Fireside chat with Sandeep Nailwal - ETHIndia 2022

foreign [Applause] [Music] those were just some of our partners um and the next thing I want to do is use this opening ceremony as an opportunity to bring on somebody a special in this space we usually use this hour to talk about what all of us are excited about in the future and today I'm excited to welcome Sandeep from polygon we're going to cover a lot of things about the future of the space India web3 and a man who needs no introduction of course here super honored to have the chance to share the stage with you welcome Cindy so we've known first of all when I came here and I entered this Hall my first reaction was what the did we do like you know I mean I was standing with the deaf folio people eat Global uh you know as we were talking about like 2018 when we started and look where we are today I was thinking like you know you're taking a pic and sending it with Alec let's see what we need to do because I met him in 2019 somewhere and I was saying that you know India is going to be the biggest ecosystem and all that and he's like yeah yeah we'll see and today here we are so I remember you uh a 2018 back when uh used to become Matic handing our t-shirts to people the Thematic booth and uh here we are seeing an incredible progress and growth in the last four years uh my first question to you is uh focusing on the personal side tell tell us about your personal journey into web3 and how you got started yep so uh I started uh Back in the Day in 2015 when uh end of 2015 when I was like you know doing my previous startup and uh you know it was B2B and it was not scaling as fast as ever thought and I thought that I want to go into the deep Tech space and I had heard about Bitcoin back in 2013 but initially I like that time I thought that you know how like I just it did not just make sense to me right so then in 2016 when uh 15 and then when I first went to went into AI a little bit and then you know uh heard about Bitcoin again I thought that what this thing is still alive this is still around like you know what's going on here so then I you know went into that Bitcoin white paper and all that and I actually did not see it as money and you know changing the money at that point in time I you know had a good understanding of geopolitics and all that I realized that okay you know this is this makes sense but what I saw as an engineer I thought is that this is basically somebody built this decentralized network which is right now solving a small computation small logic which is payment logic you pay to me a minus B I mean amount and B's balance goes up and I thought at that time like what if we could do complex business logic you know in this kind of setting that could that could be useful for a lot of things and then you know I was on and off and all that and then three four weeks into this I you know stumbled on ethereum and I think ethereum then went from 50 cents to nine dollars and all that and I read the first line I read like you know generalized smart contracts and this and I said oh like this is this is big and that is the time I took two weeks in two weeks I sent a mail to all my clients I said guys I'm shutting it down I will still help you for next six months to make sure that you know it's transitioned out but I am going all in into that and you know I left everything went back to like coming from my background where I come from going back to little money making where I am the one footing putting the food on the table for my whole family parents everyone it was a hard choice but I think that it was very clear that this is going to be very very big and here we are that's a lot of conviction especially back then um what was the ecosystem like in India and and kind of could you share more on how hard or easy or hard things were I think like you know at that point in time it's you know it was only initially some uh you know crypto trading communities like there was almost zero development communities there were one or two researchers what year are we talking here this year we are talking about 2017 early also like mid 2016 or early like that was very early for ethereum also right like but even 2017 early uh there was nobody even to till 2017 and there were few developers who were working for future Arena of foreign companies and then we started in early 2018 and first time we received uh you know the uh we heard that eth India is happening in this one and you know we interacted with you know my brother like Shakti was not here now but uh what a man and you know we interacted and you know we said that this is absolutely needed over there and then when we were starting we initially were thinking that you know we will get probably 100 people registering and things like that like those that low at that point but the good part was you said 44 for people were new in web 3 that time I think three so but yeah like you know here we are like I think you guys have done amazing job globally and in India like shout out to defolio team uh for you know after all of these these problems and all that striving hard to build this deaf community in India organic deaf community in India and uh you know I I actually like if you can give me one or two more minutes like you know I wanted to share like when we saw Shakti over there even like you know uh the Devolution team was here and we all got emotional you know looking at Shakti because you know the and that's the spirit of I think India's Victory ecosystem also like back in the day when uh you know after each Global also 2018 then we there was a big bear market and all that nobody would uh you know give money for hackathons and things like that and I and Shakti would have a lot of these discussions that you know Shakti is like you know I don't have in a runway for next three four months and all that and we would say okay let's keep trying we would give even we were like very small like we never got NBC funding and all that right so sometimes like you know ten thousand dollars twenty thousand or these kind of