Episode 219: Scaling Ethereum with Polygon’s Mihailo Bjelic

Transcript

[Music] welcome to xero knowledge i'm your host anna rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online this week i dive into the polygon ecosystem with me hilo one of the co-founders of this popular evm compatible scaling solution we learn about the polygon history the product suite they now maintain and their push into the zk space we talk about the

interaction within the polygon zk ecosystem chat about their connection to the ethereum ecosystem as well as what's next for the project now before we start in if you're looking to jump into the zk space professionally i want to remind you to head over to the zk jobs board there you can find job posts from some of the top teams working in zk i also want to encourage teams who are hiring to use this jobs board to find your next hire we have teams like polygon hermes ef and protocol labs there already be sure to post your job on the zk job board for the entire zk community to see we'll add the link to this in the show notes i also want to make sure that the upcoming zk hack mini is on your radar last fall we did a seven week event with puzzle hacking and zk tool workshops now

we bring it back for a mini version of this event set to last two weeks it starts on march 1st so if you missed the first edition or we're at the first edition and want to continue with the puzzle hacking workshop fun uh be sure to sign up for the newsletter and you can already sign up for our first event over on hop in we'll add the link to this in the show notes now i'll let tanya the podcast producer share a little bit more about this week's sponsor today's episode is sponsored by leased authority lease authority has been making advancements in the zero knowledge space since 2013. this year they will release the moon math manual a beginner's guide to zk snarks the manual is designed to enable an audience with only minimal cryptography and programming experience to implement complex real world zk

building blocks lease authority has also published a white paper on zero knowledge access passes otherwise known as zcaps this privacy enhancing technology enables users to access services without revealing personal information to the service provider they are implementing zcaps in private storage their soon to be released cloud storage service to learn more about lease authority and the upcoming moon math manual visit moon leaseauthority.com manual that's leaseauthority.com moon math manual so thank you again lease authority now here's anna's interview with mihailo from polygon [Music] so today i'm chatting with mihailo the

co-founder of polygon welcome to the show me hilo thanks santa for having me pleasure to be here i'm really excited to have you on and talk about polygon because polygon is a project that's moved very heavily into the zk space recently and you'd have to be completely not paying attention not to see polygons kind of presence in the zk ecosystem so i really want to find out though like what was polygon before all this where does polygon start for you uh so ever since 2017 i guess i i have been actively involved that's where i when i officially left i guess web 2 world and the startup i was working on back in the days and officially full time joined joint crypto

and started exploring ethereum i i was drawn to this great idea of programmable blockchains and web free and the this grand promise of of this internet of value that we are trying to build and permissionless global financial system for everyone and all these transformative concepts i guess of of governance uh changing the way we as humans collaborate disrupting companies disrupting governments all of that i went full blown down the rabbit hole i guess and and it became inevitable i couldn't resist anymore simply so so i just joined the industry full time and focused i guess on ethereum fully

and and um it was already pretty evident that ethereum layer one cannot scale and that's uh that's a feature not the bug actually and and the scaling solutions were slowly being introduced plasma was the thing back in the days and i guess i got pretty heavily erectively involved with the plasma reach research and all plasma flavors that we have seen back in the days and that's when i got drawn into into the this whole scaling debate and research and field in general uh in parallel with that i i think i got to understand i mean i still have that understanding or belief at least that we will see and we will live in some sort of a

multi-chain world so these multi-chain concepts or frameworks also kind of inspired me or i got very interested in them and it was after some time that i that i understood that actually these two concepts ethereum scaling and multi-chain systems as such are actually just two sides of the same coin basically and it kind of that's when it kind of clicked for me and and that idea of polygon was born soon after that maybe i i guess it was some sometime in 2018 i cannot really recall exactly and that's when i actually started exploring all these solutions i also i guess i got to understand that uh as i said we have this

grand promise of of web free and i i strongly believe ethereum is our by far the best chance to actually build this web free and and it's like something that really inspires me every morning when i wake up or when i go to bed this grand promise again of this network of value this permissionless financial system that will allow anyone to to participate in global economy for me if if you don't mind maybe i'm of course i'm maybe being too broad here but i think it's maybe interesting to just answer your question and as many details as sure so why not go for it yeah okay yeah for me that that opportunity with

internet basically with with establishing this internet infrastructure and internet becoming mainstream we have established this network of information and that network of information democratized access to knowledge globally and that's something very very powerful to me so before the internet access to knowledge wasn't democratized it wasn't globally available it was kind of uh reserved for people who were you either in some geographic locations like developed countries or had certain background or enough uh money to attend uh colleges etc internet democratized all of that so with the internet now anyone in any

remote village in africa or whatever latin america or anywhere basically can access more or less this global knowledge base and can learn english learn to code basically acquire skills in globally i guess democratized way what is missing now in this setup that we have is that now these people still in many regions cannot monetize that knowledge it's still not possible to actually monetize or or benefit or improve their lives with that knowledge that they can acquire i've spent some time living in africa and i've seen there for example in tanzania it is normal for people not to have ideas because it was pretty strange to

me but people don't use ids like identification cards yes there's no concept like half of the country basically doesn't have ids not to mention bank accounts so in such setup it's really hard how do you actually monetize your knowledge or any skill that you might have with webfree that kind of changes everything and that's what really one of the things that really inspired me to actually join this whole effort is basically like that missing component okay so people can now actually acquire skills globally and now with the pre it's like so simple boom you just create your wallet and you can actually get paid as an engineer or whatever or content creator or whatever really and it's something that i'm really really

