Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Sandeep Nailwal: Polygon 2.0 - The New Value Layer of the Internet?

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

What started out as Matic Network, in 2017, and later rebranded to Polygon, in 2021, it is now facing another major milestone: Polygon 2.0. Apart from a tokenomics update, their plans include building an aggregation layer for every scaling solution that will settle on Ethereum. This will not only provide crucial rollup interoperability, but it will also further offload Ethereum by recursively combining multiple proofs into a single one.We were joined by Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, for a fascinating discussion on Polygon’s future revamp, their views on infrastructure decentralisation and interoperability.Topics covered in this episode:Sandeep’s background and the vision behind MaticPolygon 2.0ZK rollup vs. ValidiumMulti-purpose shardingTokenomicsStaking decentralisationInteroperabilityThe multi-chain future outlookBlockchain adoption and use casesEpisode links:Sandeep Nailwal on TwitterPolygon on TwitterPolygon Labs on TwitterThis episode is hosted by Meher Roy & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/509

Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Sebastian Quichu, and I'm here with my co-host, Félike Ernst. Today, we're speaking with Sandeep Nailball. He is the co-founder of Polygon, and he was last on the show in 2020, almost three years ago. Back then, the project was still called Maddo and was sort of an idea that had not really been true. built yet. Obviously, lots of time has passed since then and lots has happened and Polygon is now one of the largest ecosystems in crypto. And recently they announced Polygon 2.0, a brand new vision for the future of Polygon, which we'll get deep into here on this podcast. But before we do that,

Sandeep, how are you? Well, thanks for coming on and how are you doing? Yeah, thanks. Thanks, thanks for having me and here. And, you know, I'm doing very well. Very excited to, I'm very excited for this chat. Well, so are we. Obviously, like I said, you know, Polygon has become such a huge part of the broader crypto ecosystem and certainly of the crypto narratives. Take us, take us through the last three years, right? When you had this idea, which was, you know, called Maddoch back then, which was sort of one of the very early ideas for a layer two on Ethereum, what's, you know, how is your life change in the last three years? years. So, you know, before going into the last three years itself, like, you know, but the starting

of Polygoner, starting of Madic network was basically, you know, I and my other co-founder, co-founder also, we were building apps, D-Apps, actually, on our, this thing. Like, of course, we had some protocol level understanding, but we were building the apps and we realized that, you know, Ethereum is not ready for scale and you know I also personally like I am you know

sometimes I call myself like Web 3 fanatic like you know sometimes I question myself that you know am I giving too much of or over indexing on how much the world needs

this trustless decentralized world and all that but generally like I've been very you know kind of passionate about that you know this is the this is the world or this is how the the next

phase of the evolution of humanity is going to happen, right? Like, you know, we came from those empire states where the king was the god, right? Like, king can do anything that he wanted to do. And then, you know, we came into these nation-state systems where everything became an institution, government began an institution, and people were electing the governments. But then, you know, those institutions also, in the last 40, 50 years with social media, we started realizing that, you know, how much corruption is there in these institutions. And time and again, they have proven, these institutions have proven to be prone to corruption

and somebody who gets enough power, they start, you know, misusing that power. And eventually I feel that this is the third, you know, stage of evolution of human systems wherein, you know, these trustless applications would be there. and then even the businesses will be built in a community-owned. They know, as we say, community-owned businesses and things like that. And they will, you know, empower, provide more freedom to individual human beings in all that, in more aspects of their lives, basically. And somebody actually, Harvard actually did a case study on Polygon and I was there. And somebody asked me, what exactly Web3 reduces the cost of?

Like, because every big technology reduces the cost of something. Like, you know, cars reduces the cost of transportation, internet reduces the cost of, you know, information, not that, what does Web 3 reduce the cost of? And I said that Web 3 reduces or blockchain reduce the cost of freedom, the cost of providing freedom or cost of providing democracy into the system, right? Which is, we know that how costly it is to, you know, have democracy. So that's where we started, Matic Network.

You know, we truly believed in this and we realized that the infrastructure is not ready for building those kinds of applications and businesses. So we went into that. And at that point in time, plasma was a solution which looked like, okay, what was the hottest solution in that space. And we committed that, okay, we'll build a layer to using plasma, but with an EVM on the layered. And in 2020, we launched the chain.

At that time, we launched a working plasma version. But then most of the people did not use the plasma chain. people started using the EVM side of the chains, even like pure EVM part of the chain. And then the chain, actually, even though the chain had plasma built in layer two built into that on that, but most of the people used only POS chain. And then it kind of, you know, was the kind of a, you know, this confusion in the terminology, whether it's a commit chain or it's a side chain or whatever it is.

But then the usage kind of exploded and it became one of the biggest, you know, blockchains even now I think by daily active users and you know by the number of applications deployed it's probably the biggest blockchain but in the last but as I said that the vision was to provide this web three a scalable infrastructure and that infrastructure can only come in if you have single zones of security right like you know you don't have like right now as we have seen in the past like we have so many blockchains and we were just discussing before recording also that we have too much infrastructure not many apps, right? But those infrastructure, when we say too much infrastructure, that infrastructure

is there, but these are all die-separate security zones. And to connect them, you have these bridges. And every other month, we keep hearing that, you know, some of the other bridge gets hacked and things like that. So essentially what I'm trying to say here is that even though we have a lot of block space, that block space doesn't have one single unified security zone. Like each of the zones or each of the block space has a different. different security assumption. And, you know, people need to use this third-party tools and all that to do that. So in order to achieve that scale for Web3, we believe, you know, once we launched the chain,

you know, we also evaluate optimistic roll-ups and we realize that optimistic roll-ups are kind of the maybe the next stage, but they are not the end stage. Because, you know, you have to put all the data back on Ethereum and then you have to have a fraud-proof. It takes seven days to have those fraud-proofs fully guaranteed. as hard to build also those fraud proofs. Currently, I don't think any layer two has a fully permissioned fraud proofs only I think arbitram people have permission fraud proofs,

but most of the other optimistic developers don't even have any kind of proofs whatsoever. So at that point itself, we decided in 2021 that ZK is the end game and we wanted to go big on ZK. And then by that time, like, you know, we, in 2021, we merged or onboarded it some of the top most ZK talent in the space. A merged one or two like Hermes Polygon. Like the Hermes product project, which was building a ZK Rolup, they merged with Polygon Network.

