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Fireside Chat with Polygon Labs CEO, Marc Boiron
Recorded: Aug. 22, 2025 Duration: 0:56:03Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. All right, everyone.
Thank you for joining.
We'll get started here in just a little bit.
We are going to get Mark, our CEO, up here. So just hold tight and we will get started here pretty soon.
Timmy, is there any music that you can play through the Polygon handle maybe, possibly?
Get some vibes going. If not can i can throw on some music All right.
I see Mark in the audience. so we will get him up here.
Let's see, add him up.
There we go.
And then, Timmy, if you want to throw him that co-host invite, that would be great since he's got a beefy Twitter account.
And we'll get even more listeners in here. But before we get started, everyone,
if you could go on down to the bottom right-hand corner,
you will see a little purple, you know, comment box.
If you click on that, it'll take you to the link to the spaces.
And if you could hit that like and retweet button,
it would be greatly appreciated.
Get some more folks in here uh to
hear about what is going on with polygon currently and what are in the works uh for the future so
uh hi mark how are you doing doing fantastic how are you great thank you so much for joining i think
um you know it's uh great that this month we're we're doing this on x especially with, you know, it's great that this month we're doing this on X, especially with, you know, having watched that unfold for both chains
and, like, the level of success that we have been able to have
comparatively to maybe some other projects.
Yeah, I think, yeah, there's a few parts to this.
So first, personally, like, I think Kaido is great.
And I think it's done, like, a lot for both Katana and for Polygon.
I think the same is true for Billions.
Like, the bottom line is, like, you have to, like, know what you're comparing Taito to is some form of attention that is paid for, not fully organic.
That's just reality.
And when you look at that, you're like, how is that usually done?
The reality is you are trying to find some KOLs in the back who who want to charge you based off of, like, per tweet,
usually based on the size of their account.
That's what drives it.
And that is all fine, but the thing is, what you're leaving out
is a bunch of, like, creative people
who are going to take a deep dive into your project
and, like, form a view on it.
And a lot of them are going to be looking at it fresh.
The quantity is a lot bigger.
And so when that happens,
what you naturally get is you get some stuff
that ends up being super low quality.
But what you also get is you still get
a much bigger audience,
a much greater number of people tweeting about you, very different
perspectives and takes on things. And so when you think about it for something like Katana,
this is great because it's a new project that nobody even knew about. And it is fantastic for
getting the word out. And even if everything written about it is not perfect, it's okay.
It gets the word out. People learn about what Katana is.
And Polygon, it's actually very different, right?
For Polygon, it's like almost everybody knows Polygon.
But actually, when you think about it,
nobody really knows Polygon because so many people don't understand
what Polygon actually is today
and what Polygon focuses on,
what Polygon's good at.
And now when you look at that,
most people realize that Polygon's very focused
on payments and RWAs
and that it's actually a leader in that area
and that it's got a, like,
very high potential product in AgLayer.
These are things that, like,
a lot of people wouldn't have known.
And so I think that's been super effective.
And so the next, right, expression of this is
how do you tie this to something on chain?
That actually means now they're not just talking,
they're not just helping other people learn about it,
but they're also becoming users.
I think we've already seen this quite a bit.
I think especially on Katana is people who are using
the protocol and then yapping about it.
But I think there's a lot more interesting things you can do.
Nice. Thanks for that, Mark. But I think there's a lot more interesting things you can do.
Nice. Thanks for that, Mark.
Yeah, I think just from my perspective, especially with Katana,
there's just a lot going on with that as an ecosystem and a chain.
And I think people really enjoyed learning about DeFi and being able to engage with it on chain.
And I think, you know, with that, there has also been a lot of goodwill that has come over to Polygon with association to Katana.
And then also billions right i think you know what we're starting to witness is kind of
like this this ag layer uh social layer through kaito uh you know billions katana polygon lombard
turtle club right so there's there's been a whole whole lot and that's for me that's been pretty
exciting to see um like this this above social layer and yes, but I do think I agree with you that next step
is the on-chain component. So really excited. Looks like Kaito is already rolling out some of
that. But thankfully, you know, on Katana, you know, a lot of top creators that were on the
leaderboard were actually using the chain. But thank you for that mark appreciate it uh yeah so i guess you know if you could uh
you know start us off with where we're at with polygon right now and you know where where we're
going sure um so always break this up by by products i help helps people conceptualize it
but um really if you if you think about Polygon, you should
really think about probably just two different products, Polygon POS and the Agler. And I think
when you look at where Polygon POS is right now, and you just go look at chains with the most usage,
what you're going to see is Polygon POS near the top.
