Sandeep Nailwal I The Future of Polygon | Pragma India 2023

[Music] I want to kind of cover some of the things that happen polygon connect and altogether the future of kind of the polygon ecosystem so my kind of first question is what's up with the p token P token um so when we and this is a kind of an interesting story that um you know these days we everybody is talking about like multichain and all that stuff right and I when when we were starting polygon and in the white paper itself like you know I had uh mentioned that you know in future there will be multi-chain ecosystem and this and that but then this is also the time uh this is like early 20 2019 right so we have the world or the crypto world has just seen the word al2 did not exist the world Al did not exist but the world has also seen so many of these SC cam tokens launch which are like also when they go live they've been minted and the people are minting new tokens and then dumping into the market and all that so when we were about to get into the listings and all that process and then there I mentioned that you know right now we have this much Supply and this percentage is basically will be reserved for inflation of one chain and as we launch more chains that time I I had a very primitive idea of this inflation I said as we launch more chain a certain percentage will make for every new chain and the moment that the exchanges will see this is like what the hell like you know are going to look this is a new con the token all that and and then you know then we had to say one of them uh the bigger one of them like got really uh pissed at that so okay we said no no no we are not doing this and you know we will not have an and we'll see when the the multigen happens and then in 2020 2020 uh 1 actually when we you know migrated to polygon or up upgraded to polygon that which is a mult multi chain Vision uh we had to we had mentioned that we will have to upgrade this token into a uh you know multi-chain conducive token the current token is not that so then walk us through what is this multichain vision for polygon and what is this mean for the madic token yeah so from our side like we are not like I keep saying that you know we are not building for like you know to create a blockchain which acquires some Network effects and you you know just you know stays there what we are building is we are very very clear and we are relentlessly clear at that time we we we refuse to choose uh you know kind of any path it might have a pragmatic you know intermediate stop but the path has to eventually go to the actual Mission and the mission is to have this planetary scale unlimited scaling uh you know blockchain ecosystem wherein you know like I keep giving the example of Internet 2.0 in Internet 2.0 you don't have a fixed TPS like you know AWS doesn't have you have you heard AWS saying that we have 1 million TPS or 5 million TPS and all that right it's it's it's all like it's not a shared State just assume it exists and you assume it's infin yes you ex and it's practically infinitely scalable like as many mobile apps want to launch as many web apps want to launch whoever wants to launch whatever you have practically infinite scalability and then the other part of this is that the information this is like web 2 is the internet of information and that information is seamlessly composable right so basically we are creating the content here this will go into YouTube anybody in any country with any kind of Internet service whether it is GPRS or it's Broadband doesn't matter everybody can consume it the same thing will be will H or will have to be true for web3 or whatever ecosystem or whatever uh you know protocol becomes the uh becomes the application layer of uh web 3 and we that's what we are we are trying to build so these two properties are very important for us infinite scalability and seamless composability these two things are most important so what is polygon so polygon and today my talk at polygon connect also I said that polygon is about to be born we are not even born yet right which is all we have is kind of like p a very long incubation for 5 years yes yes yes it's like 5 years incubation we had to like we Di Ed multiple times research a lot of things but now we have a idea with the ZK cryptography in place that you know this is the architecture which if nothing changes no new technology is discovered this architecture will still be able to scale to that you know infinite TPS and so just two components like infinite scalability that is achieved by polygon cdk you can launch anybody can launch as many number of chains or dedicated chains shared chains ecosystem chains whatever you want to launch you have the you can launch the chains and then then we have this aggregator layer which where all the chains submit their proofs and those proofs uh you know are aggregated and and you know one single proof is submitted to ethereum using that aggregated proof all these chains can uh you know have inter cross chain interoperability between them right now it will be right now it will be slower like in January which I say day minus one of polygon when we launch LX ly that will be like 30 minutes because every chain is still submitting the proof to ethereum and then somewhere in the Q2 which is the Day Zero of polygon we will have this fast aggregation layer where each chain can submit the proof in a matter of like from from few seconds like 5 to 10 seconds to initially maybe 1 minute but then these chains will have cross chain asynchronous uh composability uh if you know in 1 to two minutes time eventually you want to take it to 15 to 20 seconds which almost like e noral block time for ethereum yeah yeah it's like and then this this whole chain or this whole ecosystem with hundreds and hundreds of these chains that will that will feel like like one single chain like as a user you'll be clicking something