Similarly, the MIR protocol merged with Polygon Network. And today we have two, three, dis-separate teams who were building it. And, you know, the benefit of these different, different teams was that in the last four years, there's multiple projects who have been trying to build these ZK roll-ups. But having those multiple teams, they were able to contribute to each other.

from different different angles and you know trying to or were able to tell the teams that where can be some gotchas that you will find three months down the line and the result of that was that in March of this year 2023 we launched our first like full-blown ZKEVM which is audited fully mature source code and all that and we we launched it in March and you know that is actually the first full-blown layer to to exist with the with the validity proofs and you know so Since then, we have done a lot of leaps in the ZK technology that we are building.

Some of our ZK technology, like Plonkey 2, pill, this is being used by large scale amount of developers all across the space. Whenever somebody is building on ZK, people are using these technology. And, you know, like Jody, I think you guys know, Jordie Belina, who's one of the co-founders at Polygon, he's built SIRCOM, which is kind of the first, you know, first, first programming language you get into when you start to build ZK circuits and things like that. So a lot has happened. And now today, Polygon is a ZK powerhouse. And as you said, they're one of the largest ecosystems in the space. But the goal from here of Polygon 2.0 is

the goal is same. The mission is same. How do we get Web 3 to the mainstream? How do we play this role to get in the next evolution of humanity? I call it Web 3.0 as humanity 3.0. how do we play a bigger role in that? And the goal is still the same that you know how to provide this infinitely scaling infrastructure for Web 3, which also has, you know,

same security zones so that the value can move seamlessly from one place to another. You know, meaning that the entire block space should look like one single blockchain, one single block space instead of like, you know, you kind of

you know, moving your value or bridge from one chain to another and things like that. Kind of getting the similar kind of qualities that the Web 2 today has for information. It's infinitely, practically, infinitely scalable, but it is also, you know, seamless. Same case with Web 3, infinitely scalable block space,

but seamless movement of value. That is what is Polygon 2.0. That's the whole journey. Cool. So I think I understand the value proposition for Polygon 2.0. in a nutshell, how will it look or how will it be designed just so we can kind of deep dive into the individual bits later? Absolutely. Great question. So it's very simple. So we believe that under the fundamental layer of this trustless, you know, world web 3 is Ethereum.

And that's where the most of the value will be created or more than created, I would say most of the value will be secured. right and so that is the settlement layer where all the value is being settled secured and things like that but on top of that you will have hundreds and hundreds or maybe thousands or millions of chains which will connect back into ethereal using some sort of a proving mechanism which we believe that zK and most of the biggest researchers in the space believe that zK is the end game for that so you know you prove all of the execution on all of these chains back on ethereum and then because chain is proving the ZK, their execution back on Ethereum, the value can move to and fro between these chains just by relying on those ZK proofs.

So that's the simplest idea about it. And between these chains and now how it will look is that you have Ethereum, you have hundreds and hundreds of these chains, all of them are proving back to Ethereum and they can rely on each other and the value can seamlessly move between each other. So all these chains connected to this common bridge or ZK proving layer which currently we call it LXLY bridge but we are moving it to an aggregator layer so it will be aggregated together

and with that aggregated layer all these chains connected to this aggregator layer will feel like one single value network. Just like the way internet feels today like you are sitting in somewhere in Europe I am sitting in UAE we can create

exchange share this information same way you know with Polygon 2.00 we believe should be possible for the value infinite amount of scaling. More blockchains, more applications need more block space. They can spin up and dedicated block space also, not publicly shared block space.

They can spin up their own chains, but their value is still secured. Anybody can trust their value because it is being ZK proven on Ethereum, and then that value can move it out. Cool. So we'll deep dive into the interpability part of this later. Let's kind of look at the ZK part first. So basically there's two different chains that are in principle possible and that you guys also operate, right, or are going to operate.

There's kind of the ZK EVM, which is kind of the full, full blown roll-up with all costs associated with it. And then there is the so-called validityam, which you're transitioning Polygon POS into. Maybe that's kind of back up for a second. What is a validity? So what's the distinction between a validium and a ZK roll-up? Essentially, when you are doing these layer two scaling, what you are doing is you are having some computation somewhere off-chain and then you just prove back on Ethereum. So you don't have to do the execution or the computation on Ethereum and then it is happening

somewhere else, but Ethereum is securing it. And primarily to prove the computation fully, like you have actually two things. Let me take it with optimistic rollers first. In optimistic roll-ups, you need to have both two things. The two things are the proof of the execution. And then the second is the data. Like what were the individual transaction data was? And with optimistic role-up, because it is by nature, it's optimistic.

It's assume everything is correct. So what you have to do is you have to take the whole data, put it back data on Ethereum, and also put the state proofs and all that. And then you assume that optimistically everything is correct. But if something is wrong, somebody from the community can come and, you know, do this thing called fraud proof, right? And run something. That's why you have to take, you have to, you have a withdrawal delay of seven days from optimistic roll-ups.

Because you need to give enough time for anybody in the public to come and, you know, raise a contest or, you know, raise a fraud proof on, on theory. Whereas with ZK, with ZK, what we are doing is, And this is the power of the magic magical power of ZK is that you can have millions and millions of computations on some off-chain layer. With ZK, you can have a very concise proof

of that competition and just prove it back on Ethereum. It's called validity proof. It's not called fraud proof. It's not called validity proof. The moment that Ethereum smart contract, validity smart contract accept the validity proof, you can, you know, everybody can be rest assured that all the

execution, the, the, the, the that has been done on that layer two has been done as for the rules of consensus, right? Immediately you are 100% sure. So you don't, in case of ZK rollups, you don't even need data on Ethereum to prove everything.

So you can keep the data off-chain which is called validium. So in case of optimistic rule-ups or even ZK-Rov, when you want to keep the data also on Ethereum and the proof also on Ethereum, it's a roll-up. And when you keep proof on Ethereum

and data somewhere off-chain, that is called a validium. right and validium in case of zK because whole computation is being proven on ethereum it is as secure as roll up in terms of security only difference is like there is a one particular attack vector that they say which is a very corner case of an attack vector where a particular sequencer or a operator is running a valedium and that validium uh you know stops or or kind of starts hiding the data that doesn't show the data to the users because users need data to exit the platform. So it's called ransom attack.