And when you think about what that usage is,
I think you can break it up into three categories
that I think is helpful to think about
where we're at and what we want to become.
One category is DeFi, right?
Polygon was the DeFi king back in 2021,
2022, there's still a boatload of DeFi activity on Polygon.
That is something that continues to drive a lot of volumes.
The second one is these breakout applications
that somehow always end up being on Polygon,
which is probably telling.
Something like Polymarket, which is on Polygon and drives a lot of activity.
Something like Courtyard that is on
Polygon and drives a lot of activity.
These are things that are not just steady state,
they're just straight up growing tremendously fast
and bringing more activity over to Polygon.
Then last one which is the core of where we're focused,
is payments and RWAs.
And I think there's a lot that's been shared about this
because when you actually look at what we're trying to do
when it comes to just people being able to freely move their assets
wherever they want, whenever they want,
it's something that really comes down to not just whales being able to move,
but a lot of P2P transactions, smaller volumes.
When you start looking at that, you see that Polygon is straight up the leader in that.
And this is what happens when you actually have real usage on a day-to-day basis,
and it's not just transfers to different DeFi protocols in and out.
And so it's kind of where we're at.
And one of the things that's nice about Polygon when you start digging into this data deeper is it's not like we're just good in one area of payments and nothing else.
What you see is a global presence there.
It sees a lot of strength in Latam.
You'll see quite a bit in Europe. You're going to see a lot in Southeast Asia. You're going to see a global presence there. Sees like a lot of strength in Latam. You'll see quite a bit in Europe.
You're going to see a lot in Southeast Asia.
You're going to see a lot in Africa.
Like you're really going to see like a global payments world on Polygon.
And that is a huge driver of volumes.
And it'll continue to be a huge one.
It's actually just going to grow.
So that's on the Polygon POS side of things.
On the Ag layer side, it's continued development.
I've described this often as what we have now on the Ag layer,
is the base layer infra of what you need to actually have
viable cross-chain transactions that are secure fast and cheap
and that takes a long time to build out um it doesn't have the user experience that you want
yet but that's what we're turning to now right and so you know where you're at right now is you
can actually do these cross-chain transactions but they're they're slow right now uh and so what
we're working on is kind of the next step, which is referred to as like fast and raw,
speeding it up so you can go sub 10 seconds
and then sub five seconds and then sub second between chains,
as well as proof aggregation,
which is just going to allow the cost for chains
to actually settle to Ethereum to actually go down quite a bit
as we kind of aggregate multiple proofs
into one big proof and put it on Ethereum.
Key here being for users just means like lower costs that chains have to pass on to them.
So that's kind of like where the ag layer is at right now. The nice thing with the ag layer is
that it's very chain agnostic, right? So you can connect in a native way, like both CDK Aragon and CDK OP stack.
And then you can also connect other chains
in like a less native way,
which still allows you to bring assets in very quickly
from the AgLayer,
but actually assets just can't leave us fast.
Some things that are great about the AgLayer
in terms of like chains right now
is you've got Katana
that is right around $500 million in TVL,
about $450 million in productive TVL, growing very, very quickly. You've got Xlayer by OKX,
which I think is now time for people to start paying attention if you haven't realized there's started to be more activity um and so that is something that um is going to be really interesting to watch over the
next few months so pay attention to that and then over the next few months as well will be when pos
connects to the ag layer uh that's going to be another interesting development. So lots of fun stuff coming for the Aglairs.
I love that. Thank you for that, Mark. Yeah, I think, you know, something that I was thinking about when you were talking about the payments, you know, and something that I see, I saw a post
recently from Sandeep, where it's very near and dear to his heart to be able to give people the opportunity
to transact with their money in areas where, you know, it's maybe a little bit difficult,
you know, to bank, right? And, you know, you talked about Latam and Africa and some of these
other countries. Can you talk a little bit about that? And what we're seeing with some of these countries,
maybe where the currency is not as stable
and how Polygon can come in
and really help some of these people in these areas?