excited about and that's what kind of keeps me going that's one component second component is this as i mentioned this concept of collaboration and and blockchain says human coordination machine i guess or computer and basically the the potential we have with all these concepts now to do to disrupt companies to disrupt communities in general potentially even governments or concept of nation states ideally speaking of course long term but these two i guess major concepts are very very transformative and can fundamentally change the society we live in and that again that is really inspiring

for me now going back to engineering and technology we are still in a very early phase we are building some infrastructure for 1 billion plus people let's say ideally 2 billion 3 billion people currently the architecture we have is far from enough is far from mature enough for robust enough or scalable enough decentralized enough to support that that scale so i guess i came to understand while researching these scaling solutions and in general infrastructure that it is indeed very early stage of you know development innovation and everything so i i kind of came to understand that at this point it might be the best to

actually just facilitate innovation there is this famous misquote let one thousand flowers bloom so i can't understand that there should be an unopinionated platform an opinionated project that will support innovation at this point without betting on any specific technology so we have seen multiple projects you know coming and going some of them even dying betting or trying to build some specific technology and in at this point where we're in this early phase of innovation it's highly risky because a lot of these projects will will not make it actually we're still brainstorming experimenting with technology so that's how the idea of polygon was born as an unopinionated platform basically that supports all

major uh scaling approaches infrastructure solutions and yeah that that's kind of the origin of polygon i i spent some time tinkering about it and i set some kind of high level concepts and design maybe some vision and that's how the idea of polygon or first i guess concept was born and that was already i guess 2019 yeah so this is a question i have for you is when i'm trying to describe polygon i don't know if i can put it in the camp of like an l2 or a side chain like is it a roll up is it bridge to the main chain how do you conceptualize what it is today like the polygon that

people may have used if they're using open c and using kind of the polygon chain as the chain option what is that right now yes great question so polygon pos chain is our widely adopted solution that 100 plus million of user wallets are already using and that is just one chain in the polygons multi chain so we actually aim to transform ethereum into a multi-chain system with a multitude of chains of different architectures basically polygon ps is the only one chain in that ecosystem that we envision and it is special only in a way that it is highly adopted at the moment apart from

that its technology is also quite interesting in a sense that it is some sort of hybrid of layer two and a side chain it has i guess combines components of of both we can go technical of course if if we want on this podcast but generally it's interesting because it combines these two these two concepts and that's what we want to encourage and we're constantly encouraging at polygon we see ethereum scaling as a wide spectrum for us anything that scales ethereum technology ethereum stack is also scaling ethereum so on one extreme on let's say left side of that spectrum we have kind of fully independent almost this sidechain solutions or enterprise

solutions that are using evm and for us they are definitely adding uh to the network effects of ethereum and scaling ethereum technology uh scaling the the idea at the end of the day of ethereum and that's one one kind of extreme or one side of the far left side of the of the spectrum on the right side of the spectrum we have these full-blown layer tools how how we normally call them so these are chains that are that derive to a large extent security from material and in the in between we again have multiple solutions solutions like avail for example so with layer twos we normally assume that both data availability is so cold we can explain

the concept if needed i'm not sure if all the listeners are aware of the concept we've covered this a number of times on the show but i think it's great to redefine it for folks data availability what is it sure so basically when you build these scaling solutions you have two major i guess challenges one is how do you ensure security or correctness of transactions and the second one is how you ensure data availability so correctness or security is obvious one right you want all the transactions in that scaling solution or in that sidechain or whatever it is or roll up roll-ups also separate chains that's important to understand they just are secured by by ethereum so in in this particular solution you want all the

transactions to be correct right and you ensure that in zika roll-ups via zk proofs or so-called validity proofs in optimistic roll-ups you ensure that by fraud proofs so this is how you kind of ensure security and you derive security from ethereum in some way a separate concept the second concept is data availability so let's say you have a scaling solution that has one operator that is that is kind of running that solution and you say okay we have zk proofs of transaction correctness so this operator cannot do anything malicious right they cannot submit malicious

transactions we have zk proofs that are proving them so they cannot do anything malicious but what if that operator decides to shut down its server and it holds all the data of all users so users cannot actually exit if they want to go back to layer one they need it available so they can actually submit proof of transaction inclusion and they can actually exit to layer one so data availability is the proof that data is available that one could like get it if they needed it is would you say that's it yes for for any purpose either for exiting to layer one or to challenging what operator has done for these two i guess

major purposes you need data to be available this transaction data you simply need it otherwise some some big bad things can happen you either cannot ensure security fully because maybe operator in case of optimistic roll-ups for example so operator might be submitting these checkpoints to ethereum periodically but you cannot challenge them even though they did something malicious because you cannot see the transactions themselves you need to see them you need to understand that something malicious happened there and then create a fraud proof based on that so that's one thing or if you want to exit you also need data to be available so for these two things you just need all the transactions in in that

sidechain and that's a specific solution or that layer two to be available and these are i guess two major challenges that we're facing when we're designing this these uh l2s and other side chains we generally prefer term scaling solutions i guess and we see polygon as a scaling platform we don't really want because layer two is we see full blown layer two there's only one part of that scaling spectrum that's that's how we see it and as i said now in the middle you have either hybrid solutions like polygon pos chain that combined i guess pieces of both worlds of let's say side chains and layer two or you have layer twos which don't have data availability on ethereum

