating the complex world of token compliance, go to Toku.com slash bankless or click the link in the description below. One very big component of this upgrade is, of course, the upgrade to the Matic token. And governance, of course, implies we have to govern with something. You need a tool to govern with. That's the token. Can you guys walk it through how the Matic token is evolving here? Because this is a very big part of the story, correct? Yeah. So the the Matic token, like again, this is, as Ryan said, you know, promises kept, you know, is basically made promises kept. So basically this also, when we actually rebranded from Matic network to to Polygon, that was the same, you know, again, we had promised that, you know, eventually a Matic network, which is, which was a single chain kind of a ecosystem. at that point in time will migrate into this multi-chain on top of Ethereum.

Even we initially called it, you called it like Ethereum's internet of blockchain. So, you know, that this will move from one single blockchain ecosystem into this token which can support this multi-chain, you know, ecosystem. And also this token is like a very different in the sense that, you know, as we call it, like this third generation, you know, token. Why we say third generation is that first generation was BTC, right? And BTC essentially as a as a token of the network, you can't, it doesn't have any utility for you as a holder in the network.

Like you can't participate in the network using the BTC in order to participate. You have to buy hardware and do the proof of work. Then Ethereum, especially after this proof of stake merge that happened, now every Ethereum holder can participate in Ethereum main blockchain and stake it and participate in securing the network, right? And but then this happens natively, this can only happen on Ethereum network itself. And there are like some protocols have been proposed that we can, which can, you know, on the top of the protocol, they can do it separately, but natively it happens only on Ethereum.

Whereas in case of Polygon, and that's why we call it a third generation token, is basically with one single token, you can actually validate on $100,000. hundreds and hundreds of chains, right? So, and that's why we call it hyperproductive token that, you know, with you have matic pole token, you can stake it on hundreds of chains and validate, provide your services of that. Not only you can validate on multiple chains, but you also have multiple roles to play in the chains because these layer two chains, you can actually play a role of a play in Manila

validator or sequencer, which is only just plugging the transaction and creating blocks. You can also participate in the aggregator layer, as the interoperability layer that we just described. You can also participate as a local data availability cluster provider. Like many of the chains which will act as valediums, eventually like the supernet chains that are launching, app chains basically, Polygon app chains that are launching. Many of those app chains need low cost data availability for them. Many of them, we will not be able to afford Ethereum data availability even after 484. 4-4-4-4 launches, you will have a lot of, like, you know, people doing NFTs and all that stuff.

So it will, the cost will grow. Only few, in my analysis, like few roll-ups will be able to top roll-ups, which have high value in them. They will be able to afford that data will be able to afford that data will-bitty, but that has to be seen. But you can play the role technically if you wanted to play to provide this small-level data variability. Once a chain grows, then you will need a global data will be like Ethereum 4844 and all that. then fourth, you can also, you know, provide the role of, I said, sequencer data way to providers and then the aggregator layer and then finally the proofs. Because the way that with that now we are doing the proofs, the proofs are like single

transaction based proof. So we have the technology basically, eventually it's not the high priority right now, but in one and one and a half years, we'll be able to or maybe two years, we'll be able to create a decentralized layer of proofers where you stake yourmatic network, matic token or Paul token, and then participate in the network by providing the proofs for the chains. So essentially, you have multiple chains and multiple roles for the users. That's why we call it the hyperproductive token.

And you participate in the network, provide the security of the network, and earn the return returns like which we call return on work, ROW. I really like that progression because I think it gives us a short history of the evolution of crypto networks. So you have Bitcoin, which is you have zero networks to participate in. You just have the asset. You can't participate in the network. Then you have Ethereum, which you have one network you can participate in, one proof of stake, Ethereum chain.

And then you have Polygon, which, true to its name, has a poly number of networks to participate in. And so you have zero progresses to one, which progresses to N, end chains, poly chains to validate. And also, like, not just that, but also, like, not just chains, but also, like, data availability and other services as well. And I'm just reminded by the early strategy that was Polygon. I'm sure this was formally, like, emphasized as part of the strategy with the naming of Polygon. The early strategy was to try all the chains, try all the strategies, all the combination of chains. And now it looks like everything has, like Ryan said, and one of the themes of this is that the convergence of the stuff that worked to conversion the right way.

And then all of a sudden, you have one token to validate them all. I think you guys should have called it hyper-sound money, but that's just me. One thing I will say is the upgrade of the matter. Actually, we don't see that except Bitcoin and Ethereum, I don't think all the other tokens should have to do anything related to money. Yeah, that's 100%. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, so a few things maybe to draw out of this too.