Yeah, I think it's always worth remembering
why is payments so on on blockchains
right and you really think about it it's like it's the first use cases to why blockchains were
ever even created with with bitcoin uh it just happens that bitcoin's not great money even though
it might be great at uh being a store value or gold or something else. It's not great for payments. But stablecoins are,
especially in a world in which people do want to hold the US dollar. But the nice thing with
stablecoins is we're also seeing a lot of additional currencies that are non-US currencies
in stablecoins as well. And I that's just going to to continue to grow
but when you think of that like original use case for blockchains being payments uh it's because
it's like naturally a better way to move money at any time of the day anywhere in the world and so
what that means is that um if you think about why stable coins would grow on POS, well, naturally, people can pay each
other from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world easily at any time for, you know,
less than a hundredth of a penny. And that is incredibly efficient. And that's like the first
kind of like great big use case that's always been well known is Ruminensis.
I think the second one, which you touched on, is like this idea of like in-country currencies. I always differentiate between like cross-country type payments and like in-country payments,
because the reality is that like cross-country payments is basically good, a good use case almost everywhere.
But in-country payments, like most places, it sucks.
Like I'm in the U.S. and if you tell me to like pay you in a stablecoin instead of Venmo, I'm just going to be like, why?
It actually just doesn't make sense to me.
Notwithstanding that like I should be one who theoretically would want to pay in crypto.
But if you ask me to pay like somewhere outside of the U.S, I will literally ask you, can I please pay you in crypto?
But this isn't like globally true, right?
As you touched on,
and therefore you want to hold another currency,
which may not be easy to access in your traditional financial system.
Or number two, you just don't have easy access to which may not be easy to access in your traditional financial system.
Or number two, you just don't have easy access to the traditional financial system in your country.
And so now you have stable coins that are available to you.
And this is why I think you see in LATAM, why you see the kind of growth that you have.
And it's been true for a while in stable coins. But it's becoming more and more true is,
I think this initially starts with P2P.
It's just people to people making payments to each other.
What you end up getting is institutions being
like FinTechs and even more broadly than that saying,
hey, we have a role to play here too.
And you're seeing like a huge growth in fintechs
in LATAM and elsewhere in the world
coming on chain to like fill that need in countries
where they can do it like a lot more efficiently.
So yeah, I think that really probably summarizes it all.
That's great. Thank you for that, Mark.
For anybody that's interested in how Polygon is doing with payments and LATAM,
I posted a tweet up above a thread that Mark put out.
You can go and give that a look.
It brings me to my next question.
I pinned this up to the top as well, a tweet from Sandeep. We've had a
major announcement today, the CDK Enterprise. So Mark, do you want to maybe talk a little bit
about that and what you think that that's going to do for the ag layer? Yeah, sure. So when we look at like where we're at in the market right now, there is no doubt that the world has been opened up for enterprises and institutions.
And there's also no doubt that they are going to want something different than what currently exists in the market. I do think that if you look at the last few years, there's been like a pretty significant shift in institutions like willingness to touch
permissionless systems or be involved in them in some way. But that doesn't mean that they're
fully there. And it also doesn't mean necessarily that their users want that same thing.
And so I think if you think of top of mind, what's something that an institution really
wants to offer that might not be something that you could get on a permissionless open
blockchain?
Privacy is a great example of this.
They understand that their users are not going to want
all of their transactions to be viewed publicly.
Their current users don't have
their transactions viewed publicly and they want to be able to replicate that.
You can go through different things that
these institutions and
enterprises wants available to them.
That requires a different stack,
which is the whole purpose behind having the CDK Enterprise stack.
This is something that we released.
Gateway did a lot of development work behind it,
did a fantastic job with it, so kudos to them.
Really what this means is now there's
like a AgLayer native way for these institutions to come to the AgLayer. And when they come to the
AgLayer, this now means that they can issue their assets on the AgLayer. And depending on the
permissioning they do on their chain, these assets can now be transferred kind of like cross-chain.
And what I expect actually to see happen is that a lot of these institutions start where they really limit the transfer of assets to within their own chains.
And as we get more clarity from a regulatory perspective, they get more comfortable with it from an organizational perspective, they start allowing those assets to be transferred more freely across chains.
And that could be across chains within kind of like their kind of institutional chains,
but it can also be with permissionless chains, public chains eventually.
with permissionless chains, public chains eventually.
So we kind of view this as like a move from all of these institutions
who were on completely private ledgers with things like Hyperledger Bezu,
moving over to finally being on like public ledgers,
still with some controls and differentiation from like your typical chain.
And being able to do that in the Aguilera, give access to assets to users on other chains,
which I think will end up just helping the Aguilera grow in an area that is going to
grow very quickly.
Nice.
Thank you for that, Mark.
Look, I will open it up to the audience to ask some questions here pretty soon.