So the sequencer, in case of optimistic roll-up, they can steal the user's fund. But because of the fraud-proof that is only protected using the fraud-proof. In case of ZK roll-ups, the sequences cannot steal the user, but they can't touch it. All they can do is if the data is not on-chain, they can hide the data, stop showing the data, and try to do this ransom attack. to the user where they say you'll give me this much money if you have $1 million give me $200k then I give you $800k back or something like that so this is a but then there are multiple mechanisms these days where you have forced the you know transactions and

things like that and it can like you know people are building these solutions where if the sequencer is not giving you your money you can sequence your transaction first on the chill and even if the ransom attack occurs like you know the the sequence that has to process your transaction so there are multiple ways but there is is still a very small element of this small data availability, but which can be extremely minimized if you have a decentralized set of sequences there. And with ZK, that is possible. So we were even discussing, like, imagine,

nosis chain starts moving back on Ethereum. And Nossus chain already has hundreds of, like, you know, I think 45,000 or like, some insane number Nossus chain has like in terms of... Noses chain has 140,000 validators. 140,000 validators. So, you know, if these validators, are running this chain and they are proving back on Ethereum,

the data is also fairly decentralized. You don't need to rely on. So that validium is almost as secure as, like not theoretically, but practically as secure as a full-grown roller. So that's the only deposition. May I kind of just back up and kind of try to explain

the attack in slightly different words? So basically what you kind of need to kind of exit a chain by forced inclusion is you need the exact state. of the chain, right? And kind of if you want to go from checkpointed image to check pointed image, you kind of need to know which transactions have happened since the last state. So you can reconstruct the exact state. And if, if basically at, you know,

one transaction from that entire set is missing, you can't reconstruct the state and you can't kind of force an exit, which is kind of the attack factors, right? So basically it's kind of, it's, it's, it's, I agree that it's somewhat 10 years and it kind of also requires the collusion of two-thirds of the validators, which in your case would be 67. So, yeah, so I totally understand that. And also if you kind of look at the costs associated with being in a group, the majority of the costs actually come from the data availability. So basically just posting everything at the score data at the moment or basically posting everything, in a data blob as soon as we have dank sharding,

it is the lion's share of the cost. It's like 99.9% or so of the cost, only like 0.1% of the cost or so is the actual proof of the state. As you said, basically what you can do is you can prove that the state is correct. Malicious actors might still be able to kind of freeze the chain but basically that's the best they can do. They can't steal anything. Okay, so I think now we kind of have established very clearly

the delineation between a validity and a ZK roll-up. So there's this diagram that the Celeste team has put out and I think a lot of people have seen it's this chart where you have on one axis like Ethereum-centric applications and Celestia-centric applications. And on the other axis, you have the different layers of the blockchain stack.

So data availability, consensus settlement and execution. And then there's like the monolithic chain. You have roll-ups for Lidium. So I'm sure lots of people have seen this graph. And it sort of shows the different ways that one can construct a blockchain and with these different layers. I just want to get a sense of where Polygon sits in this mental model. So for the ZK roll-up, execution is happening on the Polygon ZK roll-up.

but consensus settlement and data availability are happening on Ethereum. With Validium, the data availability is on Ethereum, and then a consensus settlement and execution are part of the Polygon stack. Is that correct? In case of Validium, the proving settlement is on Ethereum, but then data availability,

in case of like Validium, especially let's talk about Polygon POS, which is one of the examples. In case of Polygon POS, you have 100 validators. And these 100 validators can buy, you know, can as well serve as data availability, you know, members of this chain also, right? So these validators are only proving on Ethereum. So settlement is on Ethereum, but the data is on polygon PSCHR, right? But then if you see other polygon, you know, chains, for example, let's take an example of ZK EVM. So ZKVM, both the data and prove are going to Ethereum.

It's a full-blown roll-up, right? Now, the execution is single sequencer, but we want and we will be decentralizing the execution of this ZKEVM chain. So there will be multiple ZKEVM executors, right? So in this case, consensus will remain off-chain, but the whole data and the proof will remain on Ethereum. In case of Polygon POS chain, only settlement is on Ethereum, but the consensus and data availability is off-chain. Similarly, you can have some other kind of, let's say you talked about Celestia, a kind of chain which has single sequencer, which puts the proof on Ethereum, the settlement layer, but puts the data on Celestia or any other data availability chain for that matter. Its own data availability layer or even Polygon ecosystem with that staking hub and, you know, and we'll talk about that in multiple roles in the Ethereum polygon ecosystem. in Polygon ecosystem

the validators will also be able to offer this role of data availability we call them DAX local data availability committees because if you are running let's a gaming app like your game is a small game you still want the value to be fully secured by Ethereum but you don't want all of your data

being put onto Ethereum L1 or like some other global layer like even Celestea that will also become costly if it starts getting thrilled enough, right? So essentially you might need your own like five or 10 validators which are providing very low cost data availability to you. And when your scale is small, you are happy with that. Once you start becoming, let's say, from 10,000 users to a million users to a 10 million users, you might want to change your data availability assumptions. And we want like just like on

AWS, you know, when your startup is growing or your product is growing, you change the configuration of your servers and improve it as per the configuration of the users need. Similarly, we also want that polygon for the developers to have a full blown stack where they can change these configurations as they go along. So yeah, these are the different kind of configurations. Where we kind of want to play role is obviously is on the execution layer where the

validators, like we believe that a lot of like app chains, for example, immutable X, which is one of the biggest gaming players, they use all the matic validators on their chains. So they want their chains to be matic validated, but still be Zika proven on Ethereum. So that's a double kind of benefits. They want to be validiums, but decentralized validiums with Ethereum as the final settlement layer.

You have many other chains where they have their own set of validators, but they just use Polygon to settle back on Ethereum. like Polygon ZK proofs. So these proofs. So for that, let me introduce this concept of, especially as a part of Polygon 2.2, aggregator layer. So the aggregator, like in the current setting, let's say you have 100 chains.

All of them are proving on Ethereum. Some of them have matic validators. Some of them have single sequences. Some of them have their own consensus mechanism, own validators. All of them are proving on Ethereum. And everybody is proving, let's say, every half an hour. So everybody has to pay Ethereum gas fees.

for half an hour proof, which can be fairly costly $50,200. And then, you know, they are able to prove only 30 minutes. So any kind of interoperability, we call it LX, NY bridge, needs minimum 30 minutes. Because once you put the proof, then you can move your funds around the other chains. So, but with the aggregator layer, what we are introducing is because we have Plonkey 2, which is the fastest recurs recursion library. You know, you can combine ZK proofs into one cycle. So with this aggregator layer, what will happen is all these chains can submit their proofs to this aggregator layer where it will be aggregated, like let's say 1,000 chains, 100 chains, all of them put a proof.

