Polygon's plan for scaling Ethereum

Transcript

why does Polygon exist what does it want to achieve in the world the vision is to create infrastructure that will power This Global value layer or Global Network of value now over the past few decades we've been able to establish the global network of information that we call the internet which has made profound changes to all of humanity as a result we've democratized access to knowledge and information which has enabled anyone from anywhere in the world to attend an MIT compai course and acquire basically any type of knowledge that was previously not available globally now this has been a noble achievement for all of society and Humanity but we're still missing something we need a similar network of

value so even though we do democratized access to information and knowledge we're missing this access to the global economy to the ability to transfer value and this access to transfer value is not democratized we still have 2 to 3 billion people people that are unbanked so polygon's vision is simple it's to help Society build this Global Network of value to allow anyone to create transfer receive or program value polygon's Mission therefore is simply to create the infrastructure to support this vision and that can make this Vision a reality now with where polygon is right now and this conversation today

you're going to learn that they're at a place where they finally have the full Tech stack to enable this they've created all the tools to make this Vision a reality and today we have joining us one of the co-founders Brendan farmer to talk about exactly what polygon is doing and how they're making this Vision a reality welcome to the show Brenan hey Jay really appreciate you having you super excited to have you my man it's not every day that we get a Founder or co-founder of a a leading chain like polygon and we are big Believers in ethereum big Believers in all chains we're not chain Maxis here at web3 Academy but definitely big Believers in what ethereum is building

and got a shout out to you and the whole team because you are contributing to the ethereum ecosystem in massive ways now I want to go back to the beginning of maybe your journey it's 2021 you've been building an L1 called mirror and that is a ZK focused L1 and you've been approached by polygon or maybe you approached polygon I'm actually not sure how that deal happened that brought you into the polygon ecosystem so take us back to that time where were you what was going on and what was going through your head that led you to eventually be acquired by polygon yeah sure so I would actually go

back even further and go back to 2017 2018 and how I got into crypto and how we started Mir and for me it was I I was living in the Bay Area at the time and working on this like really sort of like depressingly boring web startup that I didn't found I was just an engineer but I was like wandering through Stanford's campus and I like wandered into this Auditorium where vitalic was giving a talk on the plasma paper that he had just authored and he was up on stage I got out and I started reading the paper and I I'd been sort of interested in ethereum for a while and been going to syst and there's this part of the paper that says we we're outlining this like

game theoretic and cryptoeconomic mechanism for guaranteeing security but you could also just do this with zero knowledge proofs when the technology is readit I'd sort of like vaguely heard of Zer knowledge proof so I kind of knew what was going on but that really stuck with me and it kind of kicked off this like years long research into what zge proofs were like what the technology was that kind of culminated in 2018 I went to the the inaugural zcash conference zcon zero I met my to be co-founder Daniel luo and we started Mir which was a ZK one that was focused on using zerge proofs for privacy and scalability and so I guess we got kicked off in 2019 and in 2019 that was kind of the

bottom of the bare Market it was like really difficult to raise money you could sort of only do it for an L1 like l2s were kind of known but they hadn't really traction and so we hit the positioned ourselves as an L1 that was going to do these things that you know ethereum couldn't do and so we built and and we got started just as Co hit which was a really interesting time to be finding a company but by 2021 it was actually really clear that all of the activity and the sort of dynamism and the developer mind share was in the ethereum ecosystem and so we we were like looking down this tunnel of building Mir and being like well we're going to build this L1 it's going to have an entirely new developer

experience it's going to have a like new developer tools that are focused on this ZK environment and in all likelihood no one is going to use what we're going to build and we're like looking over at the ethereum E ecosystem and we're just seeing like defi summer and nfts are taking off and like it seems like people are actually using crypto and there's so much excitement and so when polygon reached out to us because they were trying to transition into into adding ZK Talent into polygon it was actually a really exciting opportunity because it meant that we could sort of have a platform to contribute to the ethereum ecosystem which was how Daniel I got into crypto in the first place and so there was sort of this nice like feeling