I've got a couple more questions.
So if you want to hit that request button to speak, I can bring you up here.
If you have any questions, it would be great to have some folks up.
Or if you don't feel comfortable speaking, you can always drop a comment down in the comments.
comfortable speaking, you can always, uh, drop a comment down in the comments. Um, but yeah,
very exciting stuff, um, with the institutional. Uh, yeah, I think, uh, yeah, it's a great direction
to move in. Um, so for my next question there, I saw a tweet, uh, from a Blockworks journalist,
and they kind of talked about the different proposals that were given to Ronin, you know, from the different foundations.
And I can post it up to the top.
But basically, you know, it kind of goes through like,
hey, you know, this much was $360K worth of ARB to become an L2 with them for Arbitrum.
And then it says Polygon offered $11 million plus in total value, including $3 million plus in direct grants contingent on hitting certain goals.
And then it goes through some of the other, what some of the other chains offered,
Optimism, ZK Sync. And yeah, I'm just wondering, you know, if maybe you could go through
what that offering was and, you know, what value you think
we would have from Ronan joining the Ag Lair?
Yeah, good question.
I love this one because most people see that tweet
and they're like, oh, Polygon, you're so stupid.
$11 million, like, what are you doing?
It's like my favorite thing is people
who don't actually look at things any deeper.
But when you actually look at what the,
when you actually, if like what the, when you actually,
if you were to actually read what we submitted, there's very little that is like just upfront, like way under a million dollars. And it's all contingent, right? And so the way that we look
at this is like you make offers that have contingencies where it's a win-win.
You need people to actually be
successful in what they're doing to actually receive a grant,
but they need to be confident that they can
be very well rewarded for being successful.
The reason because they're actually
adding value to things that we care about.
What were those things?
A small part of it is actually using
the Aglay or CDK,
tiny part because frankly, we actually don't care.
Actually, the proposal specifically says,
if you want to use Orbit or you want to use CDK stack or something else,
feel free to use it.
Our offer is still on the table because we literally don't care.
And so there's really two parts that actually are important,
which is one is using Vault Bridge.
And this is the ability for Ronin
to be able to offer much higher yields to their users
by using the same mechanism as Katana is using,
and that you will see many more chains using.
Torno is using it as well.
There's another one that's lined up to use it.
I just don't know if it's public yet.
Several more conversations.
And basically, this is the ability that users deposit right now,
USTC, USTT, ETH, and BTC,
and those are lent out on Morpho, Burning Guilt.
And that is something that if they do that,
there's a revenue share on that.
And therefore, there's a certain amount of dollars that is worth paying out based on the idea of having revenue flowing back.
And so it makes it very easy.
We get that revenue.
It gives us the ability to then grow the ecosystem further.
And so that's one part of it. Obviously, the way that that's mapped out is,
there's a certain dollar value of TVL,
at which point we view it as,
okay, over the course of X period of time,
we'll actually recoup money or actually make money off of that.
So that's one part of it.
Then the second part that's very milestone heavy is
cross-chain transactions,
which is if you're going to be driving
transactions across the Ag layer,
that is eventually going to be value that flows to
to poll holders once the Ag layer is decentralized,
but Polygon Labs now.
That is again something that is worth paying for.
There's a few reasons in this case where that's the case.
One is obviously value actually being earned,
but the other one is that's actually adding value to other ecosystems.
It's either their users using assets that exist on other ecosystems,
or it's users in other ecosystems using assets that exist on Ronin.
This actually allows for Ronin to get much greater distribution of its assets,
its users to have access to much, many more kind of like assets and use cases than it would otherwise.
And so ultimately for the AgLayer, what you get with this proposal is,
I think a chain that has proven, like a team that's proven itself to be able to execute very well,
who would be coming to the Ag layer with the incentive to grow the Ag layer,
both in terms of assets deposited,
but also in terms of cross-chain transactions.
It ends up just being a win for poll holders,
Ag layer as a whole and all the chains on it.
Perfect. Thanks for that, Mark.
Yeah, it's nice to dig in a little bit deeper, right?
I think people see that and they're like, oh, wow, that seems like a lot without actually knowing the details and what all goes into that.
you know, knowing the details and what all goes into that. You know, one last question. I think,
you know, I have been seeing some excitement around the AgLayer breakout program, especially,
you know, with some of the creators through Kaito, like kind of catching on to it,
you know, with Katana and Billions. Can you talk a little bit about the AgLayer Breakout Program
and what we're thinking around that with rewarding poll stakers?