grants that okay you know let's keep pushing let's keep pushing let's keep trying more and then you know came this after all this bear market and all that after 2019 each India then came this kovid slump right like absolutely everything got destroyed and I remember that you know after second or third day after uh you know the lockdown Shakti were discussing and you know it looked like even for polygon things were tight right but then again we said that okay bro like let's try more time let's try it some more time let's try some more time we started like that folio team switched into online hackathons completely and then we started doing year monthly accounts and all that and then you know what like you know Shakti and I would you know speaking let's say and then he says that I have some sort of fever tomorrow I can't join this call and you know that was the time when he got covered and then he was in a tier three city in India and uh you know there was no like facility also in the hospital no medicine coming in I started that crypto Leaf fund right and we started like we worked very hard like I Akash and his team members and all that and in the last few days we even arranged a ventilator like somebody traveled from India for the whole ventilator to the to the hospital and he enters the hospital and they say that it's not needed right but one thing like you know I was very sad for multiple days but one thing I am proud of that we still tried tried really hard and that's the spirit of Indian web 3. we keep trying and one day we are going to make India superpower super power in web3 and we're gonna take a lot into that and um we yeah it's firsthand part of the the same story and um there's a lot that's happened in the last four years and I think the thing to remember is that we came out strong and United and bigger than we were even a year ago and that's what we should remember I do want to switch a bit of gears and kind of talk about how we see the future of this space um I want to ask a fairly blunt question polygon is not really a layer too uh what do you say to that like I and we don't really like as we said polygon is ethereum's internet of blockchains like we don't subscribe to this narrow definition of layer 2 which means that you know you have to keep all the data back on Layer Two you can you also need to have full Security on Layer Two and everything we believe that it is a spectrum even like like chains like polygon genes like X die and nonsense chain they all have added a lot of network effects into you know ethereum as far as the communities are so maybe let's talk about how you're aligned with ethereum yes that's exactly why so you know we have we are like hardcore ethereum Community people and what we have done is like if you see in the last whole 2020 and Karthik like you know we have been seeing 20 20 21 22 like this whole L1 Wars like you know if you ask yourself who saved ethereum from this album was like you know we were the ones who were fighting tooth and nail on the on the trenches uh you know against these like you know they completely run away uh into adoption and all that so but the thing being that like you know we want to provide this ethereum stack the evm stack to the Developers in the range of decentralization at the end what what we are doing at polygon is we are providing decentralized compute right on top of ethereum and that decentralized compute comes on a spectrum you can have like if you are a startup who has only 100 users right now do you need ethereum kind of security you probably might be okay with having your own let's say you're working on a side chain which has like maybe if it's a dedicated chain even two validators or if you are on a public chain you can have like you know like polygon POS 100 validators and all that decent enough security for you but if as you keep growing across the cycle you can actually be deployed on like ZK evm today which has full ethereum security and that's also is I think that is our commitment to ethereum like you know we are the first you know in market fully available source code available zkvm fully built out all features and that's also is my message to all of you guys test out ZK VM like you know while all these bounties I would say apply them on ZK VM instead of like Mumbai test net and all that and you will see the experience like already we have we know like more than 2000 smart contracts have been deployed the user experience is absolutely fabulous and you know we have David my co-founder who has built this ZK evm like product head there you know he's there with you if you have any queries ask with him ask from him and that's our commitment to ethereum and you will see some of very big announcements from us which will you know which will show that you know what what are our plans for ethereum because that's the fun part about theorem ethereum is not only with Alex or ethereum Foundation Network it is your network it is our Network and we also have plans for ethereum and you will see that's that's wonderful and uh and uh speaking I mean I'm looking forward to what these announcements are hopefully we get some Alpha here but um obviously ZK everything is is what the Talk of the Town is polygon has three ziki initiatives um why do you have three and kind of what's thinking behind having these parallel approaches yes so ZK technology especially when we were starting like one year back it was such an early stage like although you know we have seen a hockey Street growth in the ZK technology but it was such an early stage that even betting on one out of three four approaches available is very risky and remember that we are coming from the burnt of heartburn of plasma right we remember plasma yes and we we were the only team like nobody respects the fact that we were the only team which built a production ready plasma everybody just left it like it doesn't work and all that no more no longer hyped up so we are leaving right so we we built it fully and but people ended up using the POS part more because it was easy to use uh