Ex-Stripe Exec: How To Win The Trillion Dollar Stablecoin Wars

Transcript

I think that very sort of simple future changes everything about the way that we interact, you know, not just with the convenience store, but the way we interact with global markets and frankly the way we interact with each other. Um, and so, you know, I think I think that world is probably closer than I think a lot of folks in traditional finance realize. Um, and I'm excited about trying to make it happen faster. How do you think about the strategy that Polygon is employing to ultimately bring a lot of liquidity and and and be the hub and the home for a lot of these stable coins? What is what is the strategy for Polygon?

>> Welcome back to the rollup. This is your home to learn from the biggest guests, the brightest minds at the tip of innovation. Our goal is to help spread the collective knowledge of everyone in our community. >> We are breaking crypto out of its echo chamber and taking it to the real world. Sit back, relax, and enjoy it. >> Welcome back to Money Moves Fast. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with John Egan, one of the recently hired uh people over at Polygon as the chief product officer. A long storied history in the space, uh also coming from Stripe, some experience at Y Combinator.

We're going to get through all of that. It is an absolute pleasure to welcome John to the show. Thanks so much for coming on, John. Thanks for having me, Rob. >> Absolutely. Um, Jonas, your first time on the show. Uh, this was there was there was quite a bit of noise when when Polygon hired you because Stripe kind of has their uh inner dealings in the in the crypto space with payments as well, the rise of stable chains and stable coins certainly hot right now. Um, I'd love to start with a little bit on your background. maybe you could just tell us tell us your story where you came from how you ended up uh at Polygon and why you chose Polygon to bring your talents.

>> My background is is primarily in you know tooling, enterprise tooling, consumer tooling, product building. Um I had a Y Combinator startup that was doing high-speed data transport um that got acquired by Facebook. I ran a lot of the internal uh information tooling at Facebook ultimately building the workplace product out in London. I ran news for a little while over there from a local standpoint here in New York while Trump was getting elected, which is pretty wild. Um, and uh, and I left and I came into the crypto space for a little while with a startup of my own that was doing uh, wallets and NFTts early on. Um, you really learned about it from a from a developer on my team at Facebook who was just super excited about Ethereum and got me really excited about it. Um, and then uh then ultimately got to Stripe because after

that startup, I wanted to stay really close to crypto and the ecosystem, but I really felt like there was a gap between, you know, sort of tradi and merchants and payments and like what all of this amazing stuff that was happening in the crypto ecosystem. And Stripe just felt like the right place to go. Um, it felt like an organization that had like a long list of uh of merchant relationships. It's a technology company that's building into payments as opposed to just sort of a payments company that's trying to add technology. Um, and you know, I showed up there probably at the at the bottom of crypto sentiment inside of the organization. This was just after the FTX collapse. And you know, at the time we weren't really sure inside of Stripe like what we were going to do with crypto, you know, whether or

not it was going to have much of a future. and you know put together a really great team over there and we just took kind of crypto and we made it as close to Stripe's native vision as we could. Um we ultimately built out the the crypto payments capabilities, the payouts capabilities. Um you know ultimately stable uh coin storage accounts which started to allow Stripe to be available globally. Um and then you know all of this sort of topped off as sentiment started to increase and as as usage started to skyrocket with the acquisitions of um Bridge and Privy which were quite recent. Um and I think everything after that's actually pretty pretty good public record. You know up until then I think it's it's it's a little bit of a hidden story and we can dig more into it. And so, listen, with all of this happening and everything

going, you know, super well, you know, Stripe really leaning into the space, the whole world really leaning in, you know, I just wanted to get as close to the metal as I could. And Polygon was the first stable coin chain that we ever integrated at Stripe. And so, I always knew the team. And when I sort of did my own due diligence around the space and like, okay, where can I go personally really allin on this? Um, you know, I talked to a number of chains, I'll be honest about it. And uh and with Polygon, it's felt like a very strong brand, the right technology stack, um the right placement uh and iteration and progress in the payment space. Seemed to have a wonderful right to win, which I believe really strongly in. Um got to know Sandeep and Mark and Mudet and all of the players over there. And it was