of coming full circle and being able to first use some or build something that people would actually use and second like do it in the ethereum ecosystem not to mention at that point ZK Tech was still so hypothetical it's hard to remember because now it's such a standard in our blockchain lexicon that we're like yeah of course ZK is the future and that's the way we're going for in order to scale but it wasn't the case back then so shout out to your investors who believes in you to allow you to go do something that was so hypothetical and then to the polygon team now what's interesting is polygon acquired you but you weren't the only ones that acquired they acquired a few

other teams at the same time tell us a little bit about I guess from your knowledge of what was polygon's decision to pick up three different teams it's very interesting business approach sometimes you do that in order to get them to compete and only one will survive I don't necessarily think that was the case here but interested to hear your your perspective yeah so it was definitely something that I think invited some skepticism from us and from other people in the community I think it looked from the outside as though polygon was just spraying and praying and kind of trying to convert money into Tech talent and I actually don't think I I think that the way that it worked out actually was was a lot different if you actually look at what each team was

focused on for us we we were super R&D focused so we knew as you said that ZK Tech was still hypothetical that we needed like orders of magnitude Improvement on the underlying technology in order for this to be viable in a production setting and so we were building py 2 and and now py 3 and and just focused on pushing the underlying Tech forward whereas Hermes which was another company that was acquired by polygon they were focused on shipping like Jordy is obsessed with products and like getting something that's used by people in the ethereum ecosystem and so it actually worked out like kind of brilliantly because we were able to take our Tech which was still kind of in the R&D phase when we were acquired by

polygon and we were able to transfer it so that it could power the pr for the Hermes zkm and so this actually worked out really really well because if if we had sort of been alone or we had been forced to converge rather than operating in separate teams we probably wouldn't have been able to pursue this like kind of speculative R&D project that actually culminated in like a 100x proving system and heres wouldn't have been able to use super efficient provs and so it actually ended up being super complimentary and and this is all to say nothing of like polygon Maiden which is focused on an even further looking VM Improvement and so I I I think it's actually worked out really really well which in hindsight

I'm sure the polygon m&a team would take a nice uh nice win for that one but uh it's great to hear when it works out like that now whether it's going back to that Stanford lecture with metallic talking about plasma or it's hauling on deciding to acquire three ZK teams why is ZK the best solution for for privacy and scalability yeah so I I think that's a good question the Privacy side is really easy to answer because it's basically the only way that we can effectively provide privacy and so there there it's sort of that like there's no competition on the scalability side it's really really nice because it allows us to provide proof that a ton of transactions or a ton of computation is

valid that it was executed correctly and so obviously we have things like rollups which I assume people FR of and the basic premise is that we can take a ton of transactions that we could never fit on the ethereum main chain and we can execute them offchain and we can generate a proof that all of those transactions are valid and that proof basically constrains the operator of that rollup into only behaving honestly and only accepting ballot transactions and so this is like a really really powerful thing because the alternative to zero knowledge fruits are optimistic rollups where we have this game theoretic mechanism that where if there's an invalid transaction someone can detect it and they can provide a

fraud proof and then there's a dispute resolution game and it works and it provides security but it's not as good because it enforces this challenge period where you can't withdraw funds via the native Bridge from an optimistic rollup for seven days and so if if you look at what this forces on users of optimistic rollups they have to use third-party Bridges to withdraw their funds quickly and so in aggregate like tens of millions of dollars have been spent on third party Bridges like liquidity providers have to accept duration risk where they they're locking up highly volatile assets for seven days and so for a single chain the optimistic setting is not great for a multi-chain setting which we'll get to later in the

show we have like a ton of different chains and we're horizontally scaling to meet like internet scale demand for crypto space it's actually really bad because with zero knowledge proofs we can move assets securely and trustless between those chains as soon as we generate a proof but for optimistic grow-ups we need to preserve that fraud proof window for every single cross-chain in Direction and so users will never accept waiting seven days to transfer their funds from one chain to another and so if you think about like the full vision of what we're trying to build which is an internet scale crypto ecosystem like we believe that ZK is the only way to do that okay okay yeah it makes total sense so before we jump into

the various elements of polygon and the two main elements that you've announced and launched recently and uh I just want to give an overview because polygon is quite uh a broad ecosystem we've just talked about the fact that there's three ZK teams that alone is somewhat confusing to understand let alone all the other pieces of tech within the ecosystem can you give us sort of a broad overview and then we'll dive into some of them yeah so I think that one thing you can say about polygon is like we haven't always been good at providing like a focus and easily digestable story about what we're building and I and I think that we're getting a lot better at that and so the way that you should think