So just so listeners get this in their mind, Sandeat mentioned Paul token, P-O-L token. So the Matic token becomes the Paul token. Is that correct? We're not talking about two tokens at the same time. Maddoch becomes Paul. It's kind of a rebrand, if you will. It's an upgrade.

Basically upgrade of the token. It's an upgrade. It's an upgrade. But there is a new token because their token itself does need to evolve and become imbued with new features, correct? Yes, yes, yes. But it's a one-to-one.

So if you have one Matic token, you get one Pohl token. Is that correct? Yes, yes. But for all practical kind of purposes, it's an upgrade of a token. It's just that you have to, due to the nature of Matic ERC-20 contract, which is not upgradable, you technically have to deploy a new ERC-20 contract, which is a poll, but there has to be the poll proposal is a part of the wider proposal for the new Polygoner architecture, right? It's a, it's literally integral part and it ties together and secures the whole

architecture that we're proposing. And it's, as such, it has to be accepted by the community. And if it is to be accepted by the community, Matic will, for practical purposes, cease to exist. It will have no role in the, in the polygon ecosystem. So, so, for practical purposes, it's an upgrade. David, do you know what this reminds me of? It's kind of interesting. I guess, guess a few things. You mentioned poly networks, polychains that you can validate with. It's also poly in terms of the functions, it sounds like. So it's not just being a validator. You could be a sequencer. You can be a data availability provider. And it brings me back to, you know, 2018, 2019, when we were talking about the value of tokens in general. And this is right on the back

of ICOs, right? We had this run up in all of these tokens. And on the back of that, we realized there was no such thing really as a utility token. It was a whole bunch of futility tokens. And we had these ideas that, well, what if we create, imbue our tokens with the ability to service a network, create work tokens, if you will, similar to maybe a taxi cab medallion in New York City where you have to have, in order to be part of the taxi network, you have to have your taxi cab medallion and that's worth a certain amount of assets. And if you have that medallion, then you can service the New York City taxi network.

Okay. Well, it's so interesting to me that like, it took us a while to get there, but here we are. This is a work token. And Sandeep called this thing, a return on work, right? So if you have the Maddoch token and later the pull token, then it gives you the license to serve some function in the network, to be a worker be, essentially. And what do you get for that? You get paid. Workers get paid in this type of a network. And that's effectively what we've created here. So sometimes I'm just struck by it's taken a few years, but the original promises of crypto and the ideas that we've had

just take a while to play out, but they eventually play out. And now we have another example of a work token to service the Polygon ecosystem. It's pretty exciting. Absolutely. And I think this is because

this stems from the roots of crypto. Roots of crypto, we started all started with BTC. And BTC was a currency or money It's trying to be a money and currency. And every token in 2017, 18, I used to see like, oh, we will have this health care ecosystem and our token will be the token of payment. Do you remember Dentacoin?

It was a day. You pay for your dental appointment in Dentacoin? Bitcoin for dentistry. So that doesn't work. Like only there can be only one or maximum two global currencies or monies. And everything else, every other token needs to have an actual, you know, stream of revenue for the end, you know, holders who are actually using that token to participate in the economic activity of the network. And then as per their work, they are rewarded with the or given the

incentive in form of the transaction fees, whatever service they are providing for that. And that's very straightforward and clean like actually. Sandeep, Mahalo, I've got a, I've got a bond to pick with you guys. It's called Polygon, but you called it the Paul token. Why didn't you call it the Pauly token? I mean, the Polly, first of all, there was like, there is an existing token called Polymath or something. Yeah, it's a 20-M.17 I own PollyMATO that's forgotten.

I got the AirDore. Just name it Polly. And, you know, we actually thought about it, and then some people actually were making fun. It can be Polly Amorous, Polly this, Polly-GELI. Yeah, Polly Networks, right? It's Polly. It should be Polly.

We thought about that. but we thought that, you know, let's keep this, like, again, like high quality, only three character token. We don't want to have like. You got Bitcoin. You got Paul. Exactly. Exactly.

Something like that. So, yeah, that was also either. But we have nothing, but that's pretty much it. There is, I believe that's open. There is some trading volume like that. So we didn't want to just get involved with that. Okay. Well, walk us through the third pillar of this big upgrade, the governance framework, because

I would like to submit a governance proposal to change it to the platform. Of course you can do that. And you might have some decent support for that. Yeah. So Polygon is obviously envisioned and is a community-owned. But with this proposal, we believe this is like with Polygon 2.0, we feel like Polygon is maturing and going to the next stage or next chapter in every aspect, right? with the architecture, with the native asset of the protocol,

and with the way we really kind of facilitate that community ownership, which is the governance framework itself. So there are three components of governance that we kind of identified working together with the community on this framework, and they are, first of all, protocol governance. And that is the process is comparable to interior improvement proposals. We have this process of PIPs, which is currently active. on the POS chain, we are just expanding it to the entirety of the Polygon 2.0 stack, basically. So it's a framework similar to also, as I said, EIPs, Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, Python Improvement Proposals, etc., IATF.