just a I have to tell you the truth, it was a natural fit. >> Um and so, you know, kind of capped off this this this rocket ship of a of a run at Stripe. Um, and now over here at Polygon and feel like I'm doing a little bit of the inverse. You know, at Stripe, we were kind of taking a non-crypto organization and mapping it towards the crypto future. Here we're taking a very cryptonative organization and mapping it onto, you know, payments, which is one of the most traditional, you know, ecosystems in the world. So really, really excited to be here. I feel the same way I did the day that I joined Stripe, which is there's a great right to win, a great brand, um, and the the future just feels bright. It it's incredible consistency because I think you're right. This is two very different

paths of ultimately arriving at a similar place and and maybe you can you can attest to this going back to uh one of the early startups that you had. You you got into crypto very early like you said 2011 and and so there was always that vision of what crypto could be and what you envisioned for the future of payments. And I'm sure you you held that vision when you were at Stripe and you were working towards that. And now coming from a different angle, you're still working towards what that future for payments involving crypto, what that looks like. So maybe just starting broad level and then we'll dig in. Could you just describe to us what is that vision that you have that that endgame for

payments with crypto? What what are some of some of the characteristics of that of that system that you envision? and then we'll talk maybe about how how it es and flows depending on the perspective that you're coming at it from. >> Yeah, for sure. Um, if I back it up just a little bit, you know, to when I was originally attracted, you know, into programmable money, you know, if we want to kind of call it that space, I was really excited about this idea of an open access global network, right, for moving money around and for transacting and and frankly at very deep down just connecting people. If you want to map back to kind of life at Facebook, right, we were building this graph of interconnectivity and uh crypto networks felt like doing that but out in the

open. And what that really meant is it meant not just kind of creating these connectivity layers that would let people move value between each other, but ultimately um making access to that network as low barrier as possible. Um I've had an opportunity in my life to live in a couple of different countries. Um you move quite often with my family. you know, the the the practical challenges of accessing money. You know, even in the first world as you jump between countries is incredibly high. You find yourself, you know, sitting in in these kind of dark and scary rooms and banks justifying your right to open an account. Um, you know, I remember when I was I was in the UK, the cheapest way to move money from the US was to walk up to an ATM, take money out of my US account, take two steps to the right

to the depository, you know, at the local HSBC, put the put the cash back in. And that was like the best FX rate that I could get, you know, just the silliness of like what it took to just move money from point to point. Um, and I guess the the the opportunity to a fix that problem for myself, you know, and make make it easier as I live my life to move around and b in doing so fix this problem for the world, which is that everyone should have access to interconnectivity through finance. And if you want to send money to, you know, Africa or you want to send money, you know, to Asia, it shouldn't be any more difficult than making a payment at your local convenience store. And that just I think too if you if you approach the whole space from first principles, you

know, if we were building the money system today, that's exactly what we would do. And it would sound a bit absurd for it to be anything but that. But because we've we've absorbed so much like long-term technical debt, the world isn't like that. So when I think about like my vision for the future, I'm really excited about this idea of a consistent complexity network that stretches globally that allows individuals to transact with each other at will um at whatever volumes and needs they desire and the intermediary players, you know, within the smart contracts and sort of the merchants are all able to compete on a very what I call fair playing field of um value that they can then offer. And I I think I think that very sort of simple future

changes everything about the way that we interact, you know, not just with the convenience store, but the way we interact with global markets and frankly the way we interact with each other. Um, and so, you know, I think I think that world is probably closer than I think a lot of folks in traditional finance realize. Um, and I'm excited about trying to make it happen faster. >> Relay, low fees, lightning speed, and the power of multi-chain at your fingertips. Instant multi-chain payments. Choose any token on any chain. 75 plus network supported. More than 5 million users. 8 billion plus volume processed. 70 million plus transactions.

Fast, reliable everywhere. Start swapping today. Only on Relay. Blockchain shortcuts, templates, and widgets. Launch without friction for builders by builders. Visit enso.build. The wait is over. The Talis testnet is live. Be part of the revolution. Join now at testnet.talis.network. >> I I think about this concept as we continue to improve the technology and we we continue to learn more about markets in general. I I I have this description for it. I call it this market entropy. Maybe there's a better term for it, but it's this tendency that markets have to get more efficient. It's almost like this liquidity is bottled

up. And you know, if you if you kind of unleash it, it flows just naturally. It'll it'll kind of break its container and free form to whatever you know, it its shape is. And that's kind of where where I feel like markets are headed where we've kind of kept them bottled up in this Monday through Friday, 9 to5 container. And now we're opening up that to a much much broader and bigger place. And we're going to see liquidity just just spread out amongst all of these markets. And and as these things get more efficient, we're going to remove intermediaries. We're going to end up passing a lot of cost savings back to the consumer and unlocking a lot more value.