so as i said layer twos normally derive both security from ethereum and have data availability on ethereum you have solutions for example called validiums which are deriving security from ethereum but it plays stores somewhere off chain it's not committee it can be on a committee it can be on a permissionless network of storage nodes whatever or it can be on specific solutions like the one that we are working on in polygon called polygon avail so polygon avail is a specific data availability focus chain so it's basically permissionless solution for storing and sequencing data it's specifically being built for that

it's one of the projects that we're experimenting uh at polygon but i want you to say basically is we we consider and take into account and try to work on this whole spectrum of solutions because we see use cases for practically each one of them and we see interest because one of the things we're focused really we have two major focuses in high polygon one is innovation and pushing the frontier of innovation staying on the bleeding edge of technology always and the second one is adoption and we kind of already became known for adoption and our i guess relentless some would say work on on on that front and we really want to actually like for us technology that no one uses is

unfortunately it's worthless no matter how much uh work you put into it so adoption is really important for us and we like to talk with the projects and end users and that's something we i get kind of specialized in and we're really the reason why i'm saying this is not to brag it's because we are really seeing use cases for all these solutions across the spectrum basically enterprise is one want one types of solution in general uh the three natives want different types of solutions etc so it's really i think this spectrum is here kind of to stay and and pretty much all the solutions from the spectrum have their place i guess in the

ecosystem so i i guess that's how i see it i want to kind of go back a bit to the early days because i had some questions you sort of you started to describe that you were looking around at things like plasma would you say like the early iteration of polygon was like plasma was it a plasma type chain and maybe what what is plasma even i mean we covered it a long time ago on the show but i could use a refresher yeah so i guess two major things we should mention there one to to cover briefly plasma is a layer two solution based on fro fraud proofs oh yeah it's very similar practically or essentially it is very similar to optimistic roll-ups

roll-ups are basically i guess the next iteration of plasma and they differ from plasma mainly in the way they approach data availability so plasma generally stores the notion of plasma the idea of plasma is to store data somewhere online that's where offline sorry that's when the actually data availability as a concept and as a challenge was actually uh identified during this early plasma days that's when it became obvious how okay we actually need the data that's when the data availability problem kind of was identified in the first place and optimistic roll-ups are actually normally solving that by storing data on on ethereum itself and that's

practically the major difference between optimistic roll-ups and plasma that i guess there's no other major difference so were you guys plasma originally and yeah that's the also important thing to understand so as as i said i kind of formalized the general vision i guess and design and concept of polygon and i was about to start poly one as a standalone project but generally as i guess as a person i'm i'm generally collaborative and and i like this spirit of collaboration that we see in ethereum it's really one of the things that are uh that i find very cool and and i'm kind of excited about so i generally spoke briefly with couple of projects that have significant amount i

guess of tech overlap so these were i guess ethereum scaling projects all of them and there was significant overlap as i said between my vision uh of polygon and what these teams were trying to build or achieve and one of the projects was medic that's how it uh used to be called backing yeah yeah okay when i started talking of course i knew all these projects these founders from from before and this is a small community we all know each other and all that and i just started briefly talking with them and as we started talking things really started uh coming together really nicely and we really kind of clicked and

we very quickly decided to start working together and you know starting work together with someone and becoming co-founder with someone is not a small decision it's something you don't really decide lightly but really all the kind of checkpoints with these guys got ticked and they were very committed to what they were doing uh treasury was managed very well they were really proactive they already had very similar vision for let's say the future of medic and a bunch of things kind of came together nicely and we just said okay let's do this thing together and that's how polygon was then officially introduced as our collaboration actually so i didn't

start it as as a sole founder we started it together and that turned out to be um i would say a really good decision and because of this all like exponential growth that we have all witnessed in in the last year and that we're very excited and humbled by so to just answer your question basically they were working what they had at the time was i i believe the the first or one of the first one doesn't even matter plasma implementation that we're all in production live in production and being ready to use and they also had this polygon pos chain and that's where we i guess also learned one important lesson so so we had this

pos chain that was up and running in production and it was fully evm compatible and we had plasma at the same time that was also production ready available for developers to use but still 95 of projects we were completely not biased you know when we were discussing with teams and onboarding them we were actually recommending plasma is a layer two solution because it derives security right from from ethereum more than the pos chain to a certain extent but developers actually turned out that this cvm compatibility is really important and developers actually willing to accept certain trade-offs maybe even in terms of kind of security or at

least theoretical security to have this convenience of ethereum development environment so so that's something we kind of learned and then we accepted that okay whatever we built moving forward we really need to try to make it tv and compatible that is kind of our now uh one of our design principles for all the solutions that we're building it so polygon ps is fully evm compatible polygon edge is fully compatible as well as our zk solutions polygon hermes polygon might and polygon zero that we're all very happy to support so yeah all of them pretty much have uh evm compatibility on on the roadmap that was actually one of my big questions was

like was it sort of a fork of geth the pos chain and what is the pos in the pos chain previous stake for proof of stake yes exactly so that's the kind of the the hybrid of as i said the side chain that is operated by a proof stake set of validators which is now i don't even track the the prices to be honest but i don't know what is today's price but let's say the total amount of stake in terms of us dollars is probably north of three billion dollars i guess maybe even or i'm really not sure so it's pretty uh significant amount in terms of this economic security that this proof of stake provides and uh it's a decentralized validator set proof of stake based and

