The Wolf Of All Streets - Polygon Founder Explains When Layer 2 Blockchains Will Explode | Sandeep Nailwail

Episode Date: March 8, 2022

 Ethereum and other Layer 1 blockchains are not ready to scale for mass adoption. This usability problem stems from what is known as the blockchain trilemma - a problem in which a coin has to sacrifice either decentralization, scalability, or security. Layer 2s like Polygon play a pivotal role in solving this problem for good. Thanks to Polygon, Ethereum can potentially scale for the next billion users. According to Sandeep Nailwail, the founder of Polygon, it’s only a matter of time until layer 2s explode, ushering in the network of value. --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co ーーー Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members

What's up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of Wall Street's podcast, where two times every week I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, music, art, trading, sports, basically anyone with a good story to tell. Now, one of the biggest narratives in crypto has been the explosion of layer one and layer two protocols over the past few years, largely because people argue that Ethereum is far too slow and expensive for the everyday person to use. Well, luckily, we have people like today's guest, Sandeep Nailwal, who is the co-founder of Polygon, formerly, of course, known as Matic to those of us who have been around for quite a while,

who are solving those problems in real time and basically making Ethereum usable. So we're going to talk about that, the proliferation of Layer 2s, the solutions that we're going to see in the future to bring Bitcoin, crypto, Layer 1s, Layer 2s, all of it to scale when we have, of course, a billion people using this in the very new future. Sandeep, thank you so much for joining. Thank you so much, Scott, for having me here. So listen, as I touched on in the intro, we've seen this absolute explosion of protocols, largely because of the issues I think that people are seeing with Ethereum. So why create a layer two to improve on Ethereum and not just create your own layer one and compete?

Yeah, so I think like the layer ones are inherently unscalable like any layer one which is selling you that they can scale blockchains and have user interactions on the layer one i think they are not uh you know either they don't understand blockchains properly or they are being honest enough like i'm very clear on that right i mean because you know basically it's it's like you know vitalik mentioned it very clear on that right i mean because you know basically it's a it's like you know vitalik mentioned it very nicely in that uh you know scalability trilemma right like out of out of uh you know scalability security and decentralization you can only choose two of them right and you can't you can't not choose security right you need to have security so then

either of scalability or decentralization you have to choose one more right and then any layer one which is saying that they are slightly more scalable than ethereum they end up end up choosing uh you know scale over decentralization and any layer one which is trying to do let's say uh larger amount of transactions on layer one uh they are either you know not able to fulfill that promise or they are you know extremely centralized or at least they are built in a way which which will make sure that they will never get decentralized enough. And I think the people can guess which protocols I'm talking about here without naming the names. So we are very clear on that, that the layer one can never scale. Now, our thesis of Web3 is that the whole space is going to evolve in a way where Ethereum or one particular layer one, and we strongly believe that 99.99999% it's Ethereum

with its network effects and the way Ethereum ETH as an asset, how ETH has evolved, how the Ethereum network has evolved as a decentralized protocol, how the Ethereum community has evolved so that people like us are are fighting for ethereum like the way it is our own protocol right so ethereum has a very very big advantage and i don't we don't see any other layer one becoming that and we believe that this layer one ethereum is has become the settlement layer of this network of value. See, we are building this network of value here and Ethereum has become the settlement layer and the user activity will never be on layer one. User activity will always happen on these layer twos, who knows, like layer three, layer four kind of. That was my next question.

So we are very clear on that and that's why layer two, not layer one, because that does not make sense. Right. My next question was going to be, okay, we all agree that layer ones can't scale, or at least we do, right? And that's something that I've said for a very long time. The people who obviously are running them will tell you that they can scale to a billion users, but we all know that if they can't even handle the transaction volume now, that they're not going to be able to do that at scale. So are layer twos enough? Like what if we have 2 billion people using crypto or 3 billion people using crypto? Are we really talking about then you have layer twos, effectively layer threes, like a layer two, four polygon, and then