about polygon is it's this multi-chain ecosystem that's built on on ethereum and all each of those chains is powered by What's called the polygon cdk it's the polygon chain development and so we have existing chains that are run by polygon so these are the polygon POS chain which is a side chain that has a ton of activity a ton of tvl we have the polygon ZK VM which is an evm equivalent ZK environment that's an L2 and in the future we'll have like polygon miden chains but cdk is sort of the building block for this ecosystem it's what allows anyone to spin up a new chain in ecst and so with this universe of of chains we have What's called the agir

which is the infrastructure that allows you to sort of stitch together These Chains into what will feel to a user like using a single train so it's this it's what creates this this environment of unified liquidity and state and users that we think is kind of the final answer to crypto scale right and we'll get into the egare later in this episode one thing I just want to clarify right now is is polygon POS is the chain I think most people know like when you think polygon anybody listening you're you're thinking polygon P even though you probably don't call it polygon POS you probably just call it polygon and that's where you're using madic as the

currency as the token for gas so that's the chain we've at web3 Academy minted a bunch of stuff on polygon POS and polygon ZK evm is a separate chain of separate L2 now is the plan that eventually polygon P POS will also so become a ZK evm chain yeah exactly and we can talk about this a lot with the agair but the the reality is today is that there's a ton of liquidity and value that's on polygon POS and there's no like easy and trustless and secure route for that value to be shared with ckvm or with other cdk chains in the polygon ecosystem and So the plan is to upgrade the polygon POS chain so that we

can like basically add all of those users and that State and that value to this unified ecosystem that we're building right so the objective here is that you can you can always put settlement on the main layer but always have the ability to exit on Main net all within polygon ecosystem with shared liquidity and shared State okay let's talk a bit about the zkm and the new prover type one uh that you just launched I'm guessing most of our list listeners do not know what aover is so maybe you can give us an idea of what aover is and what a type one prover is I know that fits into four different four

or five different types can't remember exactly how many there are can you give us a sort of intro to that yeah sure so Prov is what allows us to generate zero knowledge proofs that show that a ton of blocks are are valid on on an L2 and so basically the proof is what allows us to move funds off of that L2 because we we can prove that okay we we have this updated State a bunch of users wanted to exit and you can process those transfers or those messages because you know that that block is now finalized as soon as the proof is accepted by Theory so that's what aover is and then with like zkm there are a few different types of ZK VMS so there are some and basically

vitalic came up with this framework that classifies them according to like how evm equivalent the experiences for developers and for users and so at the far end of the spectrum you have like a type four zkm which is I believe CK sync and Stark net and basically this is it's an environment that's actually not the evm but it's supports compiling solidity programs which is what evm code has written in to run on this ckvm so so you have this compiler and maybe there's some compatibility ability issues and you can't use uh existing Dev tooling but overall it's like pretty good and maybe some there are some advantages to using a zkm and so if you move further along

the Spectrum you have a type two zkm so we can kind of collapse type two and three and a type two zkm presents an environment that is evm equivalent for users and for developers it presents the same environment you can use your like existing solidity code you can use your wallets your Dev tools but the like on the back end like the ethereum the way that ethereum manages state is different from the evm that's running on ethereum and these changes make it a little bit more efficient to generate zero knowledge proofs so you can have this new chain that's running on a type 2 zkm but you can't use a type to zkm Pro prover for existing evm chains like you

can't use them to Pro an optimistic gr up or the polygon PS chain and so that's where type one comes in type one allows you to take any existing evm chain and immediately start generating for it so this could be the polygon posos chain it could be an optimistic rollup it could even be the ethereum V and so that's what we are really excited about is we delivered a type one ZK VM that is really really efficient and really really cheap so the average cost to generate a proof for a transaction on mainnet ethereum is at 1/10th to 2/10 of a scent and this is going to come down by you know 30 to 50x by the end of the year and so this is like super super