we also on top of that and what is very interesting it actually lives on ethereum so in that sense for example if if ethereum hypothetically if ethereum stops working for whatever reason ps chain also will stop working because the whole validator logic and everything and the the bridge itself everything lives on ethereum so we're kind of like an execution i guess extension of ethereum maybe in some way i have some questions now about how this relates to like the eth2 split because i'm i'm sure you're paying attention very closely to this like if like this is super interesting so your pos you have your own validator set you have your own locked security from like basically people who've staked

their tokens two validators i'm assuming on the network and yet there's a bridge so there's a bridge from polygon pos chain to ethereum and you're saying that there's something in the logic that tracks it but is it sort of like time code block height like what kind of thing what does it track in terms of tracking the chain only monitors events on ethereum mainly on the bridging side or validator logic side so basically uh the the whole chain is aware of these two i guess groups of contracts so breeding contract and validator contract so the chain is aware what is the active validator set what are the weights of of every specific validator and in terms of the bridge

the chain itself is aware of any message that is requested to be bridged to to the polygon ps10 or vice versa from the pos chain to the ethereum layer one and the the messages that are supported they are generally arbitrary so you can even have uh not only simple token transfers but you can have some for example you have applications like curve that have deployments on both ethereum layer 1 and on polygon ps3 and then you have some governance decisions for example on layer 1 and the governance data makes a decision and they are able to execute decision on the pos side via the bridge in a basically trustless manner without any intermediary because we support this arbitrary message passing

that's i guess one additional convenient uh feature that this chain supports but again just going back to to the the major point viewers chain is just one concept one specific implementation on that spectrum of ethereum scaling solutions that we see and we were just i guess fortunate that chain was up and running it was fully even compatible and it was available today like we were last year we were kind of in the situation where um ethereum gas fees were going crazy people kind of started leaving the ecosystem to to some maybe other layer one chains which are maybe not offering the best uh trade-offs in terms of decentralization and whatnot of course i've never

i never like to talk negatively about any other project of course but i'm just saying that i guess it's it's its effect kind of and i think polygon was there ready to kind of meet that huge demand that that we were seeing in the market so the pos chain was very convenient in that regard but we really now are heads down working working around the clock really and more advanced this bleeding edge uh solutions that that will we really believe push the frontier of innovation one of them is for example pulling on hermes we can go if you want to cover more i guess based efforts i would of course really love definitely and yeah we're really excited about it i want to do a rundown of all of the different

kind of the product suite i don't know if you'd call it that but all the different sort of chains and ideas pos chain is this incredibly popular chain and used a lot and it's very very large and like you what you're saying sort of like you were there at the right time right place you had the evm compatibility that maybe other teams didn't realize was so incredibly valuable to be able to redeploy a solidity contract you learned that all right yeah i learned it the hard way i do have one last question about it which is like is it geth or is it something else because it's pos like what's it based on so actually yeah uh essentially pos is indeed the fork of get at least the execution layer when it comes to consensus we are actually using cosmos

ie tendermint for for consensus and for this proof of stake overlay so that's how it uh that's how it works for now currently we're working on version three of the ps chain that should introduce some i guess fundamental improvements of how the chain operates and uh simplify the architecture a little bit because currently it operates in two layers one is called hemda hymdal and the other one is called bore but we don't really i guess need to go into that right now but it is indeed based on on get at least for now cool so you you mentioned that you have tendermint and sort of something borrowed from the cosmos ecosystem at the same time i see kind of in everything you're saying you're extremely focused on ethereum have you

considered bridging to cosmos do you have any connection to that ecosystem or do you see yourselves as entirely pointed at ethereum we are fully focused on ethereum like 100 but we of course support and encourage all other projects that are adding value to the to the industry in general and cosmos is certainly i would say one of them and they have made significant contributions to the industry so far already so yeah i really love the team and as well some other teams in the industry so yeah wherever there is a meaningful way to collaborate we are open for collaboration but when it comes to our focus we we are definitely

focused on it here in 100 and we are not exploring generally uh ourselves integrations uh with other layer ones and whatnot but uh again polygon is a fully permissionless network and platform and we have indeed already bridged the deploy to deploy to some other layer once but it's by third parties it's done by third parties like there is i think now probably even i would say even 10 bridges from polygon pos to the ethereum itself wow just to ethereum you can say official it's not even official yes we have built it but it's public infrastructure of course of

course it's not our property or anything but there are third parties i would i know at least six bridges that are currently uh operational between polygon ps and ethereum and as well some of them to other chains like bsc or whatever or somana or whatever of these layer ones are out there but it's these bridges are done by third parties because it's of course poor fully permissionless uh platform and anyone can do pretty much whatever they want so i think it's a really good time now in the episode to do the kind of rundown of all of the different products because you've mentioned them a few times like you've sort of hinted at them the different types of roll-ups the different types of scaling solutions

that you're working on and maybe we can start with one you already mentioned which may i don't know if you'd exactly put it in the category but this avail date availability do you it's a standalone roll-up what would you call it like a chain yeah it's it's a chain it's similar to uh i'm not sure if i should talk about other projects i guess i would say it sounds similar to celestia yes exactly yeah okay celestia is also a great uh great project they're tackling the same basically challenge but here again a little bit more focused we are actually fully focused on ethereum they are more involved with cosmos as far as i can notice nowadays uh which is i guess one