So anyone is encouraged to propose an upgrade to any of the Polygon Protocols. There is a process of public discussion, rough consensus, gathering and if there is rough consensus that the protocol is that the upgrade is useful for the protocol. It's going to be included in one of the upcoming upgrades. So pretty standard things similar to what Ethereum, for example, is already doing. So that is protocol development. The second component or aspect of governance is what we call system smart contract governance.

System smart contracts are smart contracts that are necessary to. for the Polygon protocols to operate, like bridging protocols, staking smart contracts, bridging smart contracts, validation smart contracts for ZK proofs, etc. So any type of smart contracts that lives on Ethereum and have to be governed in some ways. So if you want to upgrade these contracts, the difference with Ethereum governance is that someone has to actually execute the upgrade of the smart contract. Ethereum doesn't have that, so to say, issue, because they, are no system smart contracts in such way.

Here we have this kind of concept of multisigs or a group of entities or individuals that can actually execute these upgrades. There are, as most of the people know, significant concerns with these multisigs. So we just want to upgrade this process and make it more community involved, make it more secure, increase the standards there. And that's kind of the second aspect of the of the governance. We are on all these aspects, including this one, we are working quite a lot with the community.

And today we published a report, actually L2B worked on it. And we just supported it and proudly kind of funded it on system smart contract governance across the layer two ecosystem. So we want to establish kind of the standards here to work with the community to improve these standards and to increase transparency with this kind of delicate component of layer two governance because we need a way, we will need a way in years to come to upgrade these system smart contracts. So we just want to make an effort to make this process as secure and community involved as possible. And the third component is this community treasury governance. So the poll proposal introduces what we call the community treasury. And community treasury is protocol funded.

So self-sustainable, basically, support vehicle, if you will, for the Polygon ecosystem. So we propose this 1% yearly emission of the poll token that will go directly to that treasury. And the treasury is community-controlled, community-guided. governed and we just with this governance framework proposal, we propose how the community treasury should be governed. How are we thinking about this governance? And we're also very excited about that because it further increases the decentralization of the project, gives more kind of more power to the community and introduces kind of

perpetual support vehicle for the polygon ecosystem. As we know, both Web Free and Polygon are in this early kind of phase of intense development and early adoption. And in years to come, the ecosystem will definitely require ongoing support. And we believe this is probably the optimal way to provide that support. So these are three components of the governance. As you can, I guess, see, it's a pretty comprehensive framework. We have worked with the community quite a lot on it. Yeah, we are very happy to see initial very good reactions to it.

We've just published it basically here at ECC the day before yesterday. So this is, of course, Polygon's biggest upgrade ever. And it comes with the actual upgrade of the token itself. And I think the upgrading of the token, along with all the details that we've gone through on this podcast, with the unlocking of the token to be more intimately a part of this network, complete with governance abilities. it feels like the logical conclusion of Polygon. It feels like the culmination, the completion of the projects from the original vision.

Maybe there's additional steps and additional upgrades and improvements. But as far as maybe to use Ethereum as an example, we are now post proof of stake with Ethereum, post-EIP-1559. We have like dang sharding, but like really left to do or left to include. But really it feels like Ethereum from its core vision. is basically complete. Is that about where you would say Polygon will be post-upgrade with the upgrade from the Maddick to Paul and upgrade from the proof of Sikane to the ZKEVM?

It feels like we're like, you know, done-ish. Absolutely. Like I think the Polygon 2.0 vision actually is the, like we believe is the end game for any infrastructure provider. Like I was saying that, you know, whether Polygon implements it or somebody else implements it, but this looks to be an infrastructure or architecture, which can actually, you know, resolve the infrastructure era of, of blockchain.