Yeah, it really all comes down to Polygon Labs is there and exists,
and Polygon Foundation to help grow Pol along with the community.
And so when we think about that, the answer is, well, people should have a reason to want to hold Pol.
And there's many, many reasons for it.
But one of them, presumably, is that they want the benefit from things that we are developing at Polygon.
And so I think one thing that we've done very well
is actually have the ability to incubate projects
that turn out to be things that are very successful.
So I think Katana is one of them.
I think Billions is proving out to be another one of them.
I think Maiden is, I think, pretty obvious to most people that it's going to be very successful.
And there's kind of like more in the works.
And when you think about that, like as a poll holder, our view ends up being that like staking is the activity that really adds value to the network. It secures the network. And that is what should be rewarded. And so part of the AgLayer Breakout Program is support that Polygon Labs provides to these projects through incubation and then afterwards as well. But it's also value that flows back to pull stakers
for continuing to secure the network,
which is really interesting because when you look
at the potential of objects,
they can be pretty significant.
And then the allocations are actually not small.
They're pretty meaningful in most cases.
So that's really the idea behind
the Aglera breakout program wonderful uh thank you for that mark well look i'm gonna bring some
community members up we've we've just hit the uh half hour mark i think uh it has been a great
space so far so excited to field some questions from the community so let's get some of these folks up here
first we have a d engineer up here long time polygon fan and creator how's it going d engineer
sorry sorry sorry i forgot my mic was muted and i had to reach for it um yeah uh do good question mark regarding the cdk i noticed a significant push towards rwa
dpin adoption was there something particular that drove that uh narrative other than uh big no
i'm not sure i fully caught that can you repeat repeat it? So I noticed in the CDK deployment,
there's a big push towards making CDK proofs more easily accessible for builders,
for financial institutions, things along those lines,
just looking at the adjustments from a top level.
Is there any particular platforms, infrastructure, or financial institutions that kind of push
that narrative or that direction for the development?
Got it.
Yes and no.
We are in talks with so many financial institutions and enterprises.
We always understand where the market is at. And one
thing that is that is very clear and is that institutions are just ready to do more on chain.
And when you go back like two, three years ago, the ready to do more on chain was like just
proof of concepts, which for what it's worth is still like many of them. There's still a lot of
like proof of concepts that are going on that are marketed as more than proof of concepts in crypto, but are really just proof of concepts.
But there is still like much more of a willingness to say, hey, we're going to jump in because we
think there's a value add here. And that value add is different for different institutions,
but they definitely see it. And so when we think of like CDK,
the products that really were out there
was really things that were for like Web3 native teams.
And as I was touching on earlier,
like the enterprise and institutions
have a different set of requirements
and you want to make it easy for them to be able to use CDK
and have access to all of those requirements that they have, like the features that they specifically want.
That's like really the reason for developing it.
It's just if you think comprehensively of the market right now, it's not just Web3 native use cases.
It goes beyond that. Our view is always to focus on things that are Web3, that we believe like can
become Web3 native. I think that a lot of the ways institutions are looking at things is exactly that
is, OK, let's keep this like very limited now but grow it into something that is
going to be more web3 native and when i say web3 native i really mean like using like the full
potential of like a blockchain and why it actually exists um and some of the composability between
chains and apps that can exist so um that's really like the reason for focusing on making one of those
stats available is just, it's what the market wants right now. And so we listen to what
the market wants and we'll deliver them that.
That was such a political answer. I love it.
Nice. Thanks for that, DeEngineer. All right, let's get on over to Lady Rocket. Go ahead. The investment means that Copernic Space invested in Polygon platform to use it as the, I believe, first Polygon-based true space economy platform.
And it's a pleasure to meet Mark in your CEO capacity.
My questions have to do with the partnership and technology functionality and also letting you know that we took Polygon to the moon.
We have a CEO of Copernic Space here that can actually elaborate on it more.
But Mark, as of March 2nd, Polygon is executing transactions
that involve space economy, community, because it was our role to democratize access to
space, and Smokey, thank you for your surprise face. And we've been looking for the opportunity
to update you guys on incredible accomplishment, especially as we are moving to the second phase
of development of new functionalities on Polygon. So everything that you mentioned about Polygon Foundation,
incubate capabilities,
we would be very open to receive offer from you.
I visited with your great foundation team at East Denver,
and we always talk about Polygon during Formula One,
because we want to take Web3 to the places that really rack.