difference very ethereum focused and the second major difference is when it comes to technology basically i think celestia to the best of my knowledge still i haven't followed haven't been following their work really closely lately but i think that the way you ensure data availability is using fraud proofs on their side and we use something called kate commitments and some interesting cryptographic and mathematical concepts to actually ensure this data availability and it's more in line with i guess data availability uh shards that are being uh currently researched and developed uh within the ethereum to as part of ethereum so it's basically the same line of

design that we followed polygon available and we want to kind of the idea with the veil is to maybe contribute in some way and uh push that whole uh effort over a little bit faster we would like to collaborate more closely we already have contacts and and interactions with the ethereum 2.0 team that's working on the sharding itself and we would maybe like in a way everything we do at polygon uh we kind of do with the idea to also give back to ethereum because pretty much all this adoption is we have to thank ethereum for for it okay there was a lot of hard work on our side and all that that's all fine but uh the way

ethereum community kind of embraced us and understood that we are actually adding value to ethereum instead of just trying to extract value and all of that and uh everything happened really nicely and uh we're very happy about that and we are always looking for ways to to give value back to ethereum and avail also with it we we would like to again contribute to this ethereum 2.0 data sharding research and and network in general but yeah polygon avail is a data availability focused solution it is also a chain itself okay it is one of the chains in this polygon ecosystem this polygon multi-chain ecosystem that we envision and it serves

this specific purpose it should do it really well it sequences data and it stores data and the the i guess it's specific in a way that very little overhead is required to actually ensure that the data is available so you can actually have a light client of that blockchain which can do some small uh data sampling occasionally throughout time and with very little overhead basically for the light client itself you can stay assured and have higher guarantees mathematical guarantees that the data is actually is available and that is kind of the the nice thing about it so yeah it is not a smart contract chain you cannot deploy apps on it or anything

like that it literally stores data in a sequenced uh way and you can easily ensure that the data is available by doing this sampling that is kind of yeah introduces low overhead do you also picture this being sort of the base chain of another ecosystem of roll-ups or do you see it more like holding data but making data available for roll-ups on ethereum yes that's exactly the purpose second one yes yes yes the base layer the base layer you always want as a base layer something that is highly secure and that is normally ethereum layer one so that should be the base layer for roll-ups we believe in general

but a roll of storing data on ethereum layer one is simply not scalable it is cheap it is expensive consumes a lot of gas and it significantly uh limits or i would say even dramatically limits the the throughput of these solutions so you need we need to look for ways to store data basically of chain and avail is just one effort one of the approach approaches that we are considering experimenting with currently and uh yeah we believe it might be an interesting uh option to actually keep the data for for these roll-ups in moving forward we also have other approaches and other efforts as i said like we really now just want to

facilitate innovation at polygon we're still in this early phase let's just help as many great ideas try to facilitate them put some funds put some resources puts our i guess maybe even network effects or whatever any sort of help can provide and let's see how they play out in the market not all of them will survive of course but it's i think very exciting and meaningful to have this uh innovation hub that we consider polygon to be what about you would sort of mention this too what is polygon edge what is that polygonal is another solution in our suit that actually enables anyone to build their own chains within within this uh multi-chain ethereum oh is it like an sdk kind of

sort of yeah actually polygon edge was called the uh polygon sdk originally we recently rebranded to polygon edge because uh we got some feedback that people normally thought for some reason that it's some sort of developer toolkit for the pos chain itself and then yeah to build daps on top of it or something yes okay confusion there constantly so we kind of discussed it briefly and decided to rebrand the polygon edge and it's in some way equivalent to cosmos sdk i guess a lot of people have heard about it or substrate exactly yes so it's kind of our alternative also again you can guess ethereum fully ethereum focused

and we currently support these enterprises like standalone po and enterprise cvm chains we support side chains that's what we have for now we recently introduced proof of stake overlay for that consensus so it's basically a modular framework to build ethereum compatible chains as we call them uh moving forward we want to introduce more consensus algorithms we want to introduce layer 2 support so people can even build their own layer 2s using polygon edge so that's going to be pretty cool and yes a lot of other cool stuff in the road map and basically polygon edge as we said before pos 10 is a fork of get [Music]

polygon edge is kind of implementation of the whole ethereum stack that's we use that's what we use as foundation for polygon edge but built from scratch which is very interesting so that was i guess one of the very few efforts at least in recent years to rebuild the whole ethereum stack so normally people forget which is it's convenient get this battle tested and all of that it's been in production for years but there are i guess two at least major downsides to that one is get is of course very monolithic code based there's a lot of interdependencies everywhere you cannot change the things easily we really want to have something

that is modular we wanted modular sensors we wanted modular runtime so you can actually with polygon edge you can kind of plug in you don't have to use evm necessarily you can plug in something like awesome you can maybe plug in some not maybe you can plug in something like ovm which is a virtual machine for optimistic roll-ups and stuff like that we are even now experimenting internally as a matter of fact we are right now starting a proof of concept we're going to use the polygon edge framework and instead of evm we're going to use zkvm that is currently being built by polygon hermes team yeah and you're going to see how the system runs together and maybe we can significantly speed up the whole development time and

maybe uh solve some of the relatively small challenges that challenges that we're seeing on the polygon hermes side so yeah you really wanted something modular which you get definitely it's not so and the second thing it sounds so hard to do this by the way because like you are what are you you're reverse engineering guests in a way and then you reverse engineering the architecture is known but just building it from scratch is is pretty challenging it's it's a pretty complex tech you know so uh and uh we wanted it to be modular one thing the second thing is uh um get is a code base that has been built for years and involved over time and it