cheap this is a huge deal I think that these Tech advancements get lost in price action of the market and the more overwhelming narrative I wish more people were talking about agar and type one perver that you guys just built but it's not as sexy as some meme coin that's pumping unfortunately not no no discs to your tee or anything course that's where the current market is focused but what's so amazing to me about this is this type 1 prover it's going to allow a chain like polygon posos to come on to become a ZK evm compatible but also you mentioned optimistic rollups could also use this

type 1 prover and you op sourced this type one prover which is like just the most web 3 and Crypton native thing you could do to really Embrace this open source concept said in web to that would have been absolute like protect that IP do not share that with anybody talk to us a little bit about what you guys made what led you to make that decision of open sourcing it and really like what will that allow down the road in relation to an optimistic rollup yeah sure so I will say I think even a lot of web 3 people were a little surprised and taken back by the to open source the type one and I think like if you look at other projects like arbitrum has a

restrictive BSL license on a lot of their Tech and I think that there's like a defensible and reasonable justification to take that approach and so for us like if you look at it on the surface it seems like oh you guys developed this amazing Tech and you're just going to give it away to your competitors and now they're going to be like on the same footing as you and that's like a really stupid naive decision and I think if you take if you look one level deeper like it's our view that in the long run execution layer Tech will be will be totally commoditized and from that perspective like what we're building with the AG layer is really really important because the AG is actually what allows us to

scale beyond the limitations of a single chain and so for us like the network effects develop around the agare like the agare is this environment where liquidity is shared and users are shared but at the same time there's no cost to chains to join the agler and so like if you're a chain you you can join the agare and you can use whatever staking token you want or whatever governance token or gas token you want you can use whatever execution want and so like for us from a strategic perspective for the polygon project like the thing that makes sense is getting as many chains onto the agare and and the situation right now with optimistic rollups is we have enormously successful projects like arbitr and optimism that have huge

amounts of value and liquidity and usage that are fragmented across different chains in the ethereum ecosystem and this like cannot continue like this is not like a a model that will support mainstream adoption or like an internet scale crypto ecosystem and so for us like for me the ideal scenario would be that optimism or arbitrum took the tech that we've made open source and upgraded to become ZK rollup because it would mean that they could join the agay and like fundamentally that's a positive sum interaction because they get access to all the existing liquidity and apps and users that exist in the polygon ecosystem but vice versa those users and apps and nft mints and defi Primitives

get access to any optimistic rollup that's joining polygon ecosystem and so like that is the long-term vision is like building an ecosystem around the agare it's not protecting Tech via restrictive licenses and trying to compete on the basis of like single chain competition it's very very Noble effort and very Noble Focus to be focused on the long-term growth of ethereum not just the long-term growth of polygon is really what I'm hearing there's this bigger picture of we're part of the ecosystem of ethereum and we need to support everybody in ethereum not just ourselves thank you for that that mindset I think that's so important I I just want to check quickly about you

mentioned that I wasn't going to ask this till later in the show but since we we're bringing it up now so an optimistic rollup could become ZK evm compatible do you think that's the future or is ethereum BAS Slayer G to come become ZK proven itself like will that eventually go into ethereum can you kind of paint the picture of how this all you you think this all will go yeah so so both I I think are true so so for optimistic rollups it's a no-brainer now because costs are so low and so you can get rid of this huge source of capital inefficiency on your chain and allow a much better experience for users so you

can have cross chain transactions in the AG at latency of like a couple seconds versus seven days um it's a huge it's like you know a couple like a few 10,000 and so for from that perspective like it it just makes sense that if you compare the aggregate amount that users have spent on third party Bridges out of op mytic rollups with their total proving cost it's like an order orders of magnitude difference and so there there's no justification for not being a ZK rollup at this stage and so the main net ethereum question I think is really really interesting because if we envision ethereum is being something that's powering the internet of value or value layer of the internet and it's

present in the existing web then it it actually becomes really cool to ZK Pro ethereum because it means that you can have full node security for ethereum in a browser so so so you could be using like a web app or some you know some app that that requires like transfers on ethereum or state from ethereum and you could be be effectively running a full node in your browser with a zled and so if we think about this sort of like futuristic Vision where ethereum actually does function as kind of the substrate for the internet then I I think it's like an important step toward that yeah well especially if our objective which I think we all I don't

