polygon zk day Kick off

[Music] [Applause] [Music] good morning good afternoon and good evening everybody my name is kartik one of the co-founders of beef global i want to welcome all of you to the polygon zk uh you're all watching this thing on each global.tv so just a quick reminder for everybody who's coming in for the first time uh we encourage all of you to log in and uh say hi to all of us uh this is the live platform we're gonna be using for the rest of the day and if you have any questions for our speakers or if you have any comments if you want to relate to any of our audience or our speakers you can write them in the chat there and i will be able to relate them directly to our speakers and also for everybody who logs in you will be getting a nft poep token so stay tuned for that after the end of the summit so this event is brought to you by e global and for those of you who don't know if global is an organization with a very simple goal our goal is to get more web3 developers into this ecosystem and we do this by running hackathons and summits and this is our last event of the year and we're super excited to be hosting this day talking about all things ck so let's get into what today is going to look like so an amazing day planned we're going to talk about a handful of things we're going to do a quick update on what is happening in the polygon ecosystem and with respect to zero knowledge world it's going to be an exciting announcement from the polygon team which uh i can't wait for uh everybody to also find out about uh then we're going to go into a few demos and talks on how polygon nightfall midan and hermes are set up so we're going to go into the the polynomial identity language by the zkvm team and then lastly we're going to have a panel discussion with all of our speakers and metallic veteran to uh just cover what we can do to move this entire ecosystem forward so without further ado let's jump right in i want to invite sandeep gianty and mihailo the founders of polygon to come on stage and uh share some of our their thoughts and uh without further ado let's bring all of them on to uh the screen welcome everybody thank you hello everyone everyone uh hello also yes awesome so yes we have your audible uh so yeah let's let's begin with a small intro uh you know from all of us so i'm sandeep i am one of the co-founders at polygon and i uh look at the business side of things that means the you know the business development marketing and you know all the things related to jd hi uh gente here founder of polygon started out of matic here started tech and looking after the tech and researcher nowadays yeah hello everyone i'm mikhail one of the co-founders of polygon i'm mainly interesting interested in scaling in our research efforts strategic type of things and yeah thank you so much for attending this event in such a large number we are very humbled and honored to see you guys here yep amazing so uh you know i uh you know let's start this event off with uh with the basically brief about uh the purpose of polygon and then we can move on to um you know different things we'll walk you through our timeline and you know about our zika things and and things like that so uh but but you know like the talk or the discussion about polygon cannot start without the discussion of uh ethereum right and uh you know this is so i you know we wanted to discuss about first uh the what is the core thesis of polygon here what what exactly uh polygon is is trying to achieve here right so uh you know basically this this whole web 3 space and and what blockchains are trying to do is to provide uh a basically this internet of value right web 2 was internet of information and web 3 is basically internet of value and our strong belief is that you know ethereum has strongly emerged as the value settlement layer which is highly decentralized highly secure environment for the value to trust value to transact globally and probably you know even beyond the globe once uh human human human race starts going multiplanetary and things like that so uh but but our belief is very strong that ethereum is that settlement layer and then on top of that once uh web3 starts expanding into uh you know into the mass adoption we believe that uh you know uh the the layer two solutions or secondary layer solutions on top of ethereum will will be the avenues where the end users will interact where the business activity will will happen but all of these different avenues will connect back into ethereum and that's the core thesis of polygon and it includes other uh you know ecosystem projects or of of ethereum also uh but at polygon we want to you know truly uh be one of the most dominant player in the transaction layer uh similarly you know many a time people ask that okay you know what what solutions polygon is providing right and and we say that uh and you know you might have heard that debate of like whether it's a layer two it's it's this and that first of all like most of the people try you know whenever they are talking about this they are talking about one or the other solution of of polygon right but as a whole what exactly is polygon is that if you see what we believe is that ethereum scaling is a spectrum we don't believe in a narrow definition of layer 2 you know we believe that all the different kinds of different flavors of solution add value to ethereum add scalability to ethereum and add network effects to ethereum so this is a spectrum that we that we you know uh we believe that you know ethereum uh scalability can happen and you can see across the spectrum on the left extreme you see a standalone change where the security by ethereum is very limited and on the right extreme you see fully secured layer two chains which have the both their data as well as uh you know dispute resolution everything going back to ethereum which is mentioned in this uh error with d a and d dispute uh resolution and data availability so polygon wants to be present across this uh you know solution spectrum on the left extreme you have polygon sdk which provides you capability to have these evm compatible sovereign chains then