Those 100 proofs get aggregated and just one proof gets, goes back on Ethereum. So the cost of proving to the chains becomes extremely low now. And what it enables is now the chains then can prove every 10 seconds, 20 seconds. So the cross-chain interoperability between the chains become much faster. Because the moment you are on chain number, let's say you are on IMX game chain, and you are playing a game and you made $1,000 playing that game on those tokens. And now you want to swap those tokens on to, let's say, NOSIS pay chain, for example, which is, let's say, assumingly, it's connected, or you want to swap it on ZKEVM.

So, you know, the moment your chain, the game chain publishes the proof 10 minutes into this. aggregator layer. Now you can take this ZK proof and go to the other chain which has the visibility of the aggregator layer and the proof has come in. They can actually run your cross-chain transaction quickly and then you can take it back in 20, 30 seconds. And that is the ultimate goal of Polygon 2.2. Wherein you are on your own chain, wherever you are playing game and all that you don't even care where your money is. You just do like, okay, swap. And then in 20 to 30 seconds, just like Ethereum blockchain, main chain kind of finality. somewhere else you use the liquidity somewhere else,

it gets swapped and you get the USB back on your chain. So again, as I was saying that all these chains should feel like one single. And so that's where the Polygon wants to play the role. Some on the execution layer, but mostly also on this aggregator layer where all the proofs are being aggregated and the value, as we say, value layer of internet. Like, you know, we want to play at the value layer of internet where all these chains are providing this execution layers.

And then Polygon is allowing that information or value to seamlessly flow across these execution environments. I think you kind of already touched on this, but spell it out first. So basically if you kind of talk about like these two different scenarios of kind of user sharding and application sharding. So basically the first being where the user kind of lives on one chain and kind of does everything on that chain, whereas the second is kind of different applications live on different chains and users kind of seamlessly.

between those two. You fall into the second camp, I assume. Yes, yes. I mean, I also see, like one important part of Polygon 2.2 is we don't want to be, we have tried to be as less opinionated as possible. Like if you see in the current internet 2.0, like which you call Web 2 world, the protocol TCPIP, which actually ended up becoming the backbone of this whole internet, is the least opinionated platform.

protocol. So what we believe is our job is to provide the seamless and secure movement of value across these chains. So our architecture doesn't put a very strong opinion on that whether all of the things should happen on one chain, like all applications should exist on one chain or they exist on other different chains. What we believe, but I believe is more of a more practically what will happen, what will end up happening is that you will have some of these public chains.

which will have massive amount of liquidity, people swapping and doing some very high value stuff. But then apps, each of the apps, because apps want dedicated capacity. You guys are building this amazing like, you know, Gnosis pay, you know, system, where you want users to be able to pay within a millisecond, right? So you do a click and then, okay, pay and payment app.

So you would want dedicated capacity for your change. Like you would not be looking to have a, you know, scenario where there is a, you know, some NFT pigment is happening and now my payments are taking, you know, 50 minutes, 50 seconds to go through, right? So people need, or application need dedicated capacity and their own scalability space to exist. Some of the chains will be, like, we believe, and this, you know, IMX will be the first kind of it will happen, is that they will themselves be a cluster of chains, right? Because they have 150

AAA games. Even if one of them explores heavily, that chain, that game will acquire or kind of like, you know, will occupy the whole chain itself. So what we believe is public chains, a lot of liquidity, some high value stuff going on.

App chains, long tail, short tail, very, very, very big kind of ecosystems. Plus then you have these ecosystem chains where some of the ecosystem, like this is a gaming ecosystem, there is a social network ecosystem and all that. And it's like these will act like more like servers. Like, you know, like Twitter is not running on one single server somewhere. Like, it's running on hundreds and hundreds of these coordinated servers. And that's what. So we want,

we wanted to have that internet, the way internet has grown today for information, we wanted to have that architecture in mind. And that's one of the reasons how Polygon two parts look like this. So I don't fall in any camp. Like, you know, I believe that the world will look like. like a very mesh space. Some of them will be dedicated chains, app chains. Some of them will ecosystem chains. Some of there will be high liquidity public chains.

Let's talk about tokenomics a little bit. So how does Polygon 2.0 impact the economics of the network? And I guess maybe a broader, more high level question is here is how does Polygon make money and fund itself as a chain and as an ecosystem?

Polygon ecosystem, basically when we started as amatic network, that time the plan was to have one single chain, even we had not thought through, like, you know. I mean, of course, we knew that it will become a multi-chain scenario eventually. But we, at that time, the token economics and everything were designed for a single chain. And, you know, now with this hyper-blockchinized world that we are looking at, like in next one and a half, two years,

I feel that there will be hundreds and hundreds of these chains. There are already hundreds, and they will keep on growing like this. And the token actually should reflect that ecosystem. So how we have, you know, like what we call pole token, which is the, you know, upgradation of Madic token. It's not a new token. Madic token will simply upgrade into pole token.

And, you know, we call it like this third generation hyperproductive token. Why we call it all that is that, you know, it started with BTC. Like, for example, BTC, as a BTC holder, you cannot do anything with BTC. You can't stick it into the network. You can't provide the security to the network with that. This was changed with Ethereum, where Ethereum as a token, like, you know, now you can stake into the network, try to provide the security into the network, and, you know, you can earn

the yield on that. And the kind of token, Polygon is becoming. And we believe that, you know, many of these infrastructure protocols, will become like this is the third generation token wherein you can not only validate on one chain you can validate on hundreds and hundreds of chain you can stake once and validate on

multiple multiple chains kind of like the you know we call it multi-staking mechanism not like restaking but multi-staking like one place your circuit stick then you run multiple chain so that's one part so not only you can validate on multiple chains you can also provide different kind of roles

so you can provide definitely a validator or sequence a role, but you can also provide a prover role, right? Like, you know, eventually we intend to have a prover layer. You can also provide a data availability layer wherein you, you know, provide data availability to different, different chains. And then finally, you can

also play a role in this aggregator layer, where you become an aggregator and, you know, because this layer also will have to be decent layer. So, you know, these four different, different roles on this one. How, you know, this becomes a sustainable effort, like how Polygon makes money. So this

Polygon is supposed to be an open decentralized protocol. So this doesn't have a revenue per se right. But with pole token, what we have proposed is we have proposed 1% inflation per year which is like you know almost like