And last, we have a racket with a Polygon name on it
that might lift off in October.
So thanks for the opportunity to share and update Mark as a CEO.
And the question is, what type of key functionalities
that might be relevant to our enhancement of transactions
and space assets on Polygon platform, do you plan for your company?
And as a CEO, how can you help us establish closer relationship with your development
team so we benefit greatly from your programs, from your support and from technology feature.
And again, Copernic Space CEO is right below me.
Cool. Thanks for the question.
And are you building on Polygon?
So I'm going to first make the comment
that I love hearing Polygon going to the moon.
I usually focus on pole going to the moon, but I'm also fine with Polygon going to the moon. I usually focus on pole going to the moon,
but I'm also fine with Polygon going to the moon.
All of those like work.
I'm in favor of it.
In terms of like your question.
So first, I always think these answers are like very specific to
like what people are actually building and like what their needs are,
which is very hard to understand without more detail.
So first, maybe it would be good for you to just, my DMs are open, just shoot me a DM
on specifics about exactly how you're using Polygon. That's always helpful to understand.
But more broadly, I think there's the, yeah, it really depends on the use case, but for purposes of some of the innovations and what we're doing on
Polygon that I think ends up being broadly beneficial to everyone.
A few things. First of all,
we rolled out our Heimdall upgrade probably about a month,
a month and a half ago now.
That was very important.
It ended up obviously increasing capacity on POS,
I think hit over a thousand TPS on chain,
like on mainnet since then,
which I think is really, really big.
We're going to be increasing that to over 5,000 TPS.
Important here being that every app and user should be able to
have a good experience that does not end up being bottlenecked.
So that's one part of it.
Probably another one that's pretty relevant to you and
almost anyone is decreasing time to finality.
That's something where right now,
finality historically, you'd want to wait for a certain time period,
and we're basically going to be decreasing that significantly.
When you think about this from a user experience perspective,
you're no longer waiting a long period of time
for the change to actually finalize.
It happens almost immediately.
This allows for you when you're building for users to
actually be able with confidence to offer much shorter time periods
on when a transaction actually looks final to a user.
Which ties into the next point
of what we're also working on is single-slot finality,
which will be kind of released this year as well.
And what you're really going to get there
is like a complete elimination of reorgs
that have historically existed on the chain.
And again, goes to basically being able
to have like confident finality.
So those are kind of some of the big buckets of things
with all of those really coming down to users having a faster,
in some cases cheaper experience as well,
and being able to really as an app developer,
and so for you specifically,
being able to show faster confirmations to users so that
they feel like their transactions are actually being completed sooner.
That really all comes down to just increasing the app and user experience.
Fantastic. Thank you so much.
Since you are a steam lawyer,
keep in mind, let's figure out financial
law for the transactions on the moon. And I am almost serious. But last question, if I think it
will benefit our audience, not only me, is about your foundation. How can we put in front of your
in front of your team,
an invitation to work with us so we get
attention and velocity in building together.
Yeah. There's a couple of things.
One, the community grants program right now is
like one source where it's not Polygon Labs,
but it's actually where the foundation, it's like Polygon Labs, but it's actually, or the foundation,
it's like an independent team actually evaluating those.
That's like one path.
The other path is directly working with us.
I like the thing is,
I will say like very frankly is the way
that we approach things is very much like focused
on what we're trying to execute on, which is
payments in RWAs. So when I was saying like, hey, shoot me a DM, help me understand like what
you're doing, it's like, how much does this tie into payments in some way? And those are the kind
of like use cases where as a foundation, we will spend more time. We will evaluate the and where it is that we can actually help,
if we can actually be of good resource.
And that's really probably the best way.
So I think if you DM me some information,
I think that'll be the best way to evaluate how we can help at all.
Great to meet you. Thank you. Yes. I think just to comment a little bit,
to expand upon that a little bit more.
I'm on the Founder Experience team with Maddy down there in the audience.
We're currently setting up some pathways for projects to be able to
receive some resources and be able to to receive
um some resources and be able to be with other builders but i think like you know it is um you
know important that that mark touched on that point right like you know polygon specifically
like is focused on rwas and payments right and i think uh that is just the direction that we are going in with projects
and putting resources towards. And with any support program that we set up, that is what
we will be looking for, for sure, right? Just to remain aligned with what is the overall higher
level strategy. But so stay tuned for that.
That's currently being built out.
I think with any type of founder support program,
it needs to be scalable
and to be able to actually meet the needs of founders.