and there will be in the background there are intent based framework whoever people can build middle Wares on top of that but then you you are playing some game somewhere your tokens goes to other chain get swapped to in a public chain your USD is deposited back and as a user you are just having a simple interface like a payment uh Gateway interface that's a pretty exciting World um one thing that sort of LED you to say all this thing is a pretty heavy focus on a lot of ZK research I to do years before to kind of be at this place right now can you walk us through what made you realize that this is the the future and you had to kind of start investing now to be ready two years later and uh and what's kind of uniquely enabled by a lot of the ZK Primitives that was not possible with the way madic was design initially yeah um I think like you know in in India like especially the people who know Hindi they would know this uh you know phrase that that means like or or like once bitten and twice shy right they in English also you have this so when we started the Plasma Research right and at that point in time the whole ethereum Community was g go on plasma and this and that and every people raise tens of billions of dollars we could raise only 150k whatever but we said that we'll deliver the plasma in this right we kept building building building and by the time we are like 3 months away from our main net suddenly we we see announcement that some VCS you know invested in this in the plasma group who were running the plasma group and then suddenly this is no longer plasma we are now converting into optimistic rollups and plasma is dead like the line was plasma is dead and we had this hard choice at that point in time that you know okay whether we keep pursuing plasma or we should also pivot two optimistic rollups or what do we do and that at that time we did the evaluation and we found that you know we we saw we we read optimistic lups and it was we realized that these are at best this is at best an intermediate solution because in optimistic roles also you're still putting all the data on ethereum you're still throttled by the uh the capacity of ethereum the gas fees are still pretty high and users don't uh developers need better uh platform for that so at that point in time when we researched about this we researched ZK also and uh you know with some amount of research even though we knew that this might take more time this might take three years optimistic rollups will come much faster but then we were very clear that this is the end game and for me it was like I did not want to get into one more technology which gets outdated very soon I wanted to be all in like spend 10 years of my life dedicate them to building something which is which is end game right is this a hindsight comment or you knew that this is the right move and you were going to make this work yeah yeah I mean see if you see 2021 uh you know we had the benefit of hindsight of plasma and plasma you know crashing and burning right and then so that's why you know we had we had the benefit of hindsight as well as the you know like this this thing like you know no I don't want to do temporary stuff because see as a you've seen how that game ends yes yeah and as a Founder like anybody who's here and they uh you know they founded some companies the most painful feeling you have is that you are giving like it's a hard job like entrepreneurship is like is a really hard like I don't wish especially we three entrepreneurship I don't wish on people because you have to have you have full shenanigan of a start startup everything Talent fundraise this that product Market fit all at the same time plus token you have like you have to manage the community and you are a P public company on day Zero almost right and then in in in the in the natural traditional world uh and I said natural I this is not natural right so in the traditional world you still have to like you have to publish reports but every quartly you publish about here every minute some Community member is tagging you abusing you on Twitter why is this this happening why is the token so it's like so hard and I don't wish it on other people and so it's very painful right as a founder and what I you know realized that I and you know obviously I have done multiple like previous like startups also right and the most painful feeling is that you are giving it your your all but you know that this is not this is not big enough this is not going to go where you want to take and that feeling I did not want to have this this one like I did not want to do one more temporary thing wanted to do this thing either it become the AME binary now it goes yeah yeah yeah all in kind of thing basically that's awesome to hear and and here you are managing two tokens you have not two tokens yet to yeah now now yes now we will have uh this is basically PO is an upgrade it's not a new token by the way and uh you the supply Remains the Same you just upgrade it to the poll it's more of a transfer to uh yeah yeah yeah yeah so you kind of mentioned this already ready let's let's talk about what cdk is so why did you have to create polygon cdk why not create a a massive ZK rollup that everybody can just use yeah so see on that like we have the like yesterday also I posted about this monolithic blockchains right like you know monolithic blockchains where you mean that one single state machine is there and you are see thinking that you know the whole world will read from this single state machine and whole world will will be building on this and it's very easy like you don't need to be a computer scientist to understand that you know this has limits of physics it's like you know you having one big computer even though you optimized it you do whatever with it but you still can't have the whole world's uh you know applications running on that single computer this absolutely