Ethereum kind of inflation and less than Bitcoin inflation which goes to the validators like all the validators who are validating they will get this particular part of the inflation. But second part is that the second part is the ecosystem growth treasury or something like that. So for that, we have proposed for next 10

years or community can decide 2% for 5 years or 1% for 10 years or whatever. We have decided that there will be 1% token treasury, token inflation, which will be used to grow the ecosystem back. And eventually there can be mechanisms where validators actually donate some part of their transaction fees or whoever is making any kind of revenue, everybody donate. But there is no way to force that fees as of now. Like our at least we are not clear right now how we can force or like the net, it can be

built into the protocol where everybody has to do it. And in future like you know, if it becomes exploitative, you are taking 10% the validators can simply say we are hard forking and we don't want to pay this 10% transaction fees, right? So right now that's the only way that there is this inflation for the growth of the

protocol. But in future there can be some donation mechanisms also where validators will donate or the revenue makers will donate to the ecosystem. But we will, you know, for 10 years, we believe that this infrastructure wars are going to stay for next three to five more years, max. It's almost timed over. It's very hard for new infrastructure players to now come and, you know, start a chain ecosystem

from day zero. You know, in three to five years, they are going to be settled. And in those three to five years, we are going to, you know, we believe that this ecosystem tragedy is good enough and post that it can become a fully community run, non, you know, non-single party or non, you know, kind of incentivized growth. Just like we see, Ethereum is almost reaching there. There's only one network, Bitcoin, which is able to do this. Ethereum also, like, you know, foundation has to spend like, I think, $80 million

as per their last report to grow the ecosystem. But eventually, like in three, four years, I think Ethereum will reach the place where they don't have to spend any money as foundation. Same. We also believe that in five, six years, following on or 10 years, it will be. to reach that place. What will the staking ecosystem look like for Polygon in the future?

So basically currently there's a set of 100 validators and there's an application to kind of become a validator and there's like some checks and stuff, right? So is that going to be decentralized? Is that going to be opened up? Yes, absolutely. So currently all these validators are not Polygon validators. They are Polygon POS validator.

They only validate Polygon POS chain. But now we have multiple chains And what we are going to do is we have, we call it staking hub. So the staking hub will be, will live on Ethereum. So you own magic tokens, you stake on Ethereum. And then once you have staked your tokens into the network, now you can subscribe to different, different kind of chain. So you can subscribe to Polygon POS.

You can subscribe to when ZKEDM becomes decentralized or IMEX chains, that this and that. So all those kind of staking logic and mechanism can happen on, on Ethereum. for you. So that's how it will look like. It will be a permissionless ecosystem. Anybody who has animatic, they can stake, and then they can choose to validate on any chain where they can, you know, on their traffic chances.

Very simple and very open and permissionless. Cool. And this mighty staking, I mean, as you said, it sounds pretty similar to restaking. And restaking's been somewhat contentious in the Ethereum Twitterverse over the last year. So with people claiming that it kind of over. overloads the consensus.

Are you worried at all for a polygon that similar things might happen? I think the bigger problem with the current restaking mechanism like eigen layer and things like that on Ethereum is that it's extra protocol. It's not a part of the protocol itself. So it introduces a lot of additional kind of risks into the system, which where the system or the base system can lose control of, if the larger amount of economic value is coming from these networks, you know, it can create very crazy scenarios where, you know,

the protocol loses, it goes out of hand for the base protocol. In case of Oligon, it is a part, it's an enshrined re-staking. Like, you know, you can think of it like that. So the protocol can enforce any kind of socio-economic mechanisms, like slashing and all that at one central place in the protocol itself. So it's, that's why it's very different. It's like enshrined re-staking in a way, if you have to say that.

So where we believe is like, you know, it's fairly much more secure than the extra protocol restate. I'd like to talk about the protocol architecture a little bit. So in your documentation, you have this staking layer, the interop layer, the execution, the proving layer.

We haven't really talked about interops so much yet. So can you tell us how interoperability will happen between applications and the polygon ecosystem? Talk a little bit more about the protocols there. And, you know, I'd like to, you know, after that, talk a little bit more about interoperability in the broader sense in terms of connecting polygon to other ecosystems. So, yeah, maybe starting with the interop layer within polygon and broadening it out a little bit outside the ecosystem. Absolutely.

So I actually, you know, use this word aggregator layer before. Like interop layer is actually that aggregator layer only, which I was explaining that, you know, all these chains currently, and this is already built out today. So all the chains who are using polygon proofers, they can connect to Ethereum. And we call it LX, LY bridge. So you can move from any chain to any chain once you have submitted your ZK proof without coming back to Ethereum. You can directly jump from one chain to another because there is a master smart contract on Ethereum, master bridge contract where all the individual chain bridges are connected. So if you are moving something and you have put in a proof, you can actually directly move the value across the chain.

But then this actually chain, this layer exists on Ethereum, right? Currently, LXLY Bridge, which is very costly because all the chains have to put their proofs back on Ethereum and which is, you know, which can't scale beyond, let's say, 10, 20, 50 chains because it will become prohibitively

expensive or very slow to move funds around. So, that's why we are introducing this interop layer or aggregator layer, we call it, where all the chains can submit their proofs back on this aggregator layer. And this aggregator layer combines all the proofs and just puts one recursively combines one ZK proof, puts that ZK proof on this one.

So each of these chains are still like layer twos. They are directly connected. Once your proof has been included in Ethereum, you can move your value from your chain to Ethereum or your chain to any other chain in this aggregator layer. So the value can move freely without any need of any external bridges. And as I was saying that because of this aggregator layer, you can now prove much faster because this.

layer will be much, you know, kind of cheaper. So you can prove every 10 seconds to this layer, this combines and puts a proof back on Ethereum. But within those 10 seconds, all the chains have a kind of a partial proof of your ZK, right? Even though your proof has not been submitted to Ethereum right now in those 10 seconds, but you know, you know that this proof is here and the chain has provided a valid proof or whatever that chain is. So you can have this interoperability, very fast interoperability. 10 to 20 second interoperability between these chains.

So that's where, like, you know, we believe that the value can move around and across chains. And notably, you can have this level of interoperability also between low and higher security chains, right? Depending on kind of where the, how the data availability is handled for each of these chains, because each of them is going to host a ZK proof to the, to this intermediate layer.