When you think about the capital efficiency at scale here and you think about the value that you're providing, the ease of access and the convenience and and I think you called it this fair this fair playing field and and this consistent complexity amongst these different markets. What do you think are some of the the things that are unlocked? Is it is it just greater financial access? Is it more more job opportunities? Maybe maybe just sound off on on on where you see these these this thing going and the knock-on effects as a result of these >> money access and and money movement is at the root of most things that we do in our lives, right? So, when we talk about what it unlocks, it's very easy to just sort of take a take a purist view and say, well, it unlocks just about everything. But I think maybe backing up

a little bit and thinking about, you know, what it sort of means for this technology layer to really take hold will kind of help us get to the get to the answer to that story. You know, I actually like this metaphor of thinking about like early days of email, right? In the early days of email, it was obvious why email was better to try to get a message from, you know, your home maybe in in the states to someone in India. It's clearly faster, right? But for a pretty long time, it wasn't actually clear that it was faster to send uh get a message to your neighbor that way, right? And so, as these technologies consistently improve, we start to get the more cl clear like access to this like early stage visibility of technology. I think we're kind of there right now with uh with

stable coins. And I think what it unlocks is very similar, you know, in the early days of um of email, right? Like international crossber like messaging got a lot easier. Um, but I think that's like that's sort of one of the interesting things about the trends around this is we'll have an effect at all layers of the stack of money movement and that is like largecale sort of global institutional money movement that's everyday human like to human money movement and then that's ultimately going to be like programmatic small scale pay as you go money streaming right that needs to happen at the like percent per subset layer. I think all of those spaces get affected by a singular technology layer that can cover each one as opposed to us having to abstract each

one into sort of a product set that makes it make sense to normal people like you and me. And what this creates is a need for fast lightweight blockchains and and not just things that can scale when it when times are tough, but always because if we're going to put the financial system, it's all composable with one another that is all one big unified system and and it works in tandem with things happening currently onchain, offchain. These are currently fragmented systems across, you know, several industries globally.

I I want to get into one of the biggest upgrades for Polygon when it comes to payments. They've been investing a lot in this area. They hired you. They're making upgrades to their tech. And so they're they're approaching the scale of hundreds of thousands of TPS. I guess my first question is maybe you could you could illuminate what Rio is and what it means for this system in general, but then also 100k TPS or more. is that what is enough to really take the existing system that is inefficient and put it into a con a world that makes a lot more sense for modern finance.

>> Yep. Um so Rio is super exciting just to get started. Uh and you know I I I wish I could take credit for Rio. I haven't been at Polygon long enough to be able to do that. Um, I think that Polygon or that Rio is the most kind of exciting payments upgrade that we've seen because it does two things. It brings this sort of immediate upside of lighter weight nodes, higher reliability, faster finality, you know, uh, uh, lower cost and and increased TPS, right? Just just out of the box, those things are there. But under the hood, these technology upgrades also lay the groundwork for the scaling that it's going to take. You you were just saying it to get to like a 100,000 TPS and be beyond. And you know, it's it's it's hard to imagine just how

much volume we're going to ultimately have to fit on chain in the in the future. And you know, is 100,000 enough? You probably in the medium term. you know, I it's it's it's unlikely we're going to go saturate that in the next year. Um, but when we really think about moving, you know, information and the payments related to that information movement birectionally on chain, you know, this will be when we look back in 10 years, this will be step one. Um, because we're going to start to see, you know, as as cost drops, it's hard to call things gashes, right? We'll fill the space rapidly fill the space.