Not only for Polygon, but that's actually like, you know, what we always believed, as you rightly said, David, that is this culmination of Polygon. Like, we always started with this thing that eventually the end of the infrastructure era of Web3 would be where you have a network, which is, you know, infinitely scalable and is composable across the network, right? And that way, it definitely feels like, you know, kind of the ultimate consolidated architecture, not only for Polygon 2.0, I'm obviously biased, but I feel for the whole of Web 3, like, you know, this kind of architecture, this kind of architecture will eventually, you know, feels like end up becoming the end game of the infrastructure era. And it's so,

it's like I always keep saying that, you know, in these crypto conferences and all that, like, we will not succeed till the time like on the stage, it's people like me and Mihailu were still building infrastructure and all that and all the other protocols like, you know, are building infrastructure. They are on stage or they are the front faces of this, of this ecosystem, right?

Whereas actually it should be the apps which are actually building useful applications for the users. They should be the heroes of this. And this will only happen when this infrastructure wars and infrastructure era is, at least this stage one of this infrastructure era is over. and, you know, we have a decent enough infrastructure which can, you know, scale Web 3 to 100 million users or even like billion users. And this definitely from our side, like Mihailo, as you guys know, he's been very active in the Ethereum ecosystem. And he has actually evaluated the like multi-sharded approach of Ethereum versus like, you know, all the other kind of multi-chain approaches and, you know, scaling approaches.

And I think Mihailo also, I, you know, that they felt confident like, you know, when Mihailo also said that to me also, without any bias, even if I remove, like this feels like something which doesn't look to have like any kind of, there's no dream in the polygon 2.0. Like there is, it's not like this will happen and that will happen and this kind of sequencer will come and that. It's not like it's basically pure engineering part from here. There's no research angle involved in this now. It's all engineering optimization of these things and, you know, productionization of these things. And then we have that system ready. So that's there.

And then second part like, which is also very. close to both of our hearts is that we always told Ethereum community that, you know, all the chip, not only Polygon POS, whatever this decentralized or these infinitely scaling, you know, block space that we will build, they all will be secured by Ethereum. And this was whole a process of last two years to reach that place where we have the viable technology which can actually prove and secure it on Ethereum, which we never believed in like, you know, it's going to be optimistic, you know, approach. It has to be. ZK approach and you see already few optimistic projects already talking about the ZK proofs and all that because it is the end game and you know I think for us like for me also personally also and for mihalo also that's like a very great it's going to be a great satisfaction that we delivered on that promise that you know this whole we are not ethereum aligned for the for the sake of saying because Polygon POS is not secured by by Ethereum we are actually we what we committed we are going to deliver and with Polygon 2.0 also what we what we have committed. we are going to deliver that. There is absolutely no doubts about that, like the way we have shown it before. We'll keep doing it in the coming days. Yeah, definitely. I would agree.

Polygon 2.0 seems to be kind of the end gave both for Polygon and for the infrastructure, web free infrastructure and overall, obviously we're biased. But yeah, I don't know if you have time to maybe run through, but I have been always very, very interested in multi-cham. main systems, in cross-chain communication, in obviously layer 2s and scaling infrastructure. And there have, if you really want to design this mainstream capable, so to say, web-free infrastructure, you have this free, you have to have basically these three components. Strongest possible security, which is the Ethereum security, unlimited, practically,

scalability, and seamless interoperability. there has not been a solution or architecture that provides solar free and we have we cannot identify any major concern with regards to these free properties in the architecture that we're proposing and that's something that I really needed basically as I really needed such an architecture so I can stand behind it. Sandip and I have had Sandip is very focused on shipping and is pushing for acceleration of development cycles, which I completely understand and it's super important. But I have always been the one who kind of who has been prolonging this divergence process, right, an experimentation process. I just really needed that confidence that, okay, I can stand behind this. I'm very confident that we should, as a community, push towards this Nord Star, and we are at this point now.

And I am personally very, very happy and very confident that this is. is the the right approach. And after that, there are, I don't see practically any major upgrades kind of being required. I think, as Sandeep said, in years to come, we will, in ideal case, just become that boring infrastructure player that is available, scalable, and everyone's using it then. I think one of the most impressive things about the story of Polygon is, it seems the vision was articulated so early. And it was articulated, I think, before you guys even.

knew how you were going to get there. It was like the destination was known, but the path there wasn't totally clear yet. And you guys just started throwing stuff at the wall to see what it worked. And fast forward three, four years later. And now we're finally here. And so I know Polygon has gotten its fair share of flak as we all do in the crypto space over the years. And yet you guys have committed to the vision that you set forth for yourselves very, very early. And now we are finally here.