not possible so that same thesis is applicable for the you know any kind of chain You're Building whether it's a layer one or whether you want to build like layer one like you know these monolithic layer ones and whether you want to build a you know like a zkm or a layer two no single chain is going to take this thing thing and second thing is that you need to like I see and this is like uh you know I see that a single state machine chain and you saying that everything in the world should exist on this chain is almost like you know feels similar to Communism like you have one single e custom everything go so you're saying you don't want a world computer no I don't want a world computer I want a I want World internet which is running on thousands and th millions and millions a great analy yes so so so I say that this this layer to analogy is more closer to capitalism because why like polygon cdk for example I'll give you today it offers you a PO today it offers you one kind of VM which is evm and you know right now you can run it on a single uh sequence of capacity now you see that we have efforts with near ZK bosm we have an effort going on with today with Hyper oracles which is building who are building ZK based oracles and they are also building a type 1 ZK bosom and very very soon in 6 months from now you will have a polygon cdk where you can choose which VM you want right so you want a was VM you we want to this VM which programming language if you have wasm you can use other kind of programming language right so this is one then you can also choose what kind of decentralization you want like somewhere in the what options do I have is it just it's either decentralized or not yes so you can choose that so right now you can have one single sequencer chain but next year we will we are implementing the ibft like uh Comet bft uh tender latest version on that so you can actually launch your layer too and you can have multiple validators on that so you have decentralized or you can just run it yourself or you can run it yeah single sequencer or multi sequencer you can do what you want to do right the third one is whether you want to have privacy on this chain or not so the miden VM has inbuilt privacy uh Foundation you have to build like you know right now we don't because privacy very touchy subject so we will going to put it out and then people can do what they want to do with that but then the point I'm trying to make here is this is very similar to capitalism right where you as a developer you can choose which VM which kind like whether you want to have a programming language which programming language which kind of decentralization and these VMS like people keep talking oh this monolithic layer one alt L1 has the parallel Computing so what like you know the we will have on M and v m and VM you will have a parallel computation right and you can process like huge amount of uh TPS on that when it's fully mature so these kind of things will keep coming and I think that's why this layer to model where ethereum is the base settlement layer and then you have you have application layer on an application layer these layer tools will look more and more like you know your uh AWS versus gcp versus this and the market will have like a one one large shareholder will have like you know people want to have it managed and somebody will just manage that yeah yeah um that's kind actually very very fascinating what what effectively was kind of the thinking around making this more accessible because because it seems like we kind of introduced now layer three here because because the way you kind of hierarchy wise describe this thing you are now doing another application but do we still run into the same problem of well there's going to be a capacity problem on this one so somebody either needs to go up or aside and you kind of still don't really solve the traffic issue so how do you going to think about the future being more modular this way or does it to just now one cdk that's going to behave like a monolithic cdk cuz that's the most popular application no no so how we see is that so like this is the topology today right so you have this polygon cdk chains and then you have an aggregator then aggregator can take let's say roughly with our internal tests it can take with 100 to 150 validators like 8,000 chains per second because each transaction on the aggregator L is one chain right so you have 8,000 chains and if that each chain has let's say 1,000 DPS so you can already imagine that you have 8 million TPS in this one right then if let's say it goes beyond 8,000 chains right so what you do is you just spin off one you spin up one more aggregator layer right with the same kind of validator setting I see and then that validator layer and then you have a aggregate that because you can do interoperability there if behaves like a single one exactly amazing this aggregator layer is actually it does not have any problems with sharding and all that because this is like individual separate State on that and uh this is fully paralyzable also you are not doing any Ledger transactions there right you just storing the proofs there so you can have like one aggregator another aggregator you can have 8,000 of these aggregators which will be aggregated the next St so the but when you are talking about layer two layer three you are essentially talking about fractal growth right but the in this architecture the you scale the hor the aggregator layer is fractally uh you know growing but the execution layers is like one single layer so everyone is a lay and everyone is connected to every other chain that's awesome I mean you kind of just softly announc that you can do 8 million transactions per second which is uh which is incredible um what what has been some of the the popular uh applications that have uh been launched on cdk or or in the process of launching yeah so the biggest one