kind of becomes a little bit messy you know some parts of the code base maybe networking especially and things like that there are always parts in these code bases that no one dares to touch because they don't know what it's going to do touch that part basically uh yeah so we just wanted to rewrite the whole stack in a more you know organized well-structured manner and i think we have achieved that it was really challenging actually and now we're working with multiple partners we're gonna have several very big announcements on that side both on the enterprise side and some big names are already using it i cannot share more details right now but it's going to be public very soon we're seeing it kind of in testing environment running very successfully now with any major issues so i think we

maybe have even made it uh so yeah this polygon edge basically like a modular framework for building all sorts of ethereum compatible chains basically ideally almost everything from that ethereum scaling spectrum that we mentioned do you have any other products or like in your suite maybe some other scaling solutions that aren't zk because i want i also want to soon move over to the zk side of things but yeah is there anything else maybe on the non non-zk that we should know about yeah we we are of course supportive of all the solutions uh uh our meaningful efforts to scale ethereum we are still actively experimenting with optimistic or fraud proof based systems uh we don't have

formal efforts there i'm not saying we won't have them but currently we don't have anything that is formalized and official from that side so i guess we can dive into the part of the okay so like i had an interview with jordy and david about when was this it was last year spring and at the time i think it was like at the very moment that they were actually like joining polygon and we even had to record a little add-on at the end because the announcement happened between the recording and the actual release of the show

and i know it wasn't actually that much about hermes that was about zk evm so we had gone into the initial plans of ckevm but hermes itself was also sort of brought over to the polygon world and i'm wondering like it has its own way of writing itself to chain and creating the snarks and creating the proofs but do you see that like has it evolved since being incorporated into polygon or does it still run the same way yeah great question uh thanks for that so herman's when we started talking to them first let me just give a very quick kind of preface so as i said we support all the solutions or scaling solutions from the spectrum of course but having explored extensively all the

solutions from the spectrum we are a little bit biased toward zk based solutions we believe taking every taking everything into account zika based solutions probably offer the best set of tradeoffs and can actually be the the i don't say the holy grail but uh can actually be the technology that can help us mitigate almost all these major challenges that we have including including privacy which is very important by the way and it's coming one day now we're all super occupied with scaling and that's like the pressing issue but once we manage to actually scale privacy is going to become a very hot and important topic because currently we're just basically our wallets and everything is open to everyone in the

world to to see and monitor our transaction transactions and that's not really viable and i take i guess zk pays solutions are very opposition to to mitigate i guess uh all these major challenges that we're facing right now as an industry i guess uh yeah and we kind of formalized i guess that bias in by publishing our zk thesis sometime last year i guess maybe in june something like that uh where we actually explain what i said now and we committed uh one billion dollars from our treasury to to support uh zk based efforts be it r d or projects or acquisitions or talent

acquiring grants anything basically that can help the industry move forward and that's how we start that's when we started actually establishing this uh polygon zk based rdk team if you want our ecosystem or call it whatever yeah and hermes is the the first project that we that we officially introduced and we are super excited to work with the with the team team is pierced by geordi who's a kind of libyan legend of ethereum and they already had the living legend of zk yes yes for the jordy and the team they they built the only for now decentralized z kernel up this is very interesting so this is

even today the only decentralized eq rollout it doesn't have a centralized operator centralized sequencer all the roll-ups out there actually not only zk but zkn optimistic all of them have centralized operator all of them apart from hermes so hermes by design has decentralized operator and some interesting model for picking the operator based on auctions and whatnot and it is live on mainnet but it is limited to uh mainly payment use cases you know token transfers and things like that so that brings us again back to this ethereum compatibility thing and how how needed that is basically for any scaling solution to be widely adopted and hermes team uh understood that

and we started talking and we really kind of clicked uh on on multiple levels and uh yeah we really liked that there started work on zk vm we recognize of course the importance of that we after some period of negotiations we decided to to join hands and yes so far the the again that proved to be so far very good decision i believe and we're uh heading towards testnet i'm really happy to say that i think uh you can even mark the day today but let's say in three months for today it's it's always tricky to give this you're putting pressure on jordy in the team right now yes but i i spent a couple of days now with jordy and the team

a couple of days together now uh went over everything that uh has been worked on uh lately and we're of course constantly in touch uh very closely we are all very confident to say that uh in three months we will have a test net of zk ibm and that's going to be to the best of my knowledge again the first implementation of ethereum virtual machine in in a zk friendly manner and we are of course super excited about it and we started this effort of establishing polygons zk team or or ecosystem if you will and one of the teams that we had a lot of respect for was definitely hermes and we started discussing with them and after a series of discussions we

recognized identified a lot of synergies mainly the the upcoming hermes 2.0 how we still call it kind of internally and to answer your question basically what's new on the hermes side so yes they have already built this uh decentralized roll-up which is live on the main net now but it supports generally only payments token transfers and things like that and as we previously said like we learned the hard way the tpm compatibility is very important i guess so uh it was great to recognize uh synergies there and they're also starting this zkvm uh effort and now we are well on our way to actually deliver that so along the way we agreed how we

