Read Part 1 here: Slumdog Billionaire: The Incredible Rags-to-Rich Story of Polygon Sandeep Nawal
Growing up in poverty in the Delhi ghetto with an alcoholic father and an illiterate mother, Sandeep Nilwal always had a fire in his belly to achieve better.
He wants to go big or go home – mediocre success is not an option.
“I'm not doing anything small,” he told the magazine. “Okay, we build some network, and it has a token. It will work well for a cycle and then it will dawn, and I will get myself a few million dollars and retire or something – that was not the plan. “
“We're going to build this, grow the community and make it one of the biggest projects in the space.”
That's why, in his mind, Polygon — formerly Matic Network — even though it hovered over a $19 billion market cap at one point and joined the top 10 currencies by market capitalization (currently, $6 is No. 13). billion market value).
“Being in the top 10, top 15 projects does not give me satisfaction. It's very clear in my mind that I want Polygon to have the impact that Ethereum and Bitcoin have created. We have to go to the top three projects in space. And that's when I say, ‘OK, Polygon worked.'”
In Part 1 of this feature, Nailwal tells the story of how he went from grinding poverty to borrowing $15,000 to pay for his wedding in Bitcoin, and the difficult early days of Matic Network when he was faced with a lack of funds. – Currently.
In the year In mid-2019, Matic Network raised $5 million in Binance's initial exchange to keep itself afloat and launched the alpha version of Ethereum's layer-2 sidechain. But it is slowly becoming clear that the plasma technology that is being pursued is not the answer that the market is looking for.
Ideas on scalability are starting to change, and plasma defects (TLDR: better at transferring assets than running complex, smart contracts) have seen it fall out of favor. The research-focused Plasma team is looking to see which way the wind is blowing, supporting the construction of the Optimistic package, naming the project “Optimism” in early 2020.
But Matic Networks' white paper outlined a plasma-based solution with tamper-proof and exploitable checkpointing layers, and the team is committed to pursuing and building on it in 2019 and 2020 despite declining interest in the technology.
Table of Contents
ToggleThe fall and rise of the mainnet market
Just as the project was preparing to launch its mainnet in May 2020, the global pandemic and the March Black Thursday market crash intervened. Within 10 days, 70% of MATIC's value was gone from less than 3-cents. With the world fearing a new Great Depression, the future of the Matich network once again appeared in doubt.
“Suddenly, it felt like everything was going to zero. That shock lasted two to three months. We survived that, but what we realized was, you know, we started with plasma technology, and now plasma is dead. And now we start our main network. People are like, ‘Plasma is dead; There's no interest from the community.'”
Nilwal said the team reached two conclusions.
The first is to try to find as many developers and builders as possible. This was a success, just in time for Diffie Summer's exciting gas payments on Layer 1, launching their Ethereum Layer 2 just in time.
The second conclusion was that they could not put their eggs in one basket again.
“We realized we had to be multichain; we couldn't rely on one particular technology,” he said.
Long-time Ethereum community veteran Mihailo Bjelic was also thinking about the future of multichain, and his team joined the project to bridge markets and communities that were marginalized at the time. Nailwal said the project's origins in India meant it had a low profile in the West and was seen by some as “just another internet scam”.
Also Read: Beyond Crypto — Zero-Knowledge Proofs Show The Potential From Voting To Finance
In the year In early 2021, the Matic network was transformed into a polygon to highlight the change in direction. At the time, Nilwal told Cointelegraph that his idea was to become “Polkadot on Ethereum” and add Optimistics rolls, Zero Knowledge (ZK) rolls, and Starkware-style Validum to the PoS network.
But Nelwal said Optimistics quickly realized that having 50 chains running in an ecosystem was a “middling solution” that couldn't be done.
“With ZK you can imagine the world […] 100,000 chains; Each has 1,000 transactions per second (TPS); All together they can total tens of millions of TPS. And the architect still survives and continues to thrive.
“Infinite scale, integrated liquidity and why we bet on ZK is the main point because ZK is the end game of blockchain scale.”