now we did not want to take first of all it was very clear in our mind that we don't don't want to be stuck in one approach which fails eventually right so we were very clear so that is one reason second reason is that layer two as we say layer one is for decentralization and security layer two is for experimentation where apps can experiment at scale for with user experience and things like that is that the same as compute to you or or is there differentiation between experimentation and compute the I didn't get the question so you said Layer Two is about experimentation is that the same as compute because you previously mentioned compute would be honest yes like you know you have much more you know spectrum of compute you will have cheaper compute and you will have costly but more secure compute and you can experiment with it like what kind of application you are building right if you are building defy you probably need very heavily secure like ethereum secured uh capacity but if you are building a game a casual game where people are going to own five ten dollars worth of nfts then you are probably okay with like a you know less decent lives but or or not secured with ethereum but fairly decentralized uh this thing right so but what I was saying is that about these three ZK Solutions like these three ZK Solutions first two of them are working on evm compatibility only but they have the difference in approaches but the third approach and I don't want to disclose more over there but you know as I said that we have very strong plans for ethereum and ethereum's defensibility so next time somebody comes to you and say that hey I have this L1 and I am supporting rust or I am supporting this programming language that programming language you know we will make sure that you will get all those programming languages all those fancy programming constructs available on top of ethereum that's why these three different approaches and you're going to see some really fun stuff coming coming from us hopefully you realize this thing but you just announced something that you guys are working on so I'm not going to repeat it you guys have to watch and pause the video after this to really read between the lines that's incredible yes uh so in a way it's a good thing if all three approaches work and it's not just about increasing your odds to see one of the three yes yes and also like you know it was so early that uh you know out of these three approaches like that's why we were able to build this ZK VM in last like probably eight months which where people are working for last four years why because we had this cross-pollination of these ideas like you know and you might discuss this with David also that you know first what they were building at Z you know at Hermes borrowing a lot of ideas from zero and Maiden they were able to build it much faster much more efficient and much more concise like you know we have some other ZK implementations which already are running into tens of thousands of lines of code where we have like four thousand very crisp and efficiently written lines of code which can be very easily you know not easily but you know they can be fairly audited and we believe that this will be much more production ready much faster than anybody else I mean I can't wait for that because all the hackers get to try this out and break it apart so you get to fix it after um I think what a lot of what you just said so far is coming from the perspective of applying research and kind of making those things go to production and that's great but you're also at the same time talking about or talking to a lot of companies with Partnerships launches getting more and more consumer applications into this space um research stuff aside what is the biggest problem that the polygon ecosystem is facing right now or rather what keeps you up at night yeah so I think like you know with all of what has happened in the past few days uh or weeks uh it you know it's a good and a bad part both like because last one year there has been war cry that you know we need to go mainstream we are too Niche but I think with what all happened like the mainstream adoption will slightly become slightly slower but then we have to go back to our roots with the niche community and you know build build out and work more on these Niche use cases that's why I think this web you know this Eid Global and uh you know this is global hackathon eat India and other hackathons become very very relevant because here is where many kind of new ideas are going to be going to be taking birth right and those ideas are going to become very relevant that's why like you know I mean it's very important for you guys also to build differentiated products in D5 in nft and you know there is a very high possibility that you know you might get accelerated growth in some of those things because the focus has come back to these things instead of like you know only being on the Instagram and reddits and you know these big Starbucks of the world you know the focus is back to the developer here and back to self-custodian all those core fundamentals of F3 and that's why it's very relevant like you know I hope that just like we have seen in the past eth India like you know we'll see some big companies coming out uh you know from from this I I totally agree with that but uh I'm gonna give you a hard time here you didn't answer my question what is the biggest problem polygon is facing sorry yes so the biggest problem you know I I want to see more Innovation like that's what I said in in this one also more Innovation uh you know it's not like specific to polygon but I would say in India ecosystem also more Innovative products coming out like you know which have some sort of differentiated product offering go to market offering and things like that like you know it's no longer relevant like you know if you guys come up like okay I've built a nft Marketplace or I build a lending borrowing system no what is the differentiation in your product and also like you know I want to give a message