So do you foresee a future where kind of depths will kind of separate out components that are high security and components that are low security and kind of build depths that live partially on a high security roll up and partially on a validity? I think like, you know, that kind of complexity going on to the developers is very kind of seen. like unlikely. Like I feel that eventually you will have fair enough data availability, you know, kind of, I would not say global chains, but kind of clusters where you can have good enough data availability and everybody. Like that's why I was telling you that we don't believe in a single data availability layer, but you know, essentially with the same staking up, somebody can actually launch a shared

data availability chain, right? which is basically like 100 people come in and you have a decent build of data availability and then people are sharing. But also this will be, this cross-chain value transfer will also, you know, will also be governed by the individual

sequences of a particular chain. Like, you know, the users don't need to know about it. Apps don't need to know about it. If I am an app which has an off-chain data availability with one single sequencer, I know that the ZK EDM public chains validators are not going to trust my value and they are going to wait for my transaction to go on Ethereum, proof to go on Ethereum and only then take my transactions which are coming in. For data availability also, there will be some other mechanism. But the base layer of security for everyone is that ZK proof.

So you are not cheating on the ZK proof level. All you can do is for some users you can hide the data and hide. do all the kind of stuff, right? But for that, those users, the freedom is with the user, right? Like the users who are willing to rely on the token, right? Let's say there is a game chain. And that chain has one single data availability provider. And you have $10 million on that chain, which you are now bridging and you sold to someone else.

So the other person who bought that token, right? That person is relying on some level of trust on your chain there. because when he's going to claim, he is going to come to this game chain and ask for those $10 million. So I think the free markets will generally tend to take care of these things more because a particular chain,

a particular app will not grow beyond a certain point unless they decentralize their data availability a bit more. Their communities will put pressure on them that, you know, this is like not a secure chain and all that and they will fail to capture more and more value on that chain. And they will have to, you know, decentralized their data availability.

But I think for data availability, there will be multiple, multiple avenues for people to put. And, you know, L2Bs and these kind of like, you know, catalogs will provide you decent enough, you know, a kind of security on the data availability side of things. Like I'd be like, for example, once Ethereum has this availability, like who's stopping NOSIS chain also to add 484 to that?

And with 130,000 validators, for a lot of chains, they will use simply NOSIS chain as data availability. Or people will launch layer 2s or NOSIS chain of data will be. And it will be on the users to trust that particular, how much to trust on that particular chain. So for us, interoperability, for us, the base layer is that ZK proving. And then beyond that, we leave it to the free market and, you know,

other kind of social games to swap. Unless something in data availability, some big explosion happens where you have data availability layer 2s and things like that, then we can see. So you were in Paris during ETC week and you attended OsmoCon and also a modular summit. So my question is here, you know, what was the purpose, what was your purpose for attending these summits and, you know, what kind of, I didn't see your target Osmocon, unfortunately, and I was like looking for it on YouTube, but I couldn't find it. But yeah, I'm curious like how you see Polygon interacting with these other ecosystems and, you know, And what is the role, you know, like, you know, Polygon 2.0 builds itself has wanted to be the value layer for the intranet.

You know, when you say anything that wants to be the something, it kind of feels, I mean, to be I read it as like it is the definitive thing and all these other things are perhaps going to, you know, perish or not be that important. So, you know, do you think that there is a role for multiple, you know, independent layer ones, domains of state, applications, blockchains, and how do you see polygons? interacting with these different ecosystems. And particularly I'm quite interested in polygons interactions with the cosmos ecosystem and the celestial ecosystem. Yeah, so I think this is a very good call out. Like we should not call it the value layer. Like, you know, actually, value layer of internet,

or we want to call it a value network. Or like, you know, we have to come up with then a slightly better name. This is a good callout that, you know, somebody will think. Our vision is that these changes, that we are talking about, like, you know, on top of Ethereum. Ethereum is the settlement layer. But then on the, on this other layer, I'm saying other layers, some of them will be layer twos, but many of them would be sovereign layer once also.

Like right now in Cosmos, let's say, a lot of Cosmos chains and, you know, big shout out to Cosmos community. Like I think after Ethereum, like, I always feel that if I could actually join some other community, being in Web 3, it will be Cosmos community. no doubt. And it's super decentralized, super cool and intelligent people over there.

But with Cosmos chains, what ends are happening is that most of these Cosmos chains in themselves get a lot of traction. But they are still kind of islands, remote islands of liquidity. They are not, you know, plugged in into the main liquidity layer of

Ethereum where the largest amount of liquidity is there. So how we see Polygon playing this rail is this aggregator layer is, for example, right now we have ZK proofs where any EVM chains, EVM ZK proof, any EVM chain can prove

back on this aggregator layer. But we are already seeing and helping other teams to build, let's say, ZKWosom kind of prove us, right? So where you can prove a WASAM chain back on Ethereum, right? And all of these chains of this aggregator layer there

kind of enables free flow of information, free flow of value between these chains, whether it's layer ones, sovereign layer ones, layer two's, single sequencer, multi-sequencer,

own token stake, whatever it is. Oligon just wants to provide that central layer of, that layer of value moving across these chains securely in a particular single standard value movement across these chains.

And, you know, beyond that, leave it onto the free markets, as I said. Instead of we putting in a lot of, like, this thing now, all the chains should have magic, like, we don't, we don't mandate on that. In fact, we believe a few, like 10, 20 chains will havematic stickers or, you know, a few more than that, or app chains will have it. But then the larger ecosystem, like osmoses, you know,

a lot of other, like, you know, cosmos ecosystem, other layer ones which might be built on wasms and all that. And right now there's this thing, everybody's, trying, you know, all the layer ones realize that they are in the remote islands of liquidity. They need to be kind of layer two. We believe that, you know, they don't even need to be layer tools. They just need to settle onto Ethereum. And, you know, like, that's good enough for their liquidity.

Like, basically, this kind of bridging provides them a trustless bridge, ZK bridge to Ethereum, right? And after that, they have their own sovereignty and they can keep growing their ecosystem as they want to grow. But the value can move to and fro very frequently around. So this idea that everything should sell to Ethereum, I mean, it makes sense, I think, on the face of it. But, you know, I think that there's also a case to be made that, you know, if blockchains are going to secure, you know, lowest of the value in, you know, the economy, that resiliency means also having other other things to settle on. like other blockchains to settle on. And obviously like Bitcoin and Ethereum have the most security and are the largest, say, like, points to which, you know, people can settle. Do you think that this argument makes sense, though, that we need more kind of, you know,

layer one, layers of state in order to have a more robust and secure, you know, global financial system running on blockchains? See, conceptually, obviously, you know, you need decentralization on decentralization itself, right? Like, you know, resiliency. Like, actually, the whole purpose of Ethereum blockchain or Bitcoin blockchain to be decentralized is that. Then you don't have to rely on one single party. So when you are, even though we are saying Ethereum as a collective one layer, but it's actually a layer which is highly, highly decentralized, same case with Bitcoin.