developers are so good at this. You give them a platform that's cap more capable and they will come up with reasons to fill it and it will be reasons that we didn't expect. You know, we we'll talk a lot about real uh real world payments, you know, sort of everyday payments which which I care a lot about right now. A lot of great human stories behind remittances, you know, how you move money back home to family when you've moved overseas or like local payments. How do you make a payment in a stable currency in a country that isn't otherwise stable? like these are very real immediate needs we need to go and solve today with the expanded um transaction ca transaction capacity but when we look around the corner and we start to think about you know AI and agentic and programmatic payments you

know today I think we're still thinking about the world as I make a payment you deliver me a service I make a payment you deliver me a service I think it's pretty clear what's coming around the corner is that it's going to be pay as you go for almost everything right So you deliver me service and I pay you as you deliver it to me, right? And not only that, but a birectional pipe where you might also be returning value back to me for the way that I'm interacting with the service. Um, great example of this is I will pay for access to data, right, when I'm searching or trying to discover things or whoever my broker is might pay for that, the agent. Um, but then on the flip side of that, you know, sellers will pay for access to me, right? or

like pay rewards back to me for interacting with them. And if you take this down, you can initially say, well, you know, it's $5 here, $10 there, $20 there. But like the more exciting way to think about it is, you know, per bit, right? Movement of data, you know, payments. And we've never really gotten to think of the world that way. If anyone who's run a business and has had to wait for their AWS bill, like knows how like how much of a sort of delayed shock you get with kind of interaction with these types of services. And AI today is that times 100 because the way tokens work if you're building a startup is you're pre- buying these tokens and you're spending them down and you're pre- buying and you're spending them down. Um and even even what we've built so far for Agentic feels that way. So I

think we're we're clearly going to eventually get to a world where that's not how it works, right? where it is my degree of interaction with a business or a data broker or an agent will just stream you know value out of my wallet or stream value back to me as I produce it and and that that's going to require you know clearly a capacity you know that starts to approach this whole gigas vision of like hundreds of thousands of transactions per second so you know it's like bandwidth how much bandwidth is enough right for I think this is going to cover us for a for a pretty long time but there's there's more to go Someone made the analogy just the other day about how uh the the equivalent of this would be, you know, like a a YouTube

video. Imagine you're paying uh upfront for the amount of bandwidth that you're going to uh use when you consume this YouTube video. It's just the mechanics of the system don't currently make sense. And so streaming, especially as you described the the AI agentic economy, this is where it really comes into play. And this is where we can connect a lot of these services so that they're a lot more predictable. And I think this goes all the way to the top of the way that money is is created and then flowing through the economy. I can just imagine, you know, the the the interest rate environment, the the way that money is flowing between regional banks and large banks. this all becomes more efficient and and therefore more

predictable as we're able to uh lower settlement times and and open up access. And so um a little bit more on the technical side. I'm just curious when when you think about like oneb block finality subsecond settlement I is this are these some of the technical things that you're aiming for? And and another framing here, and this was based off a conversation we had just earlier in today's live stream, is this idea that some of the large incumbent payment networks, they may have distribution.

Large banks have have lots of uh networks that they've tapped into and they have that distribution. But the the cryptonative teams that have seen where this is headed and they've skated to where the puck is going, they may have uh the advantage when it comes to the tech. So when when you're looking at Polygon stack and and you kind of see the the sub-second finality, the one block uh um finality, what are where do you think the advantage really lies? Do you think distribution is going to be the key differentiator here? Or do you think payment networks that have been in blockchain for a while like Polygon, is their tech advantage that substantial

where they can now they can now reach similar levels of distribution like you know the incumbent too big to fail banks. >> Right? So maybe I'll work backwards through those questions. Um there's a lot there to unpack but like I actually think a lot of the networks of existing financial like movement the these are not these are not really things to always be proud of right if you think about how a lot of large organizations move money around the world they're leaning on these correspondent bank networks and these correspondent bank networks are complicated you know there sort of these human relationships backing them and these Swiss cheese of risk tolerances that you're trying to force money through and very like low predictability and cost as well as you do it. Um, if you've ever

done an international wire transfer to sort of an unusual country, you've probably ran into run into this problem where the amount of fees being pulled out aren't quite what you thought they were going to be. You know, your bank even will struggle to predict it successfully. Um, personal story. I had to move somebody, this wasn't even unusual country, but to Dubondorf a long time ago. And I, it was a small amount. It was like six or seven, you know, dollars I had to get across. And it kept showing up with like three cents, too few. And I ultimately had to just like push a $20 transaction through. I was so frustrated about it.