that you know across the overall like you this polygon connect yesterday like 2000 people were there and and you know multiple events you know like that old model of like you know this like and especially relevant to web3 that you know you do a token and this token will do well and things like that that does not work not only it is not recommended it does not work now you're just going to if let's say you launch end up launching a token with a non-differentiated product and all that and you are thinking that I'll get listed and you know this token will do you know like Market dance and whatever I think first of all it is not work it doesn't work now because the market does not have that kind of capital we all had like 15 years of bull market infinite Capital that is no longer relevant and also the community is much more scrutinizing for everything so you know when you want to do this make sure you do it right don't do it for the sake of it for the heck of it and don't do it in a hassled way build a product build a community and then the community and you see a real relevant value value accrual value capture for the token then only you know go for those token related things don't you know Chase the token uh you know Mania that is going to you know be harmful for your longer term journey and it's not just uh that it doesn't work like I mean we know that factually because we've seen that from experience and uh exactly there's a lot of years of uh case studies here of proving this point uh yeah no I actually I learned also from you like you know because I've been very focused on exponential ecosystem growth and I think I have you know debated with you also multiple times and I learned one thing always from you whenever I met you all over the world that you are all you are always thinking of like okay right now it works it's hyped up and all that but you would be like I don't see how it survives 10 years from now five years from now right and and I think that's why like you know people like you who have made investments in those things though those would have survived large part of your investment would have survived otherwise many of them got wiped out only the paranoid survive yeah yeah exactly so you know I'm also like you know trying to learn more from that you know like even for the ecosystem we want to support those applications who we see that these are going to exist five years ten years from now and these are going to build sustainable business models not only about like this cash you know rays and funds and things like that and this is an interesting team right there there's so many Engineers here so many developers here and we're excited about just playing with the latest Technologies the latest Frameworks and we see interesting smart contract use cases as Innovative for what we think web3 can do but it's way bigger than that and we kind of touched on this thing so I want to actually go back to to something that you said earlier which is the impact of crypto is not just in software uh let's talk about crypto relief tell us about what crypto relief was and what's happened in the last two two and a half years crypto relief for example uh tell us how it started I did when my sister traveled to to my place and India was having this huge like uh you know wave Delta wave of of covet and all that and everybody was left right and Center like I was trying to volunteer for few people helping them with money things like that and then we would start with 12 people in the morning and then by afternoon six are gone right that was the kind of situation uh that was there and I was already like you know trying to do something but then my sister traveled to my place and she got covered and I also got covered like actually when I started and wrote that tweet that's a very angry yeah I myself had covet the second time as like you know screw this virus like you know because we had this fight and flight response right until now we were at that time we were flight you know we were in the flight mode just go inside the house stay there locked up everything I said screw this virus you know not only I'm going to fight with this virus with my family but I'm going to help other people also and I wrote that tweet I thought like probably we'll get like one million dollars two million dollars but then you know what vitalik ended up doing like you know with the shiba coin with a pill in yeah even he thought even he thought like later on he said that you know I thought it was going to be 10 million dollars or something right then you know we ended up getting like 450 million dollars and all that and I'm very proud to say even though it's like slightly unfortunate for web 3 and crypto industry in India that you know it's like you know here it's like a environment of like slight uh you know distrust on it and all that because you know like governments fully don't understand this but an important statistics for you all like even in this room if you are an adult and you got vaccinated one out of every three of you guys are vaccinated using the syringe donated by crypto Leaf like we donated incredible that's a hundred what 200 million people 200 million syringes we donated with UNICEF and at that point in time like India got vaccines but now there was a syringe problem like you know we did not have to so we liaised with UNICEF work all around the world and got in 200 million syringes in India that is an impact that you literally cannot compete with yes and I want to say like you know that is the impact of like vitalik also like you know not people keep asking me but people don't like realize that it's all because of italic that's the impact of metallic and I would say eat Community also because he only gathered this thing so shout out to the whole ethereum Community globally ethereum is the ultimate coordination mechanism for the world and this is incredible incredible progress yep all right I want to just uh I why don't y'all wrap this up soon so let's go into a couple of specifics about what we should look forward to