need to convince anybody of this objective is we need to interact with ethereum me as little as possible because otherwise where we are right now where it's just not scalable it's just the cost is obscene it's slow it's clunky it just doesn't work so it almost feels inevitable in a way that we will go in that direction so if you're a Founder right now is in your mind how would you think through where which chain I'm building on and I don't mean necessarily like optimism versus polygon versus uh arbitrum I mean more so like is zekia evm the only choice in your

mind assuming you want to be within the E ethereum ecosystem yeah so I think in the short term yes so in my mind the experience that you're able to offer to users in terms of the ability to onboard and and off ramp and transfer in it out of of your app as zkm just makes a lot more sense than than not um in the future I think one really interesting thing that ZK enables is it allows us to create ecosystems where different chains can be running different environments so if you have like a chain that does super super high throughput trading like a a super high performance Dex you might actually not want to run on the evm or even the salot ofm you might want to run

on something that's like specifically tuned for your application and so it's really cool that that ZK enables this because it allows you to design an environment or a runtime that's completely specific to your application and you can generate proofs and you can move funds in and out of that that execution environment super super easily interesting that is a very transformative moment so we because that's really what we need we need custom execution environments long term right when you think about you know we're just scratching the surface right now of execution environments most of it is defi some nft stuff even the nft stuff we haven't even gotten into real world assets haven't really gotten into

identity there's so many other areas of use cases for blockchain that are going to come in the future and really a lot of that is going to rely on custom execution layers and custom execution environments and we don't really have that ability right now to do that at scale I think that's where ZK comes in and and that's where like building an ecosystem around seamless slow latency interoperability is super important because you can have like users spend a lot of their time on evm chains where tooling and wallets are are actually pretty good but when they want to do something like participate in an nft mid that's going to millions of people or

participate in like a super super scalable and high per performance exchange they they can do that very easily and those applications can be set up to serve like orders of magnitude more users than any chain could currently and so if we're sort of looking ahead to like what does crypto have to look like to support five billion people like the internet I I think it's really clear that ZKA is going to be a a pivotal and transformational Technology toward that goal yeah yeah completely agree let's transition and talk about the agler we've brought it up a few times first I want to talk about the pain so give us the existing show that currently

exists that led to the need for the agler because I think everybody understands these pains but just remind us yeah sure so right now we have and we mentioned this earlier in the show we have like fragmentation in the ethereum ecosystem so there are things that exist in different forms across a bunch of different chains a bunch of different and so what does it look like to move assets and state between these chains so if you're an optimistic rollup like you can kind of forget it because you either have to use a third- party Bridge or you have to take on a 7-Day withdrawal delay so we're we're already sort of disqualified in that respect even for a ZK rollup what does it look like to move

State between like the polygon ZK VM and some hypothetical other ZK rle up po ecosystem right now it's you generate a proof which takes a couple minutes then you post that proof to ethereum which and so you need to wait for the ethereum block to finalize so that's like 12 to 19 minutes and then you deposit and claim on the other ZK rollup and so all in all you're you're looking at like a 45 minute latency for like a really simple cross chain transaction and so if we think about like what unified liquidity means it means that we should be able to move assets between chains in a way that preserves fungibility like if I have e on zkm I should be able to move it to like the okx train or AAR and I

should get eth I shouldn't get like ZK evm wrapped eth so this is a big problem secet system right now and the second thing is that we should have super super low latency and so like I should be able to do that I I should be able to have eth on zkm if okx has the the most liquidity and and will give me the best execution I should be able to swap to usdc and then immediately get back my usdc on my origin chain in a couple seconds and so diager fundamentally is looking to to solve this problem of like how do we enable these types of interactions in a way that preserves safety how do we preserve fungibility across many different chains in a safe

way and how do we guarantee safety for asynchronous and synchronous cross-chain communication I think the most obvious next question is okay so the egg provides safety for super low latency cross chain sync and async interactions and composability that's a Mel full maybe let's pick a couple different groups what does that mean to a Dev in terms of what they can build on top on chain what does it mean to a founder or an app builder in terms of the way they think about their project on chain and maybe what does it mean to a a user or a just a standard old dent yeah yeah sure so I think from the take the dev perspective first it gives you more flexibility because now if if you