how does it work? Or do we get multiple layer twos that are all settling back on Ethereum? Yes, yes. So you will have this web of like this settlement layer, and then you will have multiple layer twos. And this is our thesis, like nobody knows how it's going to evolve. But you will have this set of layer twos, which settle into Ethereum. And, you know, there can be hundreds of such layer twos. Like with Ethereum, you know, scaling, let's say when Ethereum goes into this, you know, proof of stake mode, there will be some level of scalability. Then eventually, let's say three to five years when we go into full-blown, what do you call like sharded Ethereum where it has 64 shards,

then the scalability increases even further and technically we should be able to ethereum should be able to host hundreds or thousands of these layer twos on top of it where this user activity will happen if and and ideally if blockchains achieve internet level scale especially the zero knowledge based layered layer layer twos they should be theoretically be able to support highly secured layer 3s also, which can be, you know, many of the times these layer 2, layer 3s will be application specific. So if you are Citibank, you might be running your own layer 3, which is or layer 2, which is fully run by you only, and you are just settling those proofs back on Ethereum. So that's where we believe that the scale should come.

And it looks very reasonable also that this is how it should grow. So to be clear, it's your belief that no layer one ever can scale to full mainstream adoption just because of the inherent structure of how they are. So it's always, no matter how far we get along in the technology, it's always going to be dependent

on layer two is being built on top of it. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. No doubt that layer one, you know, are inherently unscalable and layer two and, you know, further layers of, you know, secured scaling is the way to go. You talked about zero knowledge proof. She brought them up.

A lot of ZK people will see ZK snarksarks all these sort of different uh catch phrases for it is what does that look like and how does that make uh the layer ones faster and make this more scalable so with zero knowledge proofs uh i mean basically zero knowledge roll ups uh like let's first talk about zero knowledge roll ups right so zero knowledge-ups the power of zero knowledge cryptography and i'm keeping it extremely you know simple you know in terms of the parlance not getting into the technical details but the way zero knowledge technology is is built or zero knowledge cryptography is built is that you know once a particular zk circuit which circuit, which is expected to have a certain kind of logic has been deployed on Ethereum and, you know, eventually people are putting proofs back

on Ethereum, there is no way that the operator of this zero knowledge rollup can, you know, do fraudulent activity on that and still be able to put up valid enough proof. Compare this to optimistic roll-ups. In optimistic roll-ups, the operator can actually put a fraudulent checkpoint or proof, but that's why optimistic roll-ups have something called fraud proofs. Fraud proofs means that and that's why these are called optimistic, where you assume optimistically assume that the transactions are right. But if something goes wrong, then you have fraud proofs. And that's why optimistic rollups have seven day withdrawal period. Why? Because you're optimistically assuming everything is right. And if something is wrong, you need to give ample time to people or the community to challenge it, right? With ZK rollup, that is not a possibility

at all because ZK rollups use validity proofs. If the proof has been submitted on Ethereum, then it has been accepted. That means that is a valid proof and there is no way that any fraudulent activity has been done. That's why on ZK rollups, the withdrawal periods can be as less as 10 minutes or even less if the rollup is actually putting the transactions. So that's one part, right? So withdrawal periods and everything is small and all that. But one key benefit that ZK rollups also offer is because the validators cannot do any kind of fraudulent activity with the zk proof

what you can do is you don't need to submit the data back on ethereum with optimistic rollups you have to do both the things because you are expecting that some proof can happen so you have to put the proofs as well as the data back on ethereum so that if some something is wrong you can match it with the data with zero knowledge because those fraudulent proofs cannot be submitted at all you you don't need the data on on layer one you just can put that data in a layer two or kind of like you know other data availability layer right so the moment you do that now you you can have a hundred like ten thousand transactions or a thousand transactions in the zk rollup and these are called validiums,

right? Like this is a new flavor of ZK rollup, which is validium where they off-chain data availability and proofs on Ethereum. So then if you have, let's say this rollup becomes popular enough, then you can have 10,000 or 1,000 transactions, put one proof back on ZK and you don't need to put the data. You just put the data somewhere else. So the cost of putting the proof back on Ethereum does not grow linearly. In case of optimistic rollup,

when you are putting the proof, you have to put the data also. So if the data is increasing, you are putting 100 transactions, 500,000 transactions, the data also keeps increasing linearly. But with ZK rollup, you just have to put one proof which is standard like stable