So yeah, stay tuned.
We are in the process of building that out.
Thank you, Smokey Jaitan. I appreciate.
And yes, we have a scale called space.
So looking forward to collaborating.
Thanks a lot.
Great. Thank you.
All right. Well, let's get on over to GZ DeFi.
Go ahead.
GM, GM, everyone. Can you guys hear me?
Yeah. Yeah. Can you guys hear me? Yeah.
Yeah. Thank you.
Yeah, Mark, you've been doing great work educating people about Polygon
and other projects on Polygon,
like Brilliant and Katana.
So my question is,
how does Katana
solve liquidity fragmentation
differently from
the way Aglier does it?
I don't know if you get my question.
Yeah, yeah, I get it.
That's a really good question.
So I think that most of the time when people, people have been like really focused on this idea of like fragmentation across chains.
And for very good reason, because there's a ton of fragmentation across chains.
And for very good reason, because there's a ton of fragmentation across chains.
That is really what the Aguilera is trying to solve, is let's not have fragmentation across chains.
Let's basically have like one shared state across all chains in crypto.
That being said, there's still an issue that people just haven't focused on of fragmentation within one chain.
And within one chain, AgLayer cannot solve that fragmentation.
Nothing can solve that fragmentation.
The thing that has attempted to solve that fragmentation is aggregators,
like DEX aggregators, for example.
But the thing is, they don't fully solve the problem.
They just partially solve it.
And the problem being that when you're looking at one chain
and you have 10 dexes on it and people provide a certain amount of liquidity to one and then a
certain amount to the other and then a certain amount to the other what you have is a uh like
significant amount of fragmentation so i actually i was I was putting together a deck the other day, actually, and I was pulling data around this issue. So I was pulling data around like, uh, uh, with USTC pools, um, that exists on, on base. Um, and you've got, uh, at least when I pulled the data, you've got an aerodrome pool that has $34.5 million.
You've got a pancake swap pool that has $5.5 million. You've got a unit swap pool that has
$26.5 million. When you actually look at that, that means that the pool with the deepest liquidity
has $34.5 million of total liquidity. If you were to take all of those pools and put them into
one, you'd have 66.5 million dollars of TBL in that pool. Now, with that 66.5 million dollars
of TBL, the slippage on a trade is going to be significantly lower, right? So when you're talking about
on something like that,
if you're talking about
like a $500,000 trade,
you're talking about
like probably 2.5% slippage.
You're talking about like 1% slippage,
1.25% slippage
where you have the bigger pool.
Take that to like
where you start assuming
people want to trade in size. Institutions come in, more whales come in, and you start wanting somebody to do a
swap of $5 million. That means that while you have three DEXs with a total of $66 million
on base in a WETH USDC pool, if you want to do a $5 million trade, you're talking about 28% slippage.
If you're talking about that being in just one pool, you're talking about 12.5% slippage.
Significant difference. Now, obviously, 12.5% is still way too high. You just need the total to do
a trade of that size. You need the total pool amount to be higher. But the point is that the
amount of fragmentation that actually exists within a chain is very problematic for purposes of doing any size of trades.
Great. Great question. Thank you for that. And thanks for the response, Mark. All right. Well,
we have a couple more people with their hand up. Let's get on over to Adam. Adam, go ahead.
Hey, Mark. Nice talking to you. Just congrats on having Polymarket on your chain, man. This is like, you know, it's really hard to get a winner in crypto. And having one of the winning apps is pretty amazing.
My question has to do with payments.
And I think we've all kind of seen your little ads and stuff along the payment kind of rails.
How are you thinking about, like, I would point out, like, maybe banker or this idea of an AI agent to kind of manage payments and payments across chains?
Um, just wondering what your thoughts on that are. If you're seeing anything on Polygon currently, that's kind of moving into that space, not only for payments, you know, on Polygon, maybe USDC and stuff like that, but kind of cross chain stuff. Are you seeing anything like that on Polygon right now?
Just wondering what your thoughts on that are.
Okay, yeah. So first, I think, sorry, I was muted. So first, I think first, yeah, thanks for Polymarket. It is a big deal, but honestly, they're the ones who do all the work and they're the ones who deserve all the kudos. They've done a fantastic job. Just happy that like Polygon does a great job of being able to handle the type of like volumes, especially like spurts that they have at certain times, which is great to be able to let the general public see good baseline infrastructure in the space.
In terms of what you talked about, yeah, we actually literally have a defined vertical of AI payments.