this weekend 2000 people are sitting in front of us the camera can't see it but we can um what should they be thinking about and what should they be excited about to build in this space what I'm excited I think like you like your Indian developer fraternity right you know build Niche crypto use cases like you know I see the tendency in Indian developers that we are still going towards utility like okay let me build on this particular thing like a SAS like our mental model is more like you know building SAS building some profitable business and all that like I am saying that you know start thinking about Niche crypto use cases like you know build if you are building D5 build some you know these option models perpetuals and you know more optimized dexes and things like that like there are so many ideas going around even in D5 like think about that like if there are any Finance people liaise with them brainstorm these ideas and all that even in nfts and pfps I don't think like you know a lot of Indian developers have done big maybe as you're answering that like I'd love to kind of hear your thoughts on like nfts and Taos and D5 like are you excited about still those things or how do you see them now uh the nfts nfts D5 Dao's like as topics do you think there's still room to ex to build more sure like you know I feel that now they are much more relevant like if you were thinking of building a mainstream mass media kind of application now the focus has focus is back onto these Niche uses that's why I'm saying that you know maybe spend more time on your idea even here and you know once you go go home because I feel like my mission is that how we are going to make India web3 superpower is by building multiple unicorns we have three unicorns from India and they will only be built if you build differentiated products you know in the and and right now the right time is for building those Niche use cases like you know if you are building like nft Marketplace like think like what pseudo swap Has Done Right can you solve those kind of use cases nft liquidity like you know don't build the state forward use cases like can you solve nft liquidity by some by some means right or in daos how do you how can you solve uh you know decision making processes in Dao like you know that's the biggest problem right think about like if Dao's are going to be running businesses then they would have to take some sort of privacy transact privacy uh decisions also how can you make sure that you know uh you know there are things which can be uh like highly confidential thing in the context of a Dao but the still the Dao can take take the decision on that right think about these kind of things and even in D5 like for example how uh D5 product products can manage their treasury how they can increase the liquidity in their protocols and things like that like not the plain vanilla use cases because right now the markets we are in like not only in crypto generally startup markets it's very very hard to raise capital and you know in order for you to grow and go to the next stage you need to build these differentiated products in this market only only the paranoid Will Survive and only the differentiated Will Survive so you know make sure that you have those differentiation and build those Niche use cases like let's build most Innovative products at least idea level I know that in two days you can't build at least on an Ideal level let's see some of the best projects some of the most Innovative projects coming out of you guys that's what I want you guys to do I know it sounds very counter-intuitive but you synthesize this is the perfect time for you to just try things because it might be cool and not because it can be a business this is how large change happens and once something is working or when something is interesting to somebody you will figure out eventually how do you turn that into a product or a business but especially when you have a small time constraint here the goals should be experimentation as you as you already talked about and it should be the weird crazy that that you really want to see that's why like you know I think I forgot when you asked that uh what is the thing that keeps you up and all that like what thing what is the thing you're worried about and I had polygon also like you know we always as I was discussing with you that we wanted to build polygon as the business layer of web3 where the businesses are built but especially now the time is that you know again going back to the core web3 routes where you build things which are really cool they might not look like as a business today like uni swap didn't look like a business when he when Hayden started right we didn't know what amms could do like yeah now it's the default it's yes exactly and build things like that and because they are maybe they are cool you are like extremely thinking about something Innovative or think about building things which have an impact like you know this is what I like I feel for polygon Community I want to grow this segment where people who want to change the world not only build the business who want to change the world those kind of people uh you know into the polygon Community also especially I was in Europe and because like a lot of our co-founders like especially Jordy and all that Jordy is also a legend of the ethereum community like I saw a lot of like pride in a European community of polygon like even I heard I heard this term called polygon maxi yeah so I think that's that's what we call success yes so where this is public goods like how can you make an impact on the world with these things try to build those things not immediately focused on that this can be a business this can be a business this is the right time to build those cool experimentations ideas because some of them are going to be so compelling that they will be the ones that that will end up uh getting capital and growth opportunities I think that's a perfect note to end this on Sandeep thank you so much for joining us thank you everyone let's make it big guys