Polygonal bull fever
In the year At the start of 2021, MATIC's market value was only $87 million. By the middle of the year, it had risen to about $14 billion, and by the end of the year it had reached $19 billion. That's in no small part due to the growing number of users and Ethereum's ability to scale.
In the year At the end of 2020, it had less than 1,000 daily active users, but in October of that year, it surpassed Ethereum for the first time with 566,000 users in a single day, surpassing ETH's daily trading, thanks to high gas fees. L1.
Suddenly, the founders were very rich individuals, and the project itself had the money to start a large acquisition process.
In August, it acquired the entire Hermès network for 250 million MATIC. The project became Polygon Hermes, an Ethereum virtual machine-compatible ZK solution focused on decentralized and peer-to-peer communication.
In December, Polygon spent another $400 million in MATIC to buy ZK-proof experts Mir Group to build ZK recursive scaling. And purchases were coming.
“We got them all. Did we say do you want to work with us? And I think at that point we got like number three, number four, five, we got them all, because number one, number two didn't come with us. (But) the talent in the number three, four, five teams. Very good, very good.
Venture capital seems to think the new plan is a winner, with Polygon raising another $450 million in early 2022, selling MATIC tokens led by Sequoia Capital India and including Tiger Global and Softbank Vision Fund.
If more groups take different approaches, the benefits become clear.
“In the beginning, we made them completely independent to do their own research, and they collaborated with each other. Because of that collaboration, suddenly we got ZK EVM, which people thought was four or five years away.
Read more
Main characteristics
Should we ban ransomware payments? It's an attractive but dangerous proposition.
Main characteristics
Crypto audits and bug bonuses are broken: here's how to fix them
The reason ZK EVM took only 12 months to develop was because of the “difference of ideas between these groups”.
Other flavors of ZK developed under the Polygon umbrella include Midden (a Starware-like system with its own virtual machine) and Nightfall (Optimistic rollups meet zero-knowledge encryption).
Bet each way on ZK, JavaScript is for middlemen.
Another big advantage of having multiple teams build different solutions is that Polygon doesn't have to make the tough choices that other projects have had to make.
For example, StarkWare says the additional performance provided by the Cairo virtual machine makes up for the difficulty of porting existing Ethereum projects to StarkX.
Most of the other projects – zkSync, Linea, Scroll, etc. – are making the opposite bet, but compatibility with the Ethereum virtual machine is easy, attracts projects and their solutions win market share.
Polygon is the only team with a each-way bet, Polygon follows Miden Starkware in a ZK-optimized virtual machine. On his part, Nilwal thinks that EVM will win in the short term, but other solutions will come into their own in the coming years.
“Does EVM feel like JavaScript?” He says. “I remember when I was a freshman or sophomore in engineering college…JavaScript was considered the programming language of midgets! But today, JS is everywhere; Perhaps 80% of the web is powered by JavaScript. So, even if they say ‘these are the problems', EVM kind of has those results.
Nailwal added, however, “Our plan is a 10-year plan. So, we have ZK EVMs, we have Polygon Zero, but we also have Polygon Miden, which we believe has high performance, has built-in privacy features. […] And it supports all programming languages.
Midden founder Bobbin Tredbare told the magazine earlier this year that Midden VM allows users to run high-quality video games and create ZK-proofs on their home PCs that they can send over the network.
“What they are doing makes me angry,” says Nilwal. But the midden starts blooming after a year. At that time we as Polygon community should defeat ZK EVM. He hinted that a new token and airdrop are being considered to help with this.
Ethereum has upgraded to turbocharged Polygon L2.
Ethereum's next big update, EIP-4844, which should happen before the end of the year, will introduce proto-danksharding to make life easier for sharding, which Nelwal says is welcome, not a game changer.
“I think some estimates only say packages up to 200–300 TPS. Therefore, it is not a big advantage, but it reduces the transaction (gas) cost.
According to the Ethereum Foundation, “full dunksharding is several years away,” however, multiplying that progress by the currently expected number of shards of around 64.