like in terms of its cost. And tiny. Yeah. And not tiny, ZK proof are still like fairly heavy. I would say that they will be gas intensive. But you have a fixed cost for the proof. And then the data can go,

you can use an off-chain data availability layer, which can be very cheap and you can dump all the data over there. So that's why the cost can be very low over there. So it sounds like it's very fair to say we're still really early in figuring this out, right? I mean, this is all that if we want a billion people keep kind of coming back to that, then we're going to keep needing to innovate

and find new solutions and improve on all these things. I mean, even you guys, of course, you're faster, cheaper than Ethereum, but you've even had moments where you had gas fees rise and slower transactions, right? I remember the Sunflower Farmers example, right? Can you talk about what happened there? And for you guys, obviously, who are always generally have been faster and cheaper, how that stopped for that temporary amount of time. Correct. Correct. So two things like before that, on the ZK side, as you were saying that, you know, like if you ask me, ZK technology is going at such a fast rate that, you know, if you ask the same question to me 12 months back, I would say, yes, it's still not been figured out. But in the last 12 months, and even we are surprised, to be honest, like recently we had our, you know, monthly reviews with especially the Hermes team. And, you know, as per them and the improvement that we see, we actually, you know, now thinking of pre-poning some of our launches because, you know, some of the breakthroughs that have been done, you know, are actually moving at a very fast pace.

So that's one part. Second part is that, you know, before we get into the sunflower situation, we have to see and for people who have done some sort of technical programming and all that, or even normally you would understand that you know in early 2000s before this cloud came and all that when you had a small website you always kept it in a shared server shared server was that one server was running 100 small small websites because each of them has less traffic so you can actually rent that you know shared server and once your website started growing beyond a particular

you know user base then you actually move it into a dedicated server now if you see blockchains today like these composable blockchains that are you know that are their public blockchains these are all akin to shared servers where you have these servers which are shared that means these chains which are shared and That means these chains which are shared and there are 10,000 applications on that chain, which is true for, let's say, Ethereum also. Like some days, like some airdrop is happening and, you know, the gas goes crazy.

Right. One NFT release can freeze the whole chain. Because the reason is the same. Because you are having this much capacity and a thousand applications are using it. If one of them start becoming big on a particular day then it will consume all the resources that is exactly what happened with the with sunflower also and in that case there was one more thing that they did wrongly and that's why like you know they had to take down their application they took down their game the what they did is and and you know polygon blockchain worked as it is

expected expected as it was expected to run so they designed the game mechanics or their token mechanics in a way where you can do one transaction and let's say you know the gas fees you want to you you you want to pay two two cents but in that doing that two cent transaction you can get five cent of that token. Right. So it becomes a profitable trade. Right. So then you run a bot and you keep doing over and over transactions over and over and over till the time you mine so many tokens that, you know, that token and you dump those tokens into the market. Some bot people did that. And then at one point in time, the price of the token became so

much suppressed that doing this transaction at two cents did not, did not make much sense. Then that activity subsided. And they also realized that they had built the game mechanics in a wrong way. That's why they took out the game. And then now they are building an improved version of it, you know, which will have better game mechanics in that sense. Right. But like, you know, like if you have a rent, obviously you don't control necessarily any blockchain, like what's being launched, right? So what if five humongously popular NFT projects all decide to launch on the same day without communicating with each other? I'm not talking about this inherently to you, but on any blockchain. Any shared blockchain, this is bound to happen.

But one more interesting thing, even though if the SunFarm, even the gas fees increased, even then the gas fees was five to 10 cents, right? 10 cents means in $1, you can do 10. Still vastly small gas fees, I would say on Polyvore, right? So even if that happens- Yeah, if you're talking about on Ethereum, you're like, I was paying 50 and now I'm paying a thousand, right? So, you know, even if that happens. If you're talking about on Ethereum,

you're like, I was paying 50 and now I'm paying a thousand, right? I mean, it's a vastly different comparison. So it's a percentage gain, but it's still a minimal gas fee, almost nothing. That's the power of layer twos. Like even if some of those layer twos will get extremely congested, you know,

then the gas fees ideally should not be that high, especially if you are going to build like these ZK rollups, right? So Validium specifically. So listen, I've been following Polygonmatic forever. I'm an early investor. I've been holding the token forever. You guys have not had the easiest path, right? Obviously, before the rebrand, you had that massive move to the upside and then it felt like it was in a day, maybe roughly 70 percent dump.