But I feel that how the world, or the impracticality, how it plays out is, there will be always, in today's financial world also, like US dollar is the base layer of value, right? Largely. But then, let's say, 70, 80%. But then there are other value layers also, like, you know, gold, some of the other sovereign currencies and all that.

They also have value. People trust some of that value. But then if you see, because finance has this great, like, I know, they're this great saying that liquidity, begets liquidity. Especially in the larger and larger globalized world, you need free flowing liquidity, you know,

across these applications or, you know, across the world, across the economy. And I think due to that, you know, the network effects of a single liquid layer become larger and larger. So even though I can say that, yes, there will be, like, it's okay to have other layers

where the value will be trusted and will exist. But I think the large, percentage of that will still be governed by one single layer and which seems to be like right now Ethereum. Unless like let's say Bitcoin tomorrow comes up with a mechanism where now you can have validity proofs on Bitcoin and now you can settle. And as of today, like Bitcoin is like still much bigger than Ethereum in terms of its global brand and all that, then that might be a, you know, formidable competitor for Ethereum. But otherwise like I find it really, really hard for any other layer to become that segment layer. Fringe,

settlement layers, sure, but main settlement layer, I think it's like the Pareto rule like, you know, one of them will have the largest share, which is Ethereum. Well, Seb, you don't like hearing this right. No, no, I think this makes total sense.

I think it's like a perfectly you know, sound like yeah, I think I think things do aggregate. I think like aggregation theory, you know, exists also at watch chains and certainly there's going to be aggregation to the larger settlement layers, whether that's Bitcoin or Ethereum, and that they're much like, you know, I do like this nation state idea.

And, you know, study talks about this a lot too, like blockings in the context of something like NATO. I think one thing I would love to see happen is this idea of shared security also, expanding outside of like what's currently, you know, a very kind of small network of chains within cosmos to, to, you know, different ecosystems, right? We're like, different ecosystems are also, layer ones are also securing each other in this NATO-like fashion.

I know we're very far away from that happening, but I think it's like a lot of a goal to want to move towards. I want to bring this kind of full circle. In the very beginning, you kind of, you talked about kind of the thing that blockchains kind of lower the price off, and you said you think it's democracy. So tell us,

what kind of applications you foresee having actual, actually, you know, no me users on blockchains in the, you know, coming years. So what kind of things in the future will settle on blockchains and why? I think like, you know, for the next three to five years, you will still see blockchain largely confined to the financial sector only. But I also definitely believe,

that this is the best financial rails that humanity has ever seen and eventually most of if not all of finance will move on to these rails. So I personally feel that initially the use

cases where they require value to be transacted and value to be held shared exchanged these cases will be more. So obviously DFI is a segment which is automatically we understand. But then, for example, gaming also. Gaming also, like, these days, gaming is like one, like, what's the number?

Like, I think, $150 billion revenue or something like that in US itself. Like, there's a Netflix documentary which talks about, like, you know, the gaming in US is bigger than Hollywood, basketball, NBA, NFL, NHL, everything combined. So, and these are like digital only things. And value exists over there. Like people transact billions and billions of dollars in value. over there. So they definitely it makes much more sense. Similarly, only one or few use cases that I feel for blockchain right now have started emerging is maybe some form of this

you know, your social network use cases. Like where people are, as I said, in the starting of the program that what blockchain reduces the reduce the cost of? They reduce the cost of freedom. that it is the cost of democracy. And, you know, for these social networks, we definitely, you know, these are kind of social network apps are kind of the peak of the applications which need this freedom and democracy,

you know, starting now actually. So I feel that that could be one segment also, apart from DFI and gaming and other value-related use cases like RWAs, like when we say DFI is like kind of the niche finance, but then the R2DFI, or traditional finance and, you know, some of the people, you know, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, case, like their leaders, Scott Lewis, you know, is coming up with more, like, you know, nice, nicer names for this, which attracts this traditional finance into this. But basically that, like, you know, DeFi gaming, RWA or traditional finance use cases. And, you know, even stock markets, you know, moving over to this thing. Like, right now we have these stocks and all that, like, there's a large amount of management goes in the background. for clearing houses and all that.

Blockchain actually obliterate most of that, you know, use cases because you are actually settling real time to the end user itself. So that plus like the only non-financial use cases I am seeing is in the social side. So those would be the larger like kind of focused applications currently. Okay. One more thing is basically NFTs, but NFTs, you can argue that they also have value. but I feel that NFTs have a huge, huge potential. I'm not talking about art NFTs and other things.

NFTs have a huge potential, basic PFP or some other kind of NFTs, have huge potential to get to serve brands. Because I talk about this term or like, you know, I came up with this term called effective eat, like EAT, effective attention time. And for brand, it's super important. Right now brands are like, you know, fighting for this user's attention span, right? So, you know, active attention span for them for brands is super important. And that is where I feel that these NFTs can play a very big role like Starbucks, NFTs that you see.

Reddit is doing very well. The NFTs have many brands will utilize NFTs to, you know, kind of have brand campaigns, which brings them more attention. So these are the only few use cases except finance I have. But in finance, whatever you see in finance, that's a huge, huge market that, sooner or later should, you know, migrate toward blockchain-based financial loans. What needs to happen in order for that to actually take place? Because I totally agree that kind of these are the use cases where blockchain rails 100% make sense. I mean, we're all on Twitter.

We all know it's kind of not gotten better. So, yeah, I mean, I totally agree that basically this would make sense. but why isn't it happening at scale, right? I mean, so basically, if you look at actual users in the ecosystem, it's very few, if any. So basically it's most of us, we're kind of dog-fooding stuff, but no one's kind of, you know, in earnest move to lens or anything. What needs to happen for that is basically, like we keep saying,

and at the start of the recording also we are saying, and this is becoming very popular amongst the VC's that, oh, Deb 3 has. a lot of infrastructure, but then not many apps. But I would argue against that. I don't think that we have actual deterministic scaling infrastructure for blockchains as of yet. We have these separate, separate blockchains.