“So, you can imagine 64 multiplied by 200. So, as you know, there will be 12,000 TPS, all the scrolls can support.”
In June of this year, the project unveiled its Polygon 2.0 roadmap to become the “Internet Value Layer.” The vision is a ZK-powered L2s network that looks like a single chain for users to use because of a cross-chain coordination protocol. Builders can knock out their own ZK-powered L2 chain in a flash using Polygon's Chain Development Kit.
The existing PoS block chain will be Validum, which is one approach to deal with the data availability problem of how to store things in an affordable way on Ethereum.
The roadmap will see MATIC tokens upgraded to POL (short for Polygon) into a new token and introduce the controversial concept of repurposing, which would allow token stakeholders to earn additional rewards for helping to keep other networks secure.
“The Pole Token is essentially a high-yield, third-generation token. You can verify on multiple chains, and you can verify for multiple roles: you can be a collector, you can be a sequencer, you can be a data availability provider, and you can be a prover. So, with the same token, you can actually participate on multiple layers.
Retention is controversial in the Ethereum community, with critics arguing that it could turn into an unstable house of cards. But Nelwal says that POL will be integrated into the natural ecosystem rather than being added on top by third parties, much like Ethereum's EigenLayer, which minimizes the risks.
“With Polygon, risk-taking is more entrenched in the protocol; it's part of the protocol; that's how the protocol works,” he says.
“If you're a validator and you're running 100 chains, and if you fail in 100 chains or cheat on one chain, you're cut from all of them,” says Eigenlayer.
“I think there are a lot of things that ours is very simple and easy to do.”
Polygon 2.0 is like the internet of money.
For Nailwal, the ultimate goal of Polygon 2.0 is to develop crypto networks in the same way that the Internet evolved. The precursor to the Internet was the ARPANET in the 1970s, then the invention of TCP/IP in 1983 allowed multiple networks to connect, creating the Internet, which evolved into the Internet with additional technologies such as the Domain Name System and World Wide Web. Web.
“It's the nexus of all networks,” he says. “This is what you see happening on the blockchain.”
“It's very difficult to move your money from one chain to another without trust. You use these bridges, they always disappear. That's why Polygon 2.0 isn't just about infinite scalability. […] But it must ensure that the value being created across these hundreds of thousands of chains is connected and moves smoothly.
He said the interoperability layer would allow value to flow between L2 chains, as well as between Ethereum and potentially other Layer-1 chains, if they merge in the future.
“So with Polygon 2.0, we can have the same features as the web,” he says. “Whichever Web3 network wins, it must have infinite scalability and seamless transfer of value between these chains.”
“That's why the Polygon 2.0 architecture has received so much critical acclaim.”
Read more
Main characteristics
Can blockchain solve the oral problem?
Main characteristics
An Investment in Knowledge Pays the Best Interest: The Parlows Case for Financial Education
The future for Polygon and Sandip
Despite being a billionaire blockchain founder and living in luxury in Dubai, Nilwal still feels unsatisfied, that he has yet to make the impact he deserves. He sees world changers like Mark Zuckerberg, Satoshi and Vitalik Buterin – “a truly amazing person. So wealth alone is not enough. He wants to make a lasting impact.
“I never felt like Polygon made it,” he said. “This part is very constant in my mind, there is no such middle ground.”
“I think the ones who can say they made Bitcoin, Ethereum – no one else, no other protocol can say they made it; they can die in six to 12 months.
So Nailwal will not be happy until the Polygon ecosystem truly stands alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum as the foundation of the entire industry.
“We have to go to the top three projects in space,” he says.
Read Part 1 here: Slumdog Billionaire: The Incredible Rags-to-Rich Story of Polygon Sandeep Nawal
Subscribe
A very engaging read in Blockchain. It is given once a week.
Andrew Fenton
Based in Melbourne, Andrew Fenton is a journalist and editor covering cryptocurrency and blockchain. He has worked as a film journalist for News Corp Australia, SA Wind and national entertainment writer for Melbourne Weekly.
Follow the author @andrewfenton