‘With Polygon 2.0, Crypto Can Grow Like The Internet’
How has the rise of Web3 technologies affected the traditional internet landscape? What opportunities does it present for businesses and individuals?
We are in a moment where many people seem to agree that the internet is getting worse, but outside of crypto there aren’t many proposed solutions for how to do things differently.
So, the most exciting aspects of Web3 in my mind have to do with value: what we value, how we transfer value, who owns the value we create, and how we can make an internet that foregrounds users and developers over centralised groups. When we talk about the value layer, it does not mean only money. Transferring and owning value can mean anything that a user values: their data, a digital file, a token representing membership to a group and more.
We don’t hear of Web3 as much these days since the values of cryptocurrencies took a nosedive and other issues plaguing the crypto world came to light. How has the space evolved in the meantime? The good, the bad…
The amount of building that has happened this ‘crypto winter’ has been incredible because it is really the first time Web3 has laid the foundations to become the size of the internet. In the last bull market, there was an almost feverish belief that mass adoption was right around the corner. And there was good reason to think that. Users were pouring into crypto even as institutional and brand adoption was ticking up. But what has become clear in hindsight is that the technology hadn’t yet matured enough, both from a UX and protocol level.
Hence, you might understand why I am so excited by the Polygon 2.0 vision, which will be the first time that crypto can grow like the internet. More capacity can be added to meet demand by spinning up new blockchains—as Zero-Knowledge Polygon Supernets, ZK rollups, or zkEVM Validiums—that are all linked together in the Polygon ecosystem. Whereas in the past, new chains were not interoperable, Polygon 2.0 can truly scale to infinity, to supply whatever capacity is demanded.
Considering the growth of the Web3 space in the shadows of ‘crypto winter’ in the last one year, what are some of the challenges that Polygon Labs has faced and how has it overcome them?
For Polygon Labs, we have been focused on attracting talented people to this space. Because talent is rare, we believe talented people, regardless of their background, are inherently a value-add to any company. But growth is not linear. And because of the unique way in which market activity corresponds to developer activity in crypto, this has required adapting the shape and size of the company with market conditions. I am very proud of the teams we have in place today.
How has Polygon addressed scalability and interoperability challenges in the blockchain ecosystem?
In June, we launched a series of proposals to build Polygon 2.0, the value layer of the internet. We imagine a fundamental value layer where anyone can create and exchange value just like the internet allows them to create and exchange data. But this value layer of Web3 needs to mirror key aspects of Web2. It needs to be infinitely scalable and seamlessly interoperable. For the internet right now, new capacity can always be added to make it bigger, and servers hosted anywhere in the world can be accessed from anywhere else. Infinite scale, in practice, plus seamless interoperability.
Web3 right now doesn’t look like that–but it can. With the Polygon 2.0 proposals, we imagine a multichain zero-knowledge layer 2 ecosystem. New chains can always be added to meet demand, and because all these chains are connected to one another and to Ethereum – the ecosystem will be interoperable. This means liquidity across chains isn’t fractured, but unified into an experience that will feel like a single protocol. Infinite scale plus seamless interoperability.
What role does decentralized finance (DeFi) play in the Web3 framework, and how does it differ from traditional financial systems? What’s its future?
For the foreseeable future, DeFi is the most potent use-case of blockchain technology. That’s partly because using blockchain remains relatively expensive, user activity naturally migrates to the highest value activity. Relative to TradFi, it’s very different. For one, TradFi has many more intermediaries. This makes the cost of participating inherently higher. The decreased friction of DeFi means that participation is more open and the costs are lower.