is basically like immutable X which is basically used to be like only gone as a large share of the gaming market like 80 90% of that and then you know uh when immutable was there we used to be like the biggest competitors in the gaming like I think immutable and polygon and they used to have 30 40% of the market polygon has like 40 50% but then they uh joined on so they are now moving their entire infrastructure from starkware to this immutable X this morning uh Merit Circle which is the uh which was like on a subnet avalan submit uh they are also moving over and you know using cdk then you have one of the largest exchanges uh you know okx which is like upcoming that's a big one they they they are growing really really big uh more than you know coinbase uh you know daily visitors and daily users and things like that they are also launching then you have a lot of other uh ones also today like here flip cart which is the you know the crown dweller of Indian startup industry they launched their Flipkart cdk chain which now like a lot of Indian developers were previously scared of crypto right but they wanted to build something in blockchain and this is also a good use case for the government also that this is not crypto this blockchain like this blockchain is just submitting a proof it in the back end yeah and then flip card doesn't even need to now you have meta transaction Services they don't even need to interact with crypto if they don't want to J just can swipe their credit card on on a like a gloud platform where they are just sending their somebody can just manage all of that yeah so they don't even uh need to that's a pretty amazing incredible news C is back yeah that that's pretty big and I think like you know this can uh act as an inflection point because because a lot of fintech players want to launch these uh Financial applications they could launch their and Flipkart has like captive 100 million users right so uh what you can do over there is uh is like yeah so many great things so there are like multiple like that like there are like the idex which is a previously existing uh like deck they want to launch very soon I remember idex from the good old days on h i remember idex from the good old days yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so that's actually very impressive um this is this is incredible progress maybe to kind of wrap things up let's kind of hear about what does it mean for the future of polygon now like that the company the protocol Al together kind of where you are spending your time you kind of said you wanted to kind of focus on the end game which is hey let's we have the ZK infrastructure we invested all this time in R&D and now we are ready to kind of scale things with cdk does this mean that the next few years are about just now getting people to build on top or does that mean there's still more R&D to do there's still more things that are hard problems that you haven't solved yet what is what kind of state is the company in now yeah so I think polygon 2.0 all our research problems are solved these are like now engineering problems and not even hard engineering problems right implementation time it's all implementation and matriz process which takes its own due course uh so that's going on and and and you know we'll have like the first time we will have a first fully coherent story of polygon what is polygon like previously like it's polygon POS it's ZK VM and what the you know it's a side chain it's a I you know polygon miden ID cdk uh so many things so uh now we will have a one single like in next by next you two we'll have one single concerted you know kind of story of polygon also by the way like which is very important for the polygon brand and the future as you mentioned one important thing like you know we opening up right so we have actually like we did all of this research but all of our provs are fully open source and other Stacks can also use it and what is happening is due to that like for example near protocol which is a layer one they want to launch they want to have like these their proof of their whole wasm change on ethereum recent announcement about the da layer yes and that kind of consolidates ethereum's position also as a as a you know uh settlement layer def defao settlement layer and same Pro is now you know now few chains in the cosmos ecosystem are looking to use them then we want to make it available for other layer to stacks Al like for example op stack and uh arbitrum stack like we want to make these provs available to them because we want to play more on the aggregation proof aggregation layer and you know on the Chain level block space who is running uh the block space uh is perfectly fine we don't we don't mind and we already have like for example Manta network uh very solid team they are they they they have a op stack chain and they are like you know currently you know implementing the cdk provs uh onto them so we want to make it as open as possible kind of following the eum's philosophy like you know you have the evm bu then public and have people improve it collectively yes and if people some people want to Fork it they want to build their own okay just play the long-term game and see like you know whatever markets will choose whatever is uh you know uh good for the long-term and whatever makes markets more efficient so so yeah that's the that's the future from our side like as I said that the Q2 next year our product road map will be like level one complete then after that it's like okay you we need to add consensus on this one and we need to have more VMS and all that so I say that this is basically next year Q2 is basically 2015 of ethereum for us right so that's where we'll be born so that's the most Bor thing that's a wonderful note to end this on S thank you so much for telling us about the future of polygon and thank you Applause thanks for [Applause] listening