can start join hands start working together and basically polygon hermes was announced in that i guess interesting acquisition merger basically which is to the best of my knowledge the first the first example of one network absorbing another one i guess polygon token absorbed kind of hermes token and that was also kind of a pretty cool i guess experiment and but going back to the technology itself uh hermes the whole team is now fully focused on delivering zkvm which is going to be we believe to the best of our our knowledge the first basically evm fully vm compatible uh zk

uh roll up out there we are very optimistic about about delivering and i think i can share basically that in three months from now from this day today we can expect actually zkovm on the on the test net which is really really cool and we are again it's um we're always careful with these timelines of course but i'm constantly in touch with hermes team we're we're constantly updating each other we're working together and we're very confident that within three months from now we can have this on on the test which is going to be very very exciting uh in parallel we're starting some auxiliary efforts there in terms of mainly harder acceleration which is going to be almost necessary i guess at least in this first iterations of

zika based solutions so i'm not sure if many of your listeners know but harder acceleration is basically something that can significantly improve the throughput itself or computational efficiency of these zk proofs and related operations so we're also working there very actively to establish a strong team on that side and ideally further accelerate the zkv and once we have it out there on on the mainnet ideally within six months or so that's our target for now like i said just before there is an entire episode all about the zkevm if someone wants to go a little deeper into what that looks like uh i'll add the link to that in the show

notes as well if someone wants to hear it excellent yeah highly recommend it it's a great episode and very interesting thing that jordy came up with these micro vms and uh in general very very interesting technology totally although interestingly after that errored i did learn about two other zkevm projects there's definitely something brewing in the ef around this yeah and so there there is like quite a few i mean i think the idea of that like as an evm kind of secured by a zk roll up or yeah a zk a zero knowledge proof somewhere along the stack i think in the case of the zke vm that jordy does there's actually two i think it's a really exciting challenging kind of goal i think a lot of people are going to want to do it i'm

excited to see how different people approach it actually absolutely absolutely and we are of course very collaborative and geordi's indeed and we're working with ef people mainly with barry berry is leading that uh effort to the best of my lodge again from the f side and we are having jordy and him are also collaborating very well and uh there's another project i think called scroll that uh think something like yeah if i'm not mistaken they're trying to reimplement also or to implement ziki zkvm i think based mainly on this ef based effort that barry is i think that's that's uh my understanding at least i think you're doing something in that regard i'm not sure they were experimenting

also it's something like that who were yeah lupring oh oh i didn't know about that oh that's cool i heard that i think not quite sure but i think i've heard that they're also working with df in in some way which is super cool for us of course like uh let's all push the frontier of innovation together totally um what else in the zk stack do we have to look forward to can already play with i'm thinking maybe we can hear a bit about like nightfall yeah let's briefly cover i guess the three remaining efforts on our side so as i said polygon hermes at least the upcoming version currently is a payment focused roll-up upcoming zkvm is full-blown evm

zk secured implementation we're very excited about it as i already explained we have polygon maiden polygon uh zero and polygon nightfall uh left over so polygon nitro is uh unique in this zk solutions ecosystem in a sense that uh at least in polygon because it's the only one that is privacy focused it is privacy first solution it's not focused on scalability it's focused on privacy so it basically was started by the great team from the eu basically led by paul brody who is one i guess of the more prominent people from the enterprise ecosystem in our industry and

they started this this uh first of all they built this nightfall library that is providing privacy features uh for for mainly for enterprises on interior maintenance they realize it is very kind of gas heavy like all i guess zk operations on on mainnet and they start exploring these soft chain solutions and having a kind of a separate chain or roll up whatever and that's we were in touch already and working on some things together and we said okay let's do it together and that's how polygon nightfall was was born and announced and basically it's a again interesting uh hybrid of optimistic roll-up and zk roll-up and again going back to what i said in the

beginning this ecosystem is very broad very interesting and we can see all sorts of hybrids they are all sorts of solutions so i wouldn't i don't like be hell bent you know this is layer two or this is not layer two let's just uh allow this whole ecosystem to kind of thrive and develop and uh let's see what we can come up with so it's sort of combines uh components of the of optimistic roll-ups and uh zk tech to actually provide this privacy first solution so you can even kind of think of it as a tornado a lot of people uh know tornado from the ethereum minute and you can kind of think of it to a certain extent as tornado but

more scalable more uh affordable because it's uh on its own scaling solution not on the ethereum net so it is generally focused on enterprises but we really have a clear understanding of the eui team that is going to be a part of the public infrastructure and available to anyone and we're also we already have this public interface being built right now and things like that so so it's pretty interesting we're also heading working on adding additional features programmability uh exploring the next version of the of the solution itself yeah we're making very good progress i think towards the the main net it should hit the minute really soon i believe it's already on testnet

so yeah the next one i know you already mentioned was midan and we actually did a full episode on maidan as well the thing is i love doing this with you i almost feel like we should have done this product suite episode before because there's so many projects in the suite that i want to actually have on for full episodes to explore what they're doing so if anyone wants to hear about midan maiden being the stark focused solution there is a full episode on that but i think it's worth mentioning at least briefly what it is and how that fits in absolutely yes and i think it's fine that you're doing this now at least now we have all these solutions at least publicly out there and uh when we announced it was still mainly about ps chain and we're really really

trying to communicate that idea of polygon being an unopinionated multi-chain platformer solution with multiple solutions basically supported and in the works and but uh um there's still a lot of narratives in this industry and a lot of empty promises so it was kind of also important to really put something out there to really prove actually that we're not just talking that we're actually working and and building actual tech and putting it now we have all these efforts public and and very much in the works so i want to mention something for our audience that like i actually we've been trying to do this interview for like at least four or five months i think right