you have polygon pos uh which is like you know kind of in the middle it is actually uh you know a chain proof of stake chain built on top of ethereum and you know it is currently uh you know one of the most popular chains and many of you guys might know that you know polygon solutions have the dau even higher than the currently the ethereum main chain and many of the users are using and it's it's undoubtedly one you know not the highest used platform globally right now and then you know as i was talking about the spectrum on the right spectrum you have the zero knowledge solutions zero knowledge roll-ups and evm compatible roll-ups which are being built by you know various different uh solutions and then polygon avail as a data availability solution you know which 2.0 data shards also are going to be when it comes they can give birth to validium solution so with that uh you know with that base in mind that what exactly is polygon trying to achieve let's go through the journey of polygon and you know i would request jd to take us all through the journey of polygon uh and then move move forward from there jd yeah thanks so certainly started with the idea of idea to scale ethereum and launch later on 17 units when i was exploring multiple projects and the same crypto kitty happened the same time and then we realized that there is a need for them scaling solutions for the ethereum and at the same time we started uh instead of coding about the medic and founded medic um 2018 around 2018 we um we made it sandeep and i made it official that we are going to kind of build a medic uh evm based scaling solutions uh at the time like there were a few scaling solutions but um they were so complicated people uh the developers not going to use that uh properly or if they use that there will be there won't be a tools after the production of the maintenance right so we thought yeah evm based change would be better suited here for the developers to use and move from each other to um the specific chain uh in in five or five minutes or ten minutes you know simple uh easy easy to migrate um and then we we kind of noticed our io in 2019 on finance uh it was very successful io so far on the finance as you can see um june uh after multiple iterations devnet and destiny we launched mainly in early june of uh 2020 uh and since then uh we have been growing so so well that um top games on board at end of 2020 in february we uh in the hilo join in between uh late 2020 was a co-founder um polygon uh pneumatic became the polygon uh with with idea uh with the vision to have a multiple kind of solutions instead of one monolithic kind of pos chain solution uh and and you can see like you know after 2021 uh rwa major d5 protocols as well um came on on polygon um swap and multiple others right um in may 2021 mark cuban uh investors in us and we reached um 10 billion mark in in a market cape um 2021 uh in june 2021 sdk we launched studios studio has been successful uh in our journey and we understand like many nft projects gaming projects so far it helped them to launch them and it it has been so successful so far uh in august 2020 we announced hermes um network uh and they are building um pvm-based ck roll-ups uh we also launched one billion grant for one billion commitment from our site for the ck-based technologies scaling solution solutions um and q3 ey came on board with nightfall uh everything to purchase in mind and drivers in mind uh and q4 2021 uh we just announced like a few days back we announced uh my name uh polygon miriam uh with start-based uh cvm solutions ck solutions uh and one more thing we are going to do that uh but after some time wait for that yeah you do me hello thanks jd and thanks sandeep yeah so um let me briefly cover um what we call the polygon zk thesis uh here and uh this the the this this is basically the blog that covers it in in more depth uh is published several months ago and basically we keep uh publishing it with every zk related announcement and i guess we can share it also uh after the after the event or during but uh let's just briefly uh briefly cover it and one of the things that uh are part of this uh some of the things that are part of the zika disease are relevant to what sundeep and and jd said so i'll just try to run through these things uh as quickly as i can so as sandeep said uh rightly of course we believe ethereum is our best chance to build uh this uh global network of value and web free we are fully convinced in that right now and we are considering polygon an integral part of the of the ethereum ecosystem of course and this whole promise of this global permissionless internet of value is really amazing and really supposed to complement this internet of information that we have been creating for the past decades and creates a huge value-add basically for for for the humanity if you will and we are fascinated by that idea and we decided to pursue it and commit all of our resources to to help reach that amazing and grand uh um uh vision uh that being said uh again ethereum is very equals we're free in our in our minds but we need to scale it first of all so um let us first cover where polygon was like polygon beginnings and polygon where it is now basically and the wider context of the of the industry i guess when when we started versus where we are now so when we started as i said there was this pressing need to scale the the ethereum minute was heavily contrasted uh um ethereum user base started to kind of deteriorate in a sense that alternative chains started popping up with some normally uh uh trade-offs uh and uh offering maybe additional throughput and users started leaving and what not so we understood there is this really really pressing into scale ethereum uh at the same time scaling scaling ethereum was kind of a niche topic which was very relevant in ethereum community but in the wider context of the crypto industry it wasn't that visible or premium at least and there were a lot of opinions maybe even coming from vcs or influential people that it is not really fair favorable to focus on scaling ethereum and positioning yourself as a project on top