Um, and the uh the Swiss government, I think, is still holding like a debt to me of like, you know, $10 that I'm sure they're furious about. I'm worried if I ever enter Switzerland on like another flight, they're going to put me in the penalty box at like Border Patrol and write me a check and be like, "Take this back." But like that sort of stuff, I I I don't I don't really believe the statement that these like existing financial networks are so great that they're an advantage long term. Um I would actually argue my experience with them has been that they're high risk and the more we can get away from them, the better. Uh so that's that's one take on it. Um, another take which is maybe related has to do with, you know, the sort of sub-second finality like rapid settlement. Um, a similar problem you

get is the delay in settlement. And settlement delay is risk, right? Let's like just take it for what it is. Settlement delay is risk that tends to be solved with credit. That's what you do. If you're getting something instantly, even in the US, if you've ever gotten an instant AC payment, someone in that stack is issuing you credit and taking great risk on the fact that you were able to receive it because the bank sure isn't moving the money that fast, >> right? That really doesn't land for three to four days. Um, and we face this daily, right, with this like idea. And what that's doing is it's not just causing complexity in the middle of the system, which is showing up as cost to everyone who's interacting with it. Um, but it's actually just like reducing the ceilings of value that can be moved. If you've

ever run into sort of an instant a payout system, there's always a ceiling. We see it in crypto actually all the time. If you go to an exchange and you do an a transfer, right? There's always this kind of value ceiling in terms of what you can move in. It's directly related to the settlement time that you're suffering against. Um, and so you remove that settlement risk and all of a sudden those value limits go away. And if you want to move $100,000 now, you can do it. No one on either side has to take great risk. It also does this really amazing thing which is it opens up the rest of the global consumer base. One of the big things I sort of ran into at Stripe is you can you can kind of slice the world up into like high-risisk, lowrisk, mid-risisk, you know, consumer bases.

And in a place like um you know a lot of in the US, right, we generally consider the U the consumer base pretty low risk, right? So there's a lot of consumer protection to protect you against bad acting businesses. But there's also a lot of American companies that want to reach parts of the world where the consumer base is high risk, right? And the way you do that, the way you fix that problem is you just remove the settlement risk, which is generally where all of the sort of fraud and scams happen is between the moment of I've sent you, you know, virtual money, you've delivered me real service. And if we can like I've sent you real money, you've delivered me real service, you can inject a lot of like additional really trust into the system. And in all of these markets, it's always terrible

to talk about a market as high risk. They're filled with low-risk people. I think there's a pretty good argument that the entire loan industry in the high-risisk geos is actually much lower risk than it's priced at, right? And the exposure to that and the delta between those prices has everything to do with taking advantage of the market dynamics in between the kind of first world actor that's maybe issuing a loan and on the other side the person taking that loan out who's more likely to be honest than we think. So maybe this is like a very long way of saying you know subsecond finality rapid rapid settlement is really closely related to this idea of what is this like network we think is working today and why do the edges of it exist and so I think it's a huge step

function for us with Rio to be able to start really pulling that number down you know to like seconds which is which is reasonable you can click a button online wait for something to happen it can take one second and that's that's an acceptable user experience um and just get us away from this like risk management in the middle and all the middlemen that come with that. >> As the the head of product, you you're you're now onboarding, you're getting more familiar with the tech stack, but you you're also at this this crossroads between uh sales, product, innovation, feedback, and and implementing the things that you're hearing from the market and and so that the you know, the engineering team can ultimately implement those into the product. And and so the when you

talk about the price dislocation with a lot of these loan markets when it comes to first world lender, third world borrower and and that could actually be a lot more efficient than you than than we may realize. Where do you start? You know, it it you guys are making strides in in the product and improving the things so that the technology is ready. Maybe maybe if that's the start, what's the next step to ultimately get these things implemented? >> For sure. So we look we have an obligation as an ecosystem builder to deliver the technology that enables creativity from our developer ecosystem first and foremost we have that responsibility um and I think Rio for example is very