Right. And I mean, a lot of people, I think sentiment was that you were left for dead, that it was a pump and dump. There was some sort of scam. Obviously, now we talk about you guys raising a half a billion dollars from Sequoia and Mark Cuban. It's got to be the craziest trajectory of any project, basically in crypto. How does that all happen? Yeah. I mean, at that point, like, I think that was the, you know, that was a very painful point for us because we, at that point also, like you, you have been watching, you know, Polygon team, we have always focused on fundamentals that how much adoption is coming on Polygon, you know, what kind of solutions we are building and everything. And that point in time, it was like such a big, you know, shock and a sad time for us, wherein, you know, like we are working

this hard, and suddenly, we lost a lot of credibility. Like if you see, you know, Scott, at that point in time, this was like 2019 and we have, we were still in fairly deep beer market. Right. And only one, you know, like Matic was Matic as a coin, like was loved by the market. Like, you know, it was one of the only few things which, which used to be very much sort of, you know, had some community love going on for it. And suddenly that happened and we were like, you know, like we, I mean, that was one of the biggest blows. But immediately when that happened and once I, you know, woke up and saw, oh, this has happened. And then we reached out to Binance and CZ posted that, you know, this is not Polygon, somebody else would have done it and

all that. And then we also also posted immediately i told to the team that you know we are we are doing something very big our problems are also going to be big so don't worry we'll sort it out and after that like i think the the revival journey from there like which took us probably one more year from there like december 12 to december uh you know 2020 end of 2020 uh you know from december 2020 2019 to 2020 like that one year we you know 2020 end of 2020 you know from December 2020 2019 to 2020 like that one year we you know did so much hard work on all the fronts like I mean actually now if you see that was kind of a blessing in disguise because you know because nothing of nothing of Polygon and I think you also you also posted that Polygon, like the whole Twitter, crypto Twitter

was sleeping on Matic. Like a lot of people used to say this. I even bought it after that. I actually, I bought it after that 70% dip and waited. Like I didn't think it was dead, right? I'd follow you guys forever. I bought it, yeah. Yeah, so I think like, you know,

that event or incident actually, you know, made us work so hard for next one year. So that, so that we accumulated so much of fundamental value that when the community finally with, with the, I think in November, when the Trump election happened and polymarket actually polymarket application absolutely blew up. And then, you know, Vitalik also started talking about it and all that. And then, you know, we, you know, did the rebrand and, you know, increased, enhanced our vision and all that. And then the explosion that happened is also like one of the craziest explosion, you know, in the crypto space. We did like 200x or something like that without like, I mean, like a straight six months, like, you know. A hockey stick. Yeah, it's crazy. I've enjoyed every, I mean, like a straight six months, like, you know, hockey stick. Yeah, it's crazy.

I've enjoyed every, I've enjoyed every second of that personally as an investor, but what's, I don't even know how to necessarily pose this question, but it, that situation and seeing that trajectory kind of makes you question the relationship between a product, a project's fundamental value, what they're building and how the coin can just be absolutely destroyed by trading and leverage and it wasn't even actually being traded with leverage at that point i don't think i think that was a spot driven incident right i mean somebody just that was a leverage that was a leverage driven leverage yes yes i think so but like so how do you how do? You have your community, you're building this thing that's could be a earth changing,

world changing technology, but then you have to worry about what traders are doing with it. But see like, you know, which other industry also, you have to see that which other industry you get to go, you know, public on day zero, right? Like, you know, there you have to go, you know, see around private round, this, that, this, that. And then, you know, after 10 years, you go to go, you know, seed round, private round, this, that, this, that. And then, you know, after 10 years, you go public here. You are able to go to public, start getting your community involved from day zero.