And I'm sure that that is just a huge weight. of your shoulders because we're here and also just, I'm sure you guys are quite proud of the work that you guys have laid down. So congrats. Thank you so much to be here. This all has to be built, but at least like, there's a, I believe out of point

to point architecture, I would say at least 40% is full blown built and in production. Maybe additional 30% is being built and will be basically the staking layer. It's pretty much built. Interoperability layer is at least halfway built because a leader is already on the way. I would say actually, I would say it's actually 70, 80% built out. Probably even more. It's the

productionization that we are doing. Probably even more. But yeah. This cross chain also, we were just talking about it. That is already there in production in the form of LX, LY bridge, but it's just needs to be speeding up with this aggregator layer. So that, that's the part. And that is also a bit. We have to decedaliless. It's actually 70, 80%. It's probably fair to say, at least, yeah, let's say, we're speculating a little bit, but let's say at least 60% is built in production. I think that's fair to say, because execution layer is, fully commoditized basically already. Yeah.

But there is still, we need to tie everything together and deploy everything in production. But it's indeed huge weight of my shoulder personally because I have full confidence in this, in this approach. Yeah. Every time we seem to hit a finish line here in crypto, it actually appears to just be another starting line. But this is the journey, right? This is what we signed up for.

This is why this is so much fun. I want to ask you guys about how. how Polygon fits into the layer two meta that we know it today. So of course, we have the OP stack for optimism is there, scaling strategy for producing many, many, many, many chains. The ZK Sync team has the ZK stack, which is of the same vein. Arbitrum now has orbits. What's the polygone chain?

What are the poly chains? What can we call these things? Yeah. So we actually have that supernet program already like like supernets. But that super nets originally till the time ZK proofs are not there. These were all like, you know, side chains and there are already like quite a large number of people who have developed that. Now we have the ZK proofs and like, you know, they all will be upgraded into the ZK proof. So we just, we are just calling them just for a different differentiation as ZK super nets, but we still have to package that.

But I think already by the number of chains if you see, I think it all already be, it would already be, you know, I think probably the number one or equal number one or number two with the number of people that are already. building on them. And it's just that we have not, like, combined and branded that as yet. Like, you know, we are approaching that in the next maybe a couple of weeks we will announce that. But, like, on the sidelines already people, like some OG projects like IDex recently announced a ZK supernet and NOSIS pay has announced a ZK supernet and multiple more like AVE Gotchi and this and that.

Like there are multiple. And immutable already has one, correct? Oh, yeah, immutable is like, you know, the biggest one. And I think if you know gaming, Web3 gaming, like immutable and polygon together, you know, are like 85 to 90% of the whole like, you know, high quality double A, triple A gaming market. And, you know, immutable also completely moving from Star Square to this architecture. And yeah, like, you know, there are like just too many in that sense. And we are just, we just have to combine and market that. Like, you know, we are not marketed that yet because this whole.

the stack and deployment and everything, you know, was separated out in the last four, five weeks only, but people could use RZKVM code to launch their own chains already for quite some time. Yes. The supernet program itself has more than one hard, basically projects either in some phase of building or already deployed or whatnot. And now they just need to kind of align with this two point of vision that we have. And that's like for the better of each of these supernet.

So we're very excited. and we believe we'll see more and more of these dedicated, so to say, chains. Equivalent to what we have seen in Web2. In the earlier days of Web2, this kind of shared hosting, which is basically Ethereum or Polygon POS chain, where multiple applications are just deploying and using it as a shared infra, was much more common. And as Web2 matured dedicated hosting or dedicated servers become kind of the norm,

right, because of increased number of users and traffic and everything. So we believe this is kind of equivalent to what we have seen there. And as applications are maturing, we are as an industry, WebFree is getting more and more users. We will see more and more of these kind of dedicated servers in Web Free terms, which are basically polygon supernets. And all of them will be secured by ZK, plugged into the same source of liquidity and seamlessly interoperable. And, yeah, that's how we view that. Well, Sandeep and Mahalo, it's been great to have you on Bankless to explain what Polygons end game is.

It looks like it's within sight here, and you guys have clearly laid out the vision today and are building that vision. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Players to be here, guys. Bankless Nation, the wider context for this is we are in the infrastructure buildout season, where all of our layer twos

are getting massive upgrades. So I hope this conversation was helpful for you to learn about what's coming down the pike. A lot of ZK magic in store that is making our layer twos and our chains more decentralized. It's a very exciting time to be in crypto. Although we're still in the infrastructure phase, and I'm excited to get to the future phases or we talk even more about the apps being built on top of these things. We've got some resources for you in the show notes. One is the Polygon roadmap that we talked about today and some

tweets about the stack, about the token, about Polygon POS, and its move to ZK. But I got to end with this as we always do. None of this has been. Financial advice, of course, crypto is risky. Defi is. Layer 2s are. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. Layer 2s are the new frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thank you.