related to that these are obvious necessary narrative driven solutions that if they're not there you know in fact when we launch things like this my my hope would be some subset of developers are a bit surprised it wasn't already present, right? Like that's that's like often the nature of like a good technology upgrade. It's like, oh no, I was like acting under the assumption that was already there. You know, we can keep moving. Um, you know, on the other side of that, there's there's a lot of work to be done, you know, in terms of exemplifying how that technology is meant to be used. And you know we we at Polygon we have a pretty cool history of um incubating the types of teams that go and make that sort of innovation. Um you know Poly Market is

the really popular one to talk about today. Uh you know Katana is a recent one on the DeFi space that are that that are coming and uh and you know certainly as we interconnect people into like the a layer and interop layers there's there's more and more to dig into. H how excited are you for some of the non and and I know your specialties payments so we won't spend too long on this but just coming from your history at Facebook being there during a really interesting time with content moderation and you know now now coming to this censorship resistant world how excited are you for non-financial use cases like even even polyarket and prediction markets could be considered almost like this truth news sort of media new paradigm and there's plenty more beyond prediction

markets. So, you know, are are are you excited about any of those potential applications? >> Oh, yeah. I mean, look, there there's there's a reason I'm at I'm at Polygon, which is, you know, a general purpose chain kind of behind the scenes powering payments. Um, and what I love about the duality of that is it means the payments can have purpose, >> right? It's not just I'm moving money and then we're going to do something in the physical world with that. It is I'm moving money and that money gets put to work. In many cases, you know, as we go more closer and closer towards digital services, DeFi, and you know, frankly, the almost unlimited space of other interesting ideas people are going to come up with in terms of what you do. We talk about like RWAs and tokenized assets, you know, how we collateralize,

you know, ourselves in our financial, you know, lives as well as how we sort of collateral collateralize our like assets in ways that give us access to capital for like growing businesses. Um, you know, that's the obvious stuff from a from a kind of connectivity enablement standpoint. I think maybe some of the less obvious stuff is um, you know, if you take take this kind of Facebook background and kind of the open concept of the graph is also just the interconnectivity of all of the people who are participating. Um, I was talking to a friend recently about who does does an awful lot of philanthropy in in Europe and he said, 'You know, a lot of the reason that you'll you'll make a donation to specific foundations, you

know, or or historical societies, you're actually also getting yourself sort of access to all of the other people who really value that same like topic or area or, you know, piece of architecture, whatever it is that you're funding. And in the past, you really relied on the, you know, f the the the like charitable organization to help you stay connected to those individuals. But with uh with with blockchain, you know, we've we've we've found that that's just inherent, right? And and we maybe we touched on this, I really don't want to go down the NFT rat hole here, but maybe we touched on this just a little bit when like when those markets were growing on this idea of this community through like shared action of payment and ownership. And I think that that community, you know, this is where

finance moves, right? Finance moves tightly within communities, right? And then more broadly across the world. And you know, we've we've lost a little bit of some of these financial communities by losing the physical space. And we've allowed more intermediaries to show up and control our access to the communities that we are financially a part of. And I think like I'm really excited to see more creativity you know from the market in terms of what am I buying you know where am I participating what markets am I in who are the other people who are doing this with me >> and it becomes kind of a journey together and you know I think journeys together ultimately just become more complex and interesting and deep and financially you would expect to have

evolving financial relationships with the people who are in those close-knit communities with you. So I'm I'm actually really excited about that whole concept, right, which is connectivity with the other people who share sort of either financial goals, interest, excitement, or investment decisions. >> Habachi provable trade purp with speed and security. Earn rewards. Visit hibachi.xyz. Trading on fire. Asset management redefined. Built on ERC7621. Standardize how you launch, manage, and trade onchain baskets. This is Alvara, the standard for onchain asset management. A >> absolutely and the name of the segment is money moves fast. And it's really cool to hear you talk about how money

moves with community and and how you're right shared interests, shared economic activity ultimately builds a community around those practices and and we you know there's like-minded people, there's like interest and behavioral uh characteristics of that group and ultimately our economic activity will follow. And I think you you mentioned NFTTS kind of got you know into that world a little bit. I think prediction markets are are kind of on the verge of that as well as we sort of rally and coalesce around certain sectors. Maybe it's you know farmers that are sharing information about how they were able to hedge their soybean tariffs against some prediction market and and you know they're able to sort of uh learn from one another but then apply those skills