And then you have this token tragedy. Like, you know, let's say if you are day zero, you are 200 million valuation and 50% of tokens is for community. Then you have $100 million in tokens to be distributed to the community to acquire more and more users to acquire more and more traction so there are benefits to this uh you have aligned incentives right of course yeah it's better it's just it's definitely a better system i don't think there's any question it's very painful and hard but it's it's it's worth it like it's it's worth the pain and uh i mean both like you know the traditional startup journey is also good uh and i think in crypto we are seeing like a you know

kind of a mix and match of these two things now if you see the most successful products or tokens are those where they have a product and you know it already has users and all that and now then they launch their token with airdrop and you know like all those things to the users and then the token comes and those tokens end up doing very well in the market right i think we are reaching at a equilibrium point slowly and steadily where good projects will be slightly better but of course there will be you know this this has like a casino there will be some you know like shape point kind of projects will also keep coming but the point being that yeah uh but but as you said that there is a dissonance between the fundamentals of a project and the value of the token i think it is actually on both sides like on the upward side also

sometimes you see some some projects who have nothing and they have like two three billion dollar valuation and uh you know sadly it's on the downside or I mean the other direction also. So, you know, I think it's a part and parcel of the- Yeah, it works both ways. And I think it's an evolution of the way that, you know, projects or companies are able to raise funds. It's obviously better.

You know, your average person can participate as opposed to being locked out where only the rich and accredited investors can be a part of it. But speaking of rich and accredited investors can be a part of it. But speaking of rich and accredited investors, you guys, you know, had a $450 million investment led by Sequoia, which I mentioned before. Mark Cuban is a huge fan and investor. How did that happen? Well, I mean, see, with most of these, you know, investors, actually, I would say that was very easy to do. The reason for that is like many of these guys,

like for example, Mark Cuban himself uses Polygon pretty extensively. His platform like lazy.com is also built on Polygon. And, you know, there are many things like that. Like today, the scene is that the VCs, when they are talking to the teams, you know, six or seven out of 10 times, a team approaches them and they ask them, where are you building a product?

They end up saying that they are building on Polygon, right? And then, you know, many or three or four times it's exclusive on Polygon. And then other two times it's like, you know, they are multi-chain, but Polygon is a part of their configuration, right? So the thing that I'm trying to say is that many of these investors, they already knew about the traction of Polygon, right? So it was not that difficult for us, to be honest. In fact, if we wanted to and we had kept going, we could raise like 650, 700 million, whatever. We've seen that. Yeah, it's crazy.

But, you know, like we had to say no beyond a certain time, you know, wanted to keep it only to a certain extent. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy when you watch what's happening in the VC space with web three. I mean, it's like, someone's like, I'm going to raise 500 million. And then they're like, Oh, there is 900 because they were over subscribed. I mean, everybody wants to get their money into Web3 in some way, shape or form, right? So like, as you touched on, it almost feels like you're choosing your investor and saying no to people in this space rather than going out and trying to roadshow and raise money and find money. It's a unique, cool position to kind of be in.

Absolutely, yeah. It's absolutely crazy in here. Yeah. So we're talking about getting to full in. Absolutely. Yeah. It's absolutely crazy in here. Yeah. So we're talking about getting to full scale. Like we all love the idea DeFi could replace the global financial system, NFTs of the future, metaverse gaming that requires billions of people using these. We already talked about the fact that none of the layer ones can scale. How robust, how many layer twos, how many layer threes are they all going to be built by you or

you're going to have 99 competitors and there'll be a hundred of you and you'll be just one of them what does that look like when we get to billions of users what does this ecosystem look like i mean see the polygons thesis is this only right we are a multi-chain layer too so right from the get-go right and that too not only multi-chain but multi- right from the get-go. And that too, not only multi-chain, but multi-approach. That's why we are not building one ZK roll-up, we are building four different ZK roll-up. One of them is enterprise with Ernst & Young, but Polygon, Hermes, Xero, and Myden.

These three are different flavors of ZK roll-ups. Similarly, we are building a data availability chain. We are also building Polygon Edge, which is a competitor to, let's say, Polkadot Substrate or Cosmos SDK, where you can launch your own chains. So we want to be present across the spectrum for the

scaling of the settlement layer that we talked about, which is Ethereum. And the idea is that Polygon itself should have hundreds of chains, if not thousands in the coming, you know, few years. Man, I don't know how you guys, much bigger brains than me is all I can say. It's almost impossible to envision at scale if I think you're not deep down in the weeds.

