Progressive Decentralization and the Future of Governance - Sandeep Nailwal

so i'll just uh try to rush through when uh whatever time we have left on this so i wanted to start from uh you know basic what sorry it wasn't mirroring correctly you can go ahead though okay yeah i wanted to start with a basic you know uh history of polygon timeline of polygon and then you know what we are thinking in terms of uh the the the ecosystem dows that are coming in and network also like in in a sense uh network also is a dow right in in the sense that it's run by the validators and uh the the validator community takes decisions on um you know uh related to the community related to the discussion or decisions uh on the network so uh that's you know let's start with a brief journey like you know where and why i'm saying this is i'll come back to that that you know we started in 2017 uh rebranded to uh polygon from matic in 2021 um and since then we have launched like uh you know multiple uh products which includes polygon pos chain uh now we have polygon uh edge where you can you can start your own chains using polygon edge and then we are about to launch some of the the roll-ups like you know i mean we have a zk roll up which with polygon hermes uh which does the uh which which right now allows the payments but why i want to say that is that probably in the history of like the networks that we are building uh you know polygon is is kind of in a unique place where because we are probably the first network which is creating which is basically an aggregator of multiple networks right so you have uh multiple different chains like you know i mean i'll come to this part also uh but let me take you through this so you know we have polygon pos live polygon sdks live polygon hermes is live and all that so all of these networks are built on top of ethereum so you know you have when you want to go into the governance of these networks you have two different you know forms or two different ways you can think about it so uh you know for example a lot of decision making on the network can be done on on chain on ethereum so for example how many validators can be there on a particular particular chain you can decide this by choosing some parameters on ethereum smart contract right so uh that that's that's one thing similarly uh let's say you wanted to i mean this is this is on chain governance on the layer one then you can also have a part of the governance on these networks itself so for example polygon pos chain has validators and validators can impose or kind of you know can impose some governance rules by accepting or rejecting some upgrades on the on the network clients right so this is why i feel that we are in a unique situation wherein we can have some programmable network parameters on the layer one and uh you know we can have of course the the client the the network client based network governance that can happen on the layer two chains so that's why i wanted to start from there you know brief brief history like i mean brief thesis about polygon i mentioned yesterday also that you know we believe that ethereum is the settlement layer and uh you know of this web 3 and then the transaction layer will soon emerge on the layer 2 where you'll see applications you know primarily deploying on layer 2 we are already seeing a lot of applications were directly deploying on the layer 2. um so that's where that's where we feel that you know all the layer 2s are going to become the the transaction layer the applications and users actually will be using uh you know layer twos only i also mentioned sometime back uh on twitter i remember that you know ethereum main chain is actually transitioning from a user to chain where user actually used to interact with the chain to chain to chain where chains are actually going to settle into ethereum and then the user activity will move on to the on to ethereum onto the layer two so um so so these are like you know basically we we are present across the spectrum uh you know if you think about ethereum scaling we have uh you know with polygon sdk you can have standalone chains which are not secured by ethereum but just have a bridge to ethereum and on the right extreme you have fully secured layer twos where we are building multiple zero knowledge roll-ups optimistic roll-ups and so on um you know brief stats about polygon adopt you know ecosystem it is currently the most adopted ecosystem by the developers seven thousand plus dapps uh was posted by alchemy some time back uh i think infuria also mentioned like they have around ten thousand uh developers so um you know coming into this like the the main topic the decentralization and uh future of governance um you know as i was mentioning that you have both related to the dows as well as well as the network you know which uh i wanted to present the polygons point of view you have on-chain governance as well as off-chain governance right so on-chain where you change some parameters on a smart contract and then you can you can you know govern the the underlying dow or you can also have like you know the developer the validator community can you know uh have a lot of social discourse on their uh on their communities and you know influence some decisions over there um so uh i mean the main dilemma on the on the governance side is this that we want to we all want to eliminate the third parties but you know like we realize that with all this history of the dows in the past uh you know a few days it a few few few months or years i would say it is you know it is