And we used to do work across AI just in general.
And as we started narrowing more and more the work that we were doing on payments and rwa
is basically said like uh you're the entire ai uh focus is going to be on how ai intersects with
payments and enhances payments um and so yeah i think there's like a few things on on that front
like uh definitely in earlier stages but i I do think like BankerBot
deserves a shout out on this front. It's more like generalized than just payments,
but I think great kind of starting point is maybe the way that I put it for payments.
For payments, BankerBot's just good more broadly in general.
BankerBot's like just good more broadly in general. It's pretty cool.
It's pretty cool.
Our team's been doing a lot with X402
and how that'll intersect and be valuable with payments.
I think you'll see more on that coming pretty soon.
But yeah, that's definitely the kind of thing
that we're focused on is just the whole idea
of authentic payments in general.
So I think you will
be seeing a decent amount of that coming out on on Polygon because it's just a core part of payments
wonderful thanks for the the great question Adam um all right well let's get on over to the last hand that we have d engineer go ahead
a two-part question mark you mentioned the tps upgrades for the network we recently saw
say and solana boast six digit tps is there any like heavy push to get in that range for the TPS? Or is it just slowly, as you guys get there kind of thing?
It's not like a back burner kind of focus.
Yeah, I mean, you'll see, this is just the start.
We get to 1,000, get to 5,000, get to 50,000, get to 100,000.
So there's such a convergence in blockchain infrastructure.
I say this all the time, like, and this is why we don't focus on just general purpose things anymore, is blockchain is going to look the same in two years.
Like, they're already all converging and looking the same.
So, yeah, like, you'll see Polygon POS, like, we have a roadmap internally to 100,000 TPS,
and you'll see it even increase post that.
That's like a more short-term, let's call it a medium-term,
shortish medium-term roadmap to that 100K TPS.
So I just think there's just going to be a convergence
where there's no massive difference.
And it totally makes sense.
Like when you're talking about open source software,
there's literally no reason there should be a significant divergence between them and so i think the differentiators really are not going to come down to block space
it's going to come down to what you build around that block space um and and the value of that
perfect thank you and then the other question no future and I want to know when you're coming on the Hangout
That's a good question
When am I coming on the Hangout
I'm happy
DM me and let's see when I'm coming on the Hangout
Sounds good, thanks Mark
That's a great space
It's been going on for a really long time
It's a little too early for me. I think it's like 7 a.m. for me.
So I don't even think I've had my coffee yet.
But good space to go on for sure. Thanks for that, De-Engineer.
But look.
Smoking.
Yeah, go ahead.
7 a.m. is like halfway through the day, dude.
I know. I know. 7 a.m. is like halfway through the day, dude. I know, I know.
I tell you what, living on the West Coast and, you know, working at an international company can sometimes be a bit tough.
You're the last one to wake up.
It can be tough.
Yeah, I know.
You're an hour ahead of me, Mark, right?
So I'm sure it's even, you know, it's crazy for you as well.
Like by the time we're up and moving,
everybody's halfway through their day.
And it's like, oh, okay, here's all these notifications.
The way you can get revenge is just like super late advice.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead, Maddie.
Then the way that you, and also, hi, everyone.
I opt on because we were talking about support,
but then the conversation kept getting really good.
And so, but yeah, Smokey,
the way we can get revenge is with really late invites.
Of course, I consider late like 7 p.m.,
so maybe I'm also in a minority on that one.
But yes, as a fellow West Coaster, we can do this.
Yes, yeah, there can do this. Yes.
Yeah, there are some of us here.
But look, I think that it has been a great space.
We might just move these over to Twitter, to X from now on.
I think that this was super productive.
Really nice to be able to hear about all of the major developments that have happened and are coming and to be able to have the community go straight to Mark.
So I think we definitely want to keep this spirit of just having this level of closeness with the community.
There will be a weekly space coming up, a new one, that will be covering ag layer related topics, projects.
So stay tuned for that.
It's going to be with my dear friend Carlitos Way.
And I think next week we will start out by having an AMA with Foresight, which is a prediction market on Katana.
So, yeah, stay tuned for that.
But thank you for coming out, Mark.
Do you have any final thoughts that you'd like to leave the community with?
No, nothing much other than thanks for coming out and listening.
Always feel free to DM and ping if you have questions.
Want to make sure that you all know what's going on and can get all the information anytime.
So thank you all for being here.
All right.
Well, thanks, everyone, for coming out.
We will see you next month.
And appreciate it.