It's just... I mean, the number of applications, like the whole world wants to come to FF3. Like, you know, like, I mean, one year back when we had our first 10 applications, I was thinking that how do we go to 50 applications? Then we went to 30 and 40 applications. And I was thinking, okay, how do we go to 100 application? And then suddenly like in one one month we went to from 30 to 100 and then from 100 to 500 and then you know within six to eight months nine months we went to

5000 applications today like you know as per alchemy and infura we have like polygon has more than 10 000 applications so the scale when it comes it you know comes, it comes slowly. But then once it, you know, like hockey stick growth, like picks up on a particular technology, it's crazy. So, you know, we can't even know millions of users into into blockchains right I mean talk about going from 50 to 100 a thousand all the way to 50,000 is there a point where that breaks where it's just too many or is it just you find solutions as it scales see that's why you need horizontal scaling like if you have one chain where all of the users are there it will break but if you have tens of such chains which are interacting with ethereum and ethereum is ultra

stable right then you know you can have uh distributed uh you know scaling over there so if you see polygon is nothing but a horizontal sharding ecosystem, all of them connecting to Ethereum. If you see, what is Ethereum 2.0? There's a beacon chain, and then there are 64 shards. Think of Polygon in that direction. It's Ethereum, which is the beacon chain. And then you have hundreds of these rollups or layer twos or side chains or whatever it is on top of Ethereum. Love it. So the one thing we haven't talked about yet, which maybe should be considered your greatest accomplishment, believe it or not, is crypto relief. Can you talk a bit about that? It's absolutely huge. You've raised a massive amount of money to help people around the world.

Can you talk about what that is and why you did that? So, I mean, this was inil 2021 when the delta wave the delta variant hit india very badly and uh you know i mean everybody around us was getting covid positive and then you know i mean i don't know even a single person who who doesn't know some friend or some family member or some extended family member who did not perish in that in that whole wave and you know same with me also like you know I also got the COVID and my family my grandma my parents got COVID and all that and you know I was in a kind of that's what was time I went into kind of a belligerent mode where I like you know like screw this virus like you know

I mean not only I'm going to fight and help fight my family out of it but also fight my country out of it so that's when like i made a simple tweet like i made a simple multisig wallet and tweeted that you know i want to you know i will take the responsibility of transparency and everything because this money is going into india and india very, you know, generally not very welcoming to crypto. And that blew up like absolutely like, you know, I mean, in first 24 hours, we got like a million dollars. And then, you know, probably in the first week, we got $10 million donation, mostly coming from Vitalik. And then Vitalik donated that, you know, $1 billion of Shiba coin. He thought that it would be like, you know,

in actuality, $10 to $15 million. But, you know, the way it played out, Shiba Inu community also helped, you know, Polygon, like helped this ecosystem a lot. And they were like, many of them were very positive. They took it very positively. Generally retail communities, you know, Which is crazy because

for people who don't know i mean ship basically blindly sent these coins to vitalik's public wallet he sold them and sent them to relief in india they viewed it as a token burn and he actually sold them or some of them yeah so i mean but the way shiba inu community overall took it so positively that okay we were thinking like i saw so many tweets that we were thinking that we are participating in some meme coin, but we are actually now, Shiba will be used to do some actual good. So, you know, people took it positively

and that's the community spirit, I think, in crypto, which, you know, sets it apart from any other industry in the world. But didn't you have to send Vitalik back a huge part of his donation? And why was that? I mean, we, in total, we got like $470 million and we had deployed, even till now we had deployed like $75 million and Vitalik and me keep discussing that, you know,

how can we put this money even in a more faster mode into India and all that. And because I being an Indian citizen, it can be extremely, you know, regulatory wise, I'm saying it can be extremely challenging for me because we all know like, you know, most of the scams in India also, like it's very prevalent that a lot of the non-profit NGOs and all that end up doing shady things, right?