of kind of ethereum instead of maybe competing with ethereum and it was kind of an accepted opinion that that can bring bigger benefits in terms of i don't know value capture and things like that um on top of that it's really important to understand that it is very hard to build quote unquote perfect solutions for ethereum scaling because uh ethereum as a community really does not accept compromises when it comes to these core values or core engineering principles uh which are mainly decentralization and security first of all on top of it we have evm as the standard that is kind of already established all these things or requirements combined together make it pretty challenging to build kind of perfect or ideal solution or solutions on top of that polygon when we started we have really uh modest resources as jd already said there was this small crowdfund crowdfunding campaign and uh even though the treasury was was managed really well um we still basically because market cap was very low we had really modest resources at our disposal and where we are now like 10 months later i guess uh or so since we announced polygon we are now by far the most adopted scaling platform in the industry and uh moreover as we are apart from ethereum we are very likely to the best of our knowledge the most adopted blockchain network or platform in the world apart from ethereum which is i guess we all agree a huge huge success in such a short period of time one additional thing that significantly changed uh since since then is that scaling now is kind of a mainstream and everyone's aware of it then fortunately everyone's aware of polygon now and we think with polygon we managed to set an important precedent in a sense that i think we kind of proven that we managed to prove that it's possible to build on ethereum with ethereum on top of ethereum and still capture value and still add value back to ethereum instead of competing kind of editorial so we think this is one very important thing that will maybe set a a an example for future founders to think about when they're starting their projects um in as a consequence i guess of this high level of adoption that we have seen so we right now have more than three thousand applications the deployed on polygon we have more than 100 million user wallets we have processed more than 1 billion transactions we have more than 5 or 6 billion even now user funds completely organic without any incentives from our side this huge level of adoption has subsequently led to the growth of the price of the token we're not here to talk about the price of course but i'm just saying that subsequently increased dramatically resources financial resources that we have at our disposal and that of course put us in a much better position for what we are about to do in the next chapter of polygon and now we can suddenly if you can go to the next slide please so we can actually get to to um to the thing so how did we achieve how do we achieve this success and this growth in in such a short period we had clear understanding and we still have that we have two major focuses that are driving us driving everything we do at polygon one is shipping and the second one is innovation innovation because uh we are still in very early stage when it comes to building uh infrastructure for web free and this internet of values so right now in ethereum we have millions of users but we really want to onboard one billion plus or even the whole world and which means we need to scale 1000 x from from this point without again as i said sacrificing these uh major principles major design or engineering principles of ethereum to do that a lot of innovation it still has to be done a lot of work on that front is ahead of us and we understood it and we are willing to um accept it as one of our focuses uh and the other one is shipping uh for us we're all i guess engineers by education and training and we are shipping oriented and for us unfortunately innovation without shipping is just an academic basically exercise so yes uh starting from there and realizing this pressing need to scale we realize that we for now at least have to be very focused on shipping in this first period uh we as jd mentioned we delivered polygon pos which turned out to be a huge success we intentionally uh offered it as a solution with that he has certain trade-offs no not a single solution is perfect of course but we just realized that the community really needs solution today evm compatible solution today without any delays that was a very good decision uh in hindsight and after all this growth and considering where we are now which i just covered we believe at polygon now uh we need to focus even more and commit we are in a great position to commit much more resources all sorts of resources financial human resources etc uh to innovation i think something happened with slice if we can just uh go back maybe to to where we were um so yes uh we are focusing back on innovation without losing uh focus on shipping shipping is still one of our of course major major focuses but we just believe that we are now in a very good position and we are thankful for that and we want to commit significant uh resources basically to [Music] 2d innovation activity happening on polygon if you can just get back the slides that would be great i think something happened just a moment i thought just give me one sec uh there is there seems to be some issue with my um this one's [Music] yes okay sorry for this disruption guys okay are we back guys can you see my screen yes yes okay okay awesome uh me hello you can proceed uh just a moment i try to open the presentation myself okay uh yes excellent okay sorry for this guys okay so speaking of innovation and our focus now on it there as many of uh you will know there are basically two major families of innovative solutions built on top of ethereum which are commonly called layer two solutions one uh one group are fraud tool-based solutions which are the most prominent ones currently at least are optimistic roll-ups and plasma is also part of that same family of solutions the other one are are the second group are