in the market. Um, and I and I think blockchains are great tools for this, especially when, you know, if we think further out into the network state and and sort of that concept as well. Um, and and maybe just to bring us home here in the last few minutes, stable coins are going to be a staple of of this new progression. And as we continue to just really remove the line between blockchain based finance and and the off-chain world of finance, um more and more cash in the form of stable coins is moving on chains and then sequentially from there RWAS. And I think flying under the radar for most people is that Polygon is the third uh blockchain uh as it comes to uh RWAS. Ethereum has, you

know, uh 11 billion uh from what I'm seeing on RWAXYZ. Um but Polygon is right there uh with over a billion in uh RWA itself. And so when you look at the stable coin landscape and you look at the RWA landscape, we're we're getting friendlier regulation. Obviously, Circle, Tether, these are kind of the incumbents, but we've got publicly issued stable coins, we got privately issued. this Cambrian explosion of stable coins is happening. H how do you think about the strategy that Polygon is employing to ultimately bring a lot of liquidity and and and be the hub and the home for a lot of these stable coins?

What is what is the strategy for Polygon? >> Well, look, what we're fortunate about is the fact that it's kind of happening anyway. >> Um if you go look at uh emerging market local coins, which is a whole category of stable coin that I think is a bit ignored. you know, we're really focused on the dollar right now, but if we want to start thinking about things like onchain FX and what really kind of breaks down the margins in that space, it's going to be a lot of these local issued coins. Like Polygon's number one right now for the issuance of these new coins. If you're creating a stable coin today, like the likelihood that you're going to create it on Polygon is incredibly high, which is always a good sign, right? Um, so first and foremost, like that is already happening. Second of all, I think this payments focus that

we have in the organization has an awful lot to do with the idea that like we we are home to a large portion of the stable coin supply and we would prefer to be home clearly to more of it. And I think um these changes that we're making, these updates that we're making to the chain, you know, what we're starting to see in the global markets and adoption, these are all tailwinds alongside regulation, which uh which we shouldn't get into here, but it's just for once we have tailwinds of regulation in this industry. And stable coins won't go anywhere. And the greatest thing that stable coins do for us in my opinion is they just keep us on chain. Right? If we think about crypto as an electric car, the worst thing we can do is every time we've got to like switch back into

hybrid mode and charge the thing back up with like the the the inefficient gas engine that like doesn't, you know, work well at all. Um, you know, we want the Tesla of this space. We want everything to stay on chain, rapid movement, rapid finality. Um, and I will say that Polygon, we have kind of two really fascinating stories here. One is sort of POS and the capabilities of that chain as we build them out. And then the other is a layer and the interoperability story which kind of interlees with this idea that we have around vault bridge which is kind of the wrapping of these stable coins as you bring them onto your own chain so that you realize the appropriate yield value that you're delivering from a chain standpoint. Like all of these things sort of add up to

clearly stable coins have a home on Polygon and across like the Polygon family of products and I think we're only going to see that increase uh both through the technology changes we make and I think through some of the direct product efforts that we employ. I I'd love to hear more about Agar because I when I first heard about it and it's been in development I it's continued to progress but it it still seems like a really uh ambitious and and and compelling technical solution for interoperability. Could you just say more about how you see a layer helping to unify this landscape of of stable coins especially in localized environments?

>> Yep. So first and foremost just this idea of interoperability across chains is critical right there's going to be more chains you know as easy as it would be in my life to just say there will be polygon and nothing else the reality is and we're seeing this more and more over the last you know six months or so I think polygon is very early with the ag layer technology work to start to understand the need for this interoperability um you know we're going to see more chains we're going to see more like degree of stable coins existing all over the world and you know a layer is really meant to be this kind of cross-chain settlement layer that allows you to move money and coins between these chains with zero effort, zero cost. Um, agar is young I think is like a really important part of the

conversation we have around it. It's this really technically capable and incredibly secure system and I think it's on version like 0.3.5, right? It's like this is a young version of it. Um, but we are seeing like a rapid increase in like chain interest and chain launches and the interoperability kind of capabilities that we're starting to roll out across other well-known chains over the next couple of months. I think we'll continue to solidify it. I I actually cannot go super deep into the technical side on a layer. We'd have to go and pull like Muda in um from from our technical team to really dig into it. But I think um I think where we see Aglair today operating as a bit of a uh kind of independent bet right in terms of how do we start to get interoperability long term right the interoperability story becomes core to