want to deliver a superior user experience you need to be like effectively on the same chain as the apps that your users will interoperate with like to give the most seamless most composable user experience like it makes a lot of sense to be deployed in the same environment the ACT layer kind of changes this so now you can actually uh launch your app on a separate chain and you still preserve the composability and the user experience that users get from using a single chain but you suddenly have like a ton of sovereignty and flexibility and choice in how you're designing the experience of your app you can use like custom runtimes or custom execution environments you can make

different choices in terms of whether you're using a centralized sequencer or decentralized sequencer like say you're building a game and you want to deliver like a super super good user exper experience your users actually don't care if like it's being run in a decentralized way or centralized way they just want super low latency they want reliability and so you're able to provide that but at the same time give your users the ability to access liquidity for their nfts or for their in-game assets on the chains that actually are more decentralized and so it's like this way to avoid the tradeoffs that are imposed by using a single chain so from the dev perspective that's kind of what you got and I think from the founder the sort of app builder

perspective and the user perspective it kind of follows this theme it basically gives users the experience of using a single chain while not running into these really awful and painful scalability issues that we yeah well and what's interesting is there's this constant dilemma that Builders face whether it be a Dev or a Founder face right now which is this tradeoff between decentralization and scalability and speed and a good ux right which really is what your users want yes the objective of this whole thing is freedom

of access and censorship resistant and permissionless and like I fully believe all that and I think our listeners do too but not if it sacrifices how quickly I can use an app like let's be real nobody's going use the app then so that trade-off has led a lot of people to build in unsecure ways which has led to a lot of hacks and a lot of the issues that we've had in the space and so eliminating that tradeoff by saying hey you can still have all the security and decentralization that you need plus you can have the Privacy extra bonus that nobody really seems to care about yet but I think we're all going to care about it pretty soon I think we all do we just don't really think about it yet

you can have it all you can eliminate the trade-offs and you can have it all from the a lair and to top it all off you didn't even have to necessarily build in the ZK evm you could have a project on optimism right now and you can take advantage of the agare correct yeah exactly so as long as the chain that you're running on or the chain that you're deploying uses a type 1 ckvm you can basically instantly on board to to the agare and so this is like a really power ful vision and I like the way that you put it I think I I I might get heat for saying this but I I almost think that there's like a maslo hierarchy of needs for users and like people in crypto like researchers think that the

base of that pyramid is like censorship resistance decentralization like nation state attack resistance and I actually think that that is not true it's like usability at least for the next you know 10 million it's like usabil IL it's sort of reliability like lack of complexity and so as you go up the pyramid then you can add decentralization censorship resistance but like ultimately what we care about is building for users that are going to get value from using this stuff and so I I think we have to take that perspective yeah unless you're in a country where permissionless access to this stuff does not exist or you're in a

country that has serious censorship issues then okay your need is probably now and I get that but that's just not the case of where most these Builders are most of these Builders are in the Western World the developed world where censorship resistance is not as big of a deal until it is let's be real here like that's just the way you you know until that moment I hope that moment never comes but maybe it does you know somebody said to me the other day which actually was kind of striking was they said they thought that the moment that Twitter removed Donald Trump was the moment that a lot of Americans started to care about censorship resistance and I was like oh that's an interesting perspective because you're probably right those are the moments where people actually do

care but anyways I don't want to go too far down but I agree in the hierarchy of needs I think the researchers are prioritizing decentralization I think if you went and ask the average person about decentralization they would be like I don't care right like give me I I I do think that like it's healthy for researchers to prioritize that because like ultimately we have to care about that and like from the perspective I think the beauty of the agay is like we don't have to make those tradeoffs and we can offer different experiences to users based on their priorities if if you just want low latency for your game go you use that chain but if you want full censorship resistance you know nation state attack resistance then

there's an Avenue for you to use that or to access that within the EOS system as well okay okay I'm going to read out a a definition of the agare that I I took from The Still Water podcast which you're on recently so I'm gonna use that I want to read that out and then I want to get you to add on to it because I was trying to formulate my best perspective on the agare and this set it best said basically what it does is it put puts all assets for all agare chains into one smart contract and then using the magic of ZK creates this virtual accounting that says we're going to do all the transfers and be ensured through ZK that they are the value that we say they are but we're not actually going to move the