Today, you can spin up hundreds of blockchains. But then the fundamental point is having that aggregated liquidity or aggregated like value, which then starts getting fragmented and each of these chains or each of these the block spaces are ineffective, you know, end up becoming ineffective databases where the security assumptions are also separate. So what needs to happen according to me is

all these value should have a place to aggregate with each other. Like, you know, all the value should be aggregated with each other across the chains. And the security assumptions need to go down. Like security assumptions, you should be having one single security assumption across all the chains. Right.

Okay. That, you know, the value. cannot be stolen from me and execution cannot be done in a wrong way. And then I think slightly more, slight more thing is basically smart contracts security. Like, you know, we can't afford these many hacks that we go through. But I think that's a kind of a learning cycle that, you know, this whole space is going on.

That's why Ethereum's, you know, ZK, EDM or Solidity, you know, network effects are also very strong because those smart contracts have gone through. and years and years of these hacks and battle testing. Any new blockchain you will bring in, any new blockchain programming language you will bring in, they also have to go through this. And these network effects compound over time.

So I believe that, you know, more security of smart contracts, but yeah, like aggregated liquidity, single security zones for everything. It should feel like one single block space and, you know, more robust smart contracts. So Polygon is probably one of the UK, ecosystems in blockchain that has really strong business development.

And that has been a really big advantage in terms of getting, you know, contracts and sort of getting institutional and larger brands to come and use the platform. That's not the case in every ecosystem. I think there's like a gradient of, you know, kind of centralized, coordinated business development

and really very decentralized, uncoordinated business development. And I would put Polygon, on one end of that and Cosmos in the Interchain on the other. And, you know, avalanche falls in there somewhere, you know, like Solana and Ethereum also do to some extent. In terms of pushing technology forward and having the ability to like build tech that is robust over the long term, you know, which approach do you think will, well, you know, is likely to weigh out? And, you know, one example, I think like one example for the decentralized, more decentralized decision making paradigm is Linux, right?

And like Linux has always been a very decentralized government. You get decentralized in the people who are building on it and also its governance and also like the business development. And it took a really long time, but in the end now after 30 years like Linux is powering most of the world server infrastructure, most of the devices we use on a daily basis. And I think that wasn't obvious that that would be the case like 20 years ago. So yeah, in that context, like, how do you see that playing out? Yes. I think like, you know, there are two parts that I can discuss on the Linux thing. Like, first of all, I think Linux technology was always decentralized and always like open source,

which actually, you know, encouraged a lot of smart or the smartest people in the world to contribute to the operating system levels, whereas like some of the other operating systems were very close source, so they could never attract the talent. In case of blockchain ecosystem, the technology, that level is actually at par. Because, you know, even for Polygon, the technology is open source and it is becoming more and more open source. Like, you know, with ZK and all that, we are also attracting a lot of ZK talent. So I believe that that gets compensated over there. But with with blockchains also, if you see that blockchains, which had a really, mover advantage like VTC and

Ethereum, they kind of survived and you know, build those network effects you know, in those days because there were very few you know, kind of players in the space. But then, you know, now if you see for any blockchain

protocol to get any meaningful traction on it, they will, they need to have some level of distribution because there's just too much noise in the, in the ecosystem. So you need some level of distribution. But I also keep saying to our team, like, for example, Polygon Labs, which is, you know, one of the largest contributors into this Polygon ecosystem. Now, although there is a very large part, like, for example, all of these brand,

you know, brands that keep launching on Polygon, not many people realize that more than 50% or even 60% of them, we don't even know that they're going to launch on Polygon. So now it's become like a kind of a cell propagating machine. But I feel that I keep telling to our Polygon Labs team also that our eventual goal is to kill ourselves. Like we have to take it to a place, but we also keep growing our community and organic stuff and all that, where Polygon Labs at one point in time ceased to exist

or remains a very small contributor. Maybe it still remains a small contributor 10, 20% at that. And all these models of these community-owned businesses, these are being done for the first time in this world. Like, we don't really know how these community owned businesses, right now we're talking about infra, but what will happen to, let's say, a social media application, right, which comes, which is a decent social media application. I think they will always have a nucleus, like, or set of like one or two teams,

which are actually contributing to their core development. Like, even for Bitcoin, you can argue that there is a core developer, Bitcoin core dev ecosystem, same case with Ethereum for development. And then even for the, I think your question is more directed towards the business development. I think for the application layer, you will see that these community-owned businesses, kind of business models will evolve where there will be one or two entities in that ecosystem, which will contribute to the nucleus of that, you know, continuous growth. And then, you know, the community will be contributing from outside.

but at least 20, 30, 40%, you will see these teams. So that's where, like, we also don't really know, we are also playing this, that as this ecosystem evolves, it will be very wrong to say that we have an exact, you know, playbook that's how they are going to do. But if you see most of the current infrastructure protocols, they are all adopting Polygon's playbook. Like, they all are trying to play something similar to what Polygon did.

While we, because slightly being ahead of the curve, like we are now you know kind of as we say progressive decentralization so we are kind of continuously reducing the footprint and increasing the organic footprint but yeah like you know i mean obviously ethereum and cosmos and bitcoin communities are super super like organic communities and you know it's a dream come true for any protocol founder to have that kind of uh community and we have to also change a lot like see when people say you might have heard also a lot of people say you might have heard also a lot of people saying like you know Polygons a business development

ecosystem has been very you know kind of aggressive or kind of very concerted, concentrated and everything but then if you see that where Polygon came from like Polygon didn't come from this Silicon Valley background like it had no like credibility

like people most of for the first two three years people considered Polygon a scam like because it did an IEO on finance and things like that right so it had to fight hard but now we also realize that we have to make it more and more organic and community growth and everything. And then I think ecosystem as a whole is making those changes to become like great communities like cosmos or Ethereum or Bitcoin. So it's a work in progress.

Great. Well, I think that's a great note to end on. Sadie, thanks so much for coming back on the show and sharing the vision for Polygon. I think it's really, really fascinating and also so impressive. the growth of that ecosystem and what you guys have accomplished in the last three years. So I wish you and obviously the Polygon

ecosystem lots of success in building out this vision. So hopefully we could do this again in the next two or three years and Polygon will be even bigger. Hopefully, yes. Thanks, sir. Thanks for Dikip.

Thank you. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the Epicenter podcast. Go to epicenter.tv slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen. And while you're there, be sure to sign up for the newsletter, so you get new episodes in your

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