zk-based solutions uh as as jd said like we all started uh researching and uh experimenting with these solutions pretty early in 2017 i guess ever since plasma was introduced and that's basically how jd and i met in the first place um and throughout all this time we analyzed all these solutions and we came basically to a conclusion that um zk-based solutions are probably the the i don't want to say the way to go but we definitely became biased towards this uh this family of solutions because of several major reasons uh we don't have i guess the capacity or the time to go into into all the details and compare these two families but in a nutshell basically zk uh based solutions offer significant uh advantages in terms of scaling first of all in terms of security first of all formal security provable security and in terms of user experience and these three things are as we i guess all can agree extremely it's really important or critically important when building scaling solutions uh that's why we decided that zk basically is a strategic resource for us moving forward and that we want to significantly focus and commit serious or significant funds from our treasury to to experiment with these exciting solutions so zkp's zero knowledge proofs or zero knowledge uh cryptography is basically a i would say a fascinating field of cryptography it was introduced in mid 80s uh and it didn't really have a lot of applications until blockchains came by uh zero knowledge crypto cryptography sorry uh um uses very interesting um cryptography primitives and methods to prove certain statements uh uh normally without revealing most of the parts of the statement and normally or very often in a very succinct way so it's possible to with very little computation potentially approve huge amount of computation or large amount of statements or transactions if you will and it became obvious along the way when uh blockchains were introduced and when the scaling uh uh pressing needs to scale was uh became obvious it uh became also kind of obvious that zk and and their special properties might be a really really interesting uh tool basically to to address these major challenges that's why we have seen in the past i guess two years we have seen a true cambrian explosion of innovation in the zk field a lot of new protocols a lot of new primitives a lot of new projects and we are very happy to see that then we are even more happy to be able now to uh seriously join this this uh um this evolution basically of z case as i said we decided zkp is our strategic resource for us and we decided to support this effort innovation in this field with one billion fund uh one billion commitment from from our treasury um if we can just go to the next slide um okay and just i want to just briefly briefly cover uh what we have done so far before i hand it over to sandeep again in our zika arsenal we already have so we announced the zika thesis i believe three or four months ago something like that and in the meantime we are very proud and happy that we have already significant results from this commitment and uh so far we have three active projects three very exciting projects uh under the polygon umbrella uh uh first of first one is polygon hermes as jd mentioned it is basically uh evm compatible roll up one interesting thing or specific or let's say two interesting things about hermes out of many uh uh are that hermes is the first decentralized roll-up so roll-ups are currently normally centralized since they normally have centralized operator hermes team has built the first and only to the best of our knowledge at this moment decentralized roll-up uh and they are now building uh zk evm which is basically the the re-implementation of the ethereum virtual machine zk friendly manner so to say and we are very excited of course about this effort polygon nightfall is the second project it is done in collaboration with people from me vi it is basically a continuation of their work on nightfall the the library for a privacy that introduces privacy in uh on ethereum mainly targeted towards enterprises with them we are now building this uh interesting hybrid roll-up basically which is a hybrid of uh optimistic and zika roll-up which is privacy focus so this is the first application uh for of z case targeted towards privacy so that's the main reason i guess why we're excited about this uh and the third one that we have announced so far is polygon maiden polygon maidan is a stark based effort uh which is basically a generic uh zk or stark based roll up which is going to be ethereum compatible so uh in a sense you can draw some parallels i guess with star queer effort between these projects the difference that this project is uh fully open source it's mainly community driven and there are some of course differences in the architecture which we find very interesting but we don't really have the time to cover uh those differences now what is very important for us like critically important that as you can see this there are already free projects here uh and some might ask okay how will these projects interact will be will they be competing with each other what is your idea there for us we we are extremely happy that we managed to establish a really really good atmosphere with this between these projects we are all aware that this is again a very early stage of innovation these projects are working very closely together they are constantly touch i mean we are all constantly in touch we are exchanging knowledge updating each other helping each other and we are moving towards to uh together towards this uh hopefully brighter future of of scaling uh that being said this arsenal is already very powerful i would say um but it might even be better or might even complete the puzzle if we just can add something more to it so what can we possibly add i will leave it now to sandy but can we imagine that we have the fastest zk scaling technology in the world that in some way would probably uh complete or really add a lot of value to this this arsenal that we have now and um yeah with this i will just leave it to to sandy sandy please [Music] [Applause]