assets on L1 exactly that does thatt well I I think it captures the fungibility and sort of the low latency interaction really well the nice thing for me for someone who's technical like me as I get to come on these podcasts and you guys get to teach me how to explain what I'm building in another way so this is like a really positive experience in that respect but I think that's a really important aspect to emphasize which is that within this ecosystem there doesn't have to be an L one footprint for all of these interactions that are happening on chain and so we're not limited by the capacity of ethereum in the total throughput of the ecosystem around the agler and so this is like a real like part of what

you can think about polygon's role is is to like get around the bottlenecks that are currently imposed on scaling within crypto now and so that's like the capacity of ethereum it's the like ethereum's capacity for for da and so I think that's like a really important design principle that we're trying to emphasize and so who's on the agler now is have there been people who have jumped on chains that have jumped on the agare and what do you think the future is and maybe why should a chain jump on the Agra I mean simply it's free doesn't cost you anything like or maybe why it wouldn't a chain do it is actually the better question yeah yeah so there are chains not have launched yet so we this week we're deploying the smart contracts

for the UniFi bridge and so this like creates the ability for chains to to now deploy there are actually some really cool projects that are going to be on the aay that have already announced so okx which is one of the largest exchanges in the world kanta Manta or Kanto Manta near AAR like a a ton of different projects and there will be more in the coming months but in terms of why someone wouldn't Deploy on the EG layer I mean I'm super super biased but I think that it really would would come down to some sort of like narrative aspect where you don't necessarily want to participate in something that's associated with polygon but but but we're actually trying to like get past that because we view our role as

building neutral public good infrastructure and of course that will benefit like polygon run chains that are on that ecosystem but will it will also benefit every other chain that's that's on the ecosystem our approach is fundamentally different from that which is being taken by like the optimistic rollup ecosystems like optimism and arbitrum where there are restrictions for chains that are that are joining that ecosystem so there are like Revenue share requirements there are limitations and restrictions on the types of execution environments that you can run on like how your chains get sequenced and so for us like fundamentally we're not trying to impose any of those restrictions because we think that at

this stage of cryptos development like the pi is going to grow so rapidly that I'm sure some will like circulate to polygon chains but it's fundamentally not about being value extractive or rent seeking or trying to like sort of capture at this stage it's about like creating an ecosystem that's fundamentally ethereum aligned that can scale and that can be like a positive sum thing for all chains that are involved and is joining the agair a heavy lift it doesn't seem like it seems actually quite simple to do yeah it's super easy so if you're an existing chain then then you need to set up infrastructure for generating zero knowledge proofs or we can do that for

you or sort of an implementation partner can do that for you but otherwise it's really just like opting in to use the shared bridge and generating proofs and and kind of building there there are some modifications that will be required to take advantage of super low latency cross chain interaction but these are like very very simple changes it's incredible how simple it is in the execution and usage of this when it is solving such a problem that we all deal with so regularly around bridging and moving liquidity across chains and all this stuff is like we will never get to where we want to get to without this Zoom us out now I don't know whe whether

you want to talk what time frame you want to talk in whether it's a month in crypto feels like a year whether it's a few months or whether it's a few years where does this all go and how does this all maybe come us bring us back to the beginning of the episode how does this all work together within the polygon ecosystem yeah sure so so the timeline for the AG like I said the bridge smart contracts have been deployed and so the next step is proof aggregation so this will allow us to enable that super low latency cross chain interaction and then beyond that it's really just launching and supporting new execution environments so polygon miden is coming this year we also have other developments in terms of like proving system uh ad and optimizations that sort of drive down the cost of running chains

but fundamentally like the tech is here like the cost is already so low that right now we're just reducing latency and sort of like optimizing for that last 20% of the user experience but it's a really nice position relative to when we when Daniel and I started in 2019 when we raised money it was like a very very uncomfortable position in certain ways because the tech was not ready and so we were looking at this thing that we wanted to build and we were thinking like well in order to sort of have parody with the experience that people expect on ethereum we we need ZK Tech to advance by like 100x and that's like a really really daunting thing when you're