there that those validator communities are not validated as in the dow communities the token holders uh you know govern the taos and it's it's really hard to completely uh remove the let's say the powerful people in the in in a particular community so there are multiple you know kind of uh multiple kind of design patterns emerging we are also seeing uh that decision making becomes very very difficult in the dow so i'm seeing a lot of dows actually going into the delegation mode where the the community can delegate uh let's say the decision making to a to a fixed number of let's say the delegates and then the delegates can take faster but you know still it's it's it it's been really difficult to completely eliminate any single particular or you know some uh you know centers of power and and have a fully decentralized governance i mean we know that the timeline of of you know daos and then you know this is the time when we are seeing a lot of daos coming in and that's why these governance and uh these parameters the tooling is becoming very very uh you know prominent so i mentioned that you know a network like governance again is applicable on the networks also so you have three different kinds of governance for let's say this is again in the context of polygon for example uh validator governance and community governance these are already live the network governance fully uh you know where you can change network parameters from ethereum is still working progress um you know some of the things that could be helpful for the people who are right now looking into dows is some of this tooling that is available on the dow so snapshot where uh you know uh you can you can actually have votes without having a fully deployed smart contract now you can actually have some parameters basis on some parameters you can have some sort of voting uh similarly you have dework which is like a web 3 bounty board uh you have tools like sobol which are providing like decentralized operations and grants program we are using them uh let's say in the polygon ecosystem dao gnosis safe can be used for the for the dow and treasury and discord and discord and discourse are you are being used for the communication and you know uh yeah community decision making before you go on for on chain voting so some of these tooling this is very helpful and if you guys some of you guys are looking into uh you know do something in the house these this would be uh you know these tools are good point to start with um you know i mean some of the challenges that decentralized governance uh you know like plutocracy and meritocracy uh kind of you know there's always a uh kind of war between these two these two side of things you always have some whales holding large amount of tokens in a particular dow and you know you have the real contributors so how do you kind of you know balance these two power centers uh i mean vitalik had proposed quadratic voting some time back so it has been experimented in bitcoin and various other places but you know we still are i think far away from the ideal solutions on this uh the governance tooling i also said that you know right now still tooling is still in fairly uh fairly early stages so that also is a is a fairly big you know issue and of course if you don't achieve all of this you can you risk being the dow being risk the dow being centralized and you know which can lead to the downfall of the dao um you know like opportunities for decentralized governance uh you know like why we like i am a big proponent of progressive decentralization because you know we know without naming the projects like some projects decentralized too fast and then the decision-making in those projects becomes way too you know slow and it's it becomes very hard to make large impacts so you know giving sharing an example from polygon side like we have we have always believed in the progressive decentralization and we are moving slowly towards that goal so we even now we don't believe that we'll be like we will fully decentralize the treasury operations or business operations in the next two to three years right because we believe that there is a lot to be done on the adoption side and for that we need fast decision uh decision making um you know innovation on the governance side is also you know growing extremely high there are multiple things that are happening multiple tools that are being created multiple ways of uh you know voting and uh you know decentralizing power within the communities and and you know like how do you distribute the decision-making power within the community as i was mentioning that you know you always have a dichotomy between whether you should allow a large number of people to participate in voting or like or making the decisions and then how fast you can take the decisions right so there's always a you know kind of tug-of-war between these two things and you know i'm seeing that the delegated like sub-dao kind of concepts where you have a big sub-dial but individual decision-making can be delegated to these sub-doubts is is becoming bigger and bigger and then each sub tao might have their delegates where which community chooses let's say there is an investment now the community chooses who are going to be the gps of this uh let's say this investment uh sub dao so similarly like you know and if if the if the gps are not doing good work community can you know replace them and things like that so those kind of things are also happening pretty well so i think we are running out of time thank you so much uh yep thanks a lot