Of course, everywhere. I'm getting this money from crypto. And if I'm being, you know, careless and I deploy this money very, very fast into, you know, some NGOs and this reaches wrong hands, you know, even one single case, even though I deployed $100 million, even $10,000 lands in wrong hands. And, you know, whole uh barrage of uh regulatory scrutiny can come to me right so i told vitalik that you know i mean i can't do i can't deploy this like you know extremely fast as you might expect but you being an external citizen you can donate it to india nobody can touch you right so it's much better you take this 100 million back so we still the the ecosystem it's much better you take this 100 million back. So we still

the ecosystem fund, the crypto relief fund still has 100 million or $300 million with it. And we are doing like big things like setting up a hospital and a virology institute in India and so many big things that we are doing in India with that money. It's incredible to see the community come together. We're seeing the same thing in Ukraine, right? And in Canada. Yours was kind of the first huge example of this. But when all else fails, we're seeing crypto easily get through to people and helping them on the ground in terrible situations. I mean, isn't that the whole point? Bitcoin is establishing its utility as an unstoppable currency. Especially with this Russia situation, I'm hearing that all this buying right now that is coming in,

that is coming from some of these Russia or related countries around, that they are not trusting their local currency at all and, you know, buying in droves Bitcoin. So I think, yeah, it's very, you know, interesting to see. And the similar thing happened after the, you know, COVID, the March 2020, you know, this thing also, it is kind of becoming a hedge against the fiat currency. And that dream is coming true slowly. So before we finish, should people still be fearful of India banning or coming down in some manner heavy handedly on crypto? Because that's obviously one of our back and forth narratives. Yeah, not banning. i don't think india is going to ban crypto all right uh you know um uh you know

completely but definitely uh you know they are going to impose a lot of regulation a lot of reporting requirements and everything uh you know to make initially at least like to for for the average individuals to get into crypto you know make it very difficult um but uh you know like i mean i i'm i'm totally uh i totally understand where government is coming from because india has this huge history of being cash dominant uh economy where there's a rampant black marketing and all that like black money and all that is there and uh you know these recent governments have done a lot of good work to bring information technology and bring things to the books and suddenly you introduce crypto and boom like everything everything all your systems you know

have no value no you know kind of control and all that so they will keep doing this stuff until they figure out the model that they need to interact with crypto. But I think one big problem that governments will need to understand and I think it will take time, but in coming years, they will soon reach a realization point where they will start realizing that this crypto actually not only disrupts money but it also is going to disrupt governments completely right uh and and you know that's that's going to be one another uh you know big uh kind of change that needs to be seen in coming you know decade or so because i think we're starting to see it but it yeah it kind of takes out the biggest thing that government controls

which is the which is the currency, because using that, they also get into taxation and all that. So if they lose monetary control and trackability with these privacy technologies coming in and all that, then how do they control fiscal policies? And once that goes off the window then uh you know only two things that remain with them which is infrastructure building and security and uh you know i think infrastructure building also of the part of the government can also be uh you know kind of privatized i think a lot of capitalist countries have have that like they have privatized

infrastructure providers so that also is not really a government's task. So only the security will remain as the main task of government. Everything else, you know, will move into, so crypto has a potential to disrupt everything else. So, you know, I mean, we are in for a ride for next 10, 20 years. It could be a very different world. I was going to say, the moral of the story, concluding the conversation here is that it's going to be a crazy uh decade and we have a lot to look forward to as all of this sort of scales and becomes adopted so where can everybody follow you after after this conversation and keep up with what's happening at polygon i am like you can follow zero x polygon uh our main handle uh from uh you know where most of

the things are they are broadcasted by the community. And then I am available at the Red Sandeep Nalwal, my full name on Twitter. Thank you so much for doing this. As I said before we even started recording, this was long overdue. We'd been trying to get this on the books for a long time. I'm glad we finally got to have this conversation. I look forward to doing it again,

maybe, I don't know, a year down the road because I have a feeling it'll look completely different again. Yes. Yes. Let's make sure that it should look, it looks completely different. You know, as you said, again, yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Scott, for always, you know, being supportive of Polygon. And then thank you so much for having me here. My pleasure.