looking at it from that perspective but the tech is here and so like the fundamental building blocks for for building something like the ID layer have already been invented and so this year is just about like putting in the underlying infrastructure and then focusing on like developing Superior wallet experiences like how do you deliver user and developer tools that reflect what you can now do on the agare and so so I think that's going to be like a really important component that we're also F right right and this chain development kit cdk as you guys are calling it but optimism has the op stack arbitrum has Arbitron orbit that has become a big product there's a I feel

like every week I see another chain that's picking picking where they're going to develop their own chain do you think the outcome here is that if optimism and arbitrum also become ZK compatible then it sounds like that's a strong possibility then the egg kind of becomes the this base layer that connects all these modular chains into one liquidity and state like is that really where we're going and how long do you think might take yeah so I mean if you ask me yes like that is sort of the endgame where you can be running on op stack or an arbitrum orbit chain and those Technologies are amazing and they

have their own benefits but fundamentally what you want and what you need to deliver to your users is safe and super low latency cross chain interoperability we we can't be in this situation where uh every few months we launch a new chain and there are liquidity mining incen and there's all this like inorganic activity that comes on those chains and like we play these same games that are really really inefficient we need to deliver an environment where liquidity is shared where users are shared and where if you are bringing positive economic value with an app or an nft Mint or some dii primitive on your chain you're able to instantly access the liquidity and the users that you need to be successful and

so I I think like we have to move to that environment I think that the agag is the best candidate to kind of power that in terms of when that might happen there's already progress on kind of making that happen and and supporting transitions for those chains I think that this year will be sort of a process of seeing like getting more information on on how that could play out but I think like if you were to ask me I think maybe sooner rather than later I like it I'm I'm optimistic with you as well it feels like a weird word to use in this conversation actually but uh I'm with you I think it'll be sooner rather than later okay before we wrap here I I just want to give you a chance to tell people where can they follow you on Twitter act

where can they follow polygon team how can they reach you if they have more questions or is there somewhere else just the floor is yours for a shill yeah sure so I Amore barmer on Twitter I'm not the most active user but I try to try to post um and then zerox polyot is the polyot handle polygon website has a lot of materials and yeah that you can just reach out to me or to anyone anyone at polygon we we're always happy to hear from people building the ecosystem and people with ideas that just uh need support amazing appreciate that uh okay want to wrap with a couple of fun personal questions uh so you can take a deep breath here off the mic on the tech

stuff now although that's probably maybe that's the easier step for you side okay first question is one prediction for 2024 ideally other than related to egler zkn if you have any others yeah I mean I I'll cheat a little bit and say that I I think by the end of the year we'll be a lot more optimistic on the infrastructure side we we will see like for the first time in the history of crypto this like view Over the Horizon where we can see ourselves having SC like solved the scaling issues and so I think that that's will just be a huge shift in perspective for people building

in this space completely agree yeah I knock on wood can't wait for us to get to that day I hope that comes this year as well and I think you're right one thing you've bought recently for under $100 that brings you Joy does not have to be on Tre yeah I I I actually don't think I own any nfts so I I don't think there's like an an nft I live in Vermont and I think that the best kombucha in made in Vermont and so okay drink a ton of the stuff and so that's what's the brand it's called aqua V shout out to I I hope they sponsor me that that would be like one of the most satisfying I've made it moments if I could get

sponsorship but okay I'll make sure I'll send them this clip from the show and see if they reach out to you okay last last question if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it oh man feel free to take take a deep breath and think for me today and it can't be a lame answer like goes to polygon.net of marketing that's probably what your answer would be which is totally fine it always splits on the show some people take the marketing route some people take the personal message to the world route I know I I mean I think the marketing route is pretty easy I I I do think like especially for people people who have

like a lot of conviction in in things and are like taking a lot of personal risk like like I was in in Ser 2019 I think that it like the self-doubt is like definitely real and and it can be like something where you're expending like a lot of mental energy so maybe I would put some like kind of corny phrase like the stakes are like never as high as as you think and like you should always just take on as much risk as possible like within reason like the downside is like never as bad as you think and I don't know like B on yourself I like that I like that or the stakes are never as high as you think that's a uh that's a captivating billboard see you should be in marketing there you go you got it Brendon this has been an absolute pleasure thanks so much

for giving us the times day yeah thanks J thanks for having me thanks so much for listening and everybody have a great day thank you for listening to web through Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for our free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web 3 insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3 make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and web3 are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one