kind of the capabilities that we're going to need across the whole ecosystem. So we should we should we should hop on another call about this in uh in a month or two and we can go super deep on a layer. >> We we absolutely should. I I I think there's plenty of threads to pull and you've only been there four weeks, so I I don't want to I don't want to pull on these threads too much and you guys have a lot going on behind the scenes as well. So, I'm I am really excited because you've been in the space and and you know, kudos to Polygon as a as a as an organization for surviving and sticking around because we've seen plenty of projects within the top 100, top, you know, 50 tend to they they just, you know, sometimes they they don't stay around for a long time and

you guys have been able to. And and so, just with a few minutes left, you know, I I'd love to just close out and maybe you could just share some some wisdom that you've collected along the way. you you've got a rich experience and history moving through some of these top organizations at Facebook and and Y Cominator running your own startup and then at Stripe and now Polygon. What are what are some bits and pieces that have stuck with you along the way about global payments and networks and just the way in which you're thinking about this space as it evolves? I think maybe the most interesting takeaway that I've had in in in my career around this space and and really broadly in technology and emerging

technology is when you're deep in it, you know, when you're a builder, you're you're way earlier than you think you are. you know, there's there's there's there's there's these great interviews with like YC founders, you know, who were operating uh against blockchain um in the early days, you know, who Bitcoin was $30 or something like that. And they were convinced they were too late, you know, they were like, it's over. I I'm getting, you know, this is it's going to hit $50 and we're done, right? Um and the reality is, you know, when you live your life a little bit in the future, you actually have to have just a bit more patience than you'd like to have, right? And I think in crypto this is maybe 10x true. We uh we really think about our sort of forward steps in technology and we think about these

changes we're making as you know immediate and and done as soon as they're you know present or visible or version 0.01 starts to exist. But the reality is, you know, that's the first step and the organizations that persist are the ones that continue to put another foot in front of the other and build and build and build. And um, you know, we we we can see this at the ecosystem level today, which is kind of what we talked about a little bit earlier. There these obvious corridors of money movement and then there are these like less obvious ones. And it's quite possible the less obvious ones will actually be the ones that change the world. And we're very far away from them. um with Poly Market and their recent raise, there are these great, you know, messages going all every everyone

on Twitter, right, wants to kind of claim that they knew Poly Poly Market was gonna going to work before everyone else. Um but you know, the people who who who did and who were, you know, understood this kind of core shift that was happening and they stayed really close to it for the long haul even though the downturns shook everyone else away. And this is, you know, to your point a minute ago, you know, Stripe could have just given up on crypto after the FTX collapse. And I don't think anyone would have told them they were wrong to do so. Um, you know, Polygon could have just backed off from iterating technology for things like ag layer and and the work on Rio, you know, and people would have forgiven. They would said, "Oh, we got to wait till the market, you know, goes back up and and

triples and 10xes again." But like these are organizations um and it's a reason that I'm at them and I go to organizations that I think will stand the test of time that will continue to build through the downturns and it's it's you know we we talk about diamond hands and all of these things in crypto and it's it's easy stuff to say and it's brutal to do and I think like once you do it a couple of times you get used to it and so my biggest learning has simply been to be very accustomed to the idea that you know we're really early and all of the ups and downs of the early stages of things will just look like a smoothed line up and to the right when you zoom out in the future. And I think that that's I think it's a shared learning. I

imagine you could talk to a lot of other folks in the space who have it, but I think it's really important especially for folks coming into the industry today. We're really focused on stable coins which are very young. you know, stable coins have had a very kind of up and to the right progression and we will have setbacks in this industry in this space in big ways and I'm excited about, you know, being able to survive those as well and come out uh to a higher peak on the other side. >> Yeah. Absolutely. It's an incredible incredibly patient mindset. Um, and it's also bold to to have the resilience to understand that there will be setbacks, to build in the face of those setbacks, and and kudos to you to pick and choose such a sustainable path. I I just it gives me confidence that this industry

is going to continue to forge ahead because people like you are at the helm of some of these organizations that are pushing uh the frontier. Uh, John Eaggan, chief product officer of Polygon. Thank you so much for coming on. It was a pleasure. Thanks Rob.