so i'm really embarrassed we kept getting pushed off because it was like something's coming yeah yeah because i told you that like really for us it was really important to kind of prove ourselves to the community and to actually show that we have the capacity that we have formal efforts uh capable expert teams working on on them just to basically prove that it's what we're saying actually we're also putting to work totally yes so now we can discuss uh each of these solutions uh separately and open totally so yeah sorry for that and you're also we're constantly like

super busy yes thank you for understanding no problem no problem i don't mean to bring you on and then shame you or something i'm just happy that we got to do it already but i deserve it okay anyway tell us so tell us a little bit about maidan i think it's important cool of course yeah maidan is a stark based effort it's a scaling focused effort it's a zk roll up stark only exclusively based on stark it is in that regard you can think of it as somewhat uh comparable to i guess what star query is doing because it's also start based start only based scaling solution but the difference is that maidan is fully open source we really believe in polygon we really believe in

open source technology and everything absolutely everything we build and we that we will ever build on polygon in the polygon ecosystem will be open source we want to follow this ethos of web3 and everything that maidan is working is fully open source of course and there are then some deeper differences when it comes to actual architecture so both projects have their respectable virtual machines which are start based uh maidan has made in vm stark has stark vm i believe and uh yeah the architectures are kind of different and whoever wants to uh understand the differences i guess better is to to listen to the to the mind and episode

itself explains that in more detail i can maybe cover it briefly or it's not required right now but there are some architectural uh differences and uh yes and another thing that we are focusing on very much i guess is that ethereum compatibility as i said so the the maiden vf has its own native assembly but we are actually actively thinking in line of compiling solidity to that assembly and that is already set as one of the design goals for the vm itself and the assembly alongside it and um that's something also very important i guess to mention when it comes to dissolution the solution is pure headed

by by bobbin bobini's prominent zk researcher he was dk leaded facebook snowy for quite some time he built uh winterfell winterfell is a very interesting decentralized stark brewer that was built in as part of facebook novi and uh bobin left novi and started basically maiden with us maiden is kind of successor of uh of this stuff vm this stuff was bobby's project that's how i actually met bobin we met on it research bobin published uh this stuff as his first effort to build starkville's stark-based virtual

machines some time ago i think maybe two and a half years ago i guess roughly and that's how we met basically i need to research and started talking and i really liked his ideas and i kind of invited him started talking to him and eventually uh we also decided to to join hands and that's how polygon maiden was introduced and we might go now to polygon zero if you want sure although i want to keep the polygon zero brief because actually in the next week or two i have a schedule to actually have a full episode to look into what that is um another team i'd been trying to have on for a while is mir it was a request from the audience and um

they also were like just wait just wait just wait and now finally it was announced that there had been something happening between your two organizations and it all made sense um but yeah what is maybe just briefly what is polygon zero and maybe you can give people a bit of a taste for what we're gonna talk about next time when i bring them on for a full episode okay cool maybe you can tell me how secretive i should be now just be vague okay deal so as some of your listeners might already know recently we announced this mere acquisition mir is the less known zk startup in my humble opinion one of the most

underappreciated zk teams out there they have a very very strong team with some very cool technology in in works and already out there the the main piece of the technology for now at least is splunky 2. so blocky 2 is the world's fastest recursive uh zk prover out there it is a significant breakthrough in terms of engineering on that front and it is i guess at least two orders of magnitude again it's not up to me to compare and uh brendan and danielle the founders of of polygon zero which is which used to be mere can cover it uh in more depth in the in the

episode itself but basically it is by far the fastest if you will zk scaling technology available today and the whole team has done a great deal of the optimizations and they they built this really great piece of technology and we're super excited to have them also as part of the polygon family and working on on polygon zero so polygon zero is also zika roll up in a sense similar to mere uh similar sorry to to polygon uh maidan but the difference is it is based on on plonkie 2 as the core piece of that infrastructure and the whole virtual machine will be based on that on that technology and in a similar manner basically we want to see uh solidity compatibility by transpiling from

solidity to the native assembly of the virtual machine that zero is is building so these things are kind of similar but the technology and the team are are different so uh yeah the the back story is that i also know danielle the founder of one of the two founders of uh polygon zero also from eat research so back in the days we also hit some yeah that was and when you say eat research you mean the like the forum the board where people post things sorry yeah i assume people know it but i don't know why i'm assuming that i mean most people probably do know it the ones yeah it's a popular ethereum research forums where i don't know like us

ethereum geeks are hanging out and yeah getting to know each other i guess and that's where i met also danielle we kind of became friends and also during our effort to establish this zk team or ecosystem we decided to join hands and also super excited and humbled to have these guys on board super strong team and uh yeah excited uh to see what will come from from their side and just to give uh um just kind of wrap it up now a lot of people are asking us okay you have three scaling focus zk efforts why are you doing that like what's what's wrong with you basically we keep hearing that and again i keep

going to to my original point or premise that this is very early phase of innovation uh still and we want that as i said to let 1000 flowers bloom let's support multiple efforts let's encourage innovation and what we're very very happy about is that these teams are working together really really well so there's very close collaboration between these teams and great great energy we have regular weekly calls we have uh of course asynchronous communication on kind of a daily level teams are updating each other collaborating with each other we even kind of set the incentives in a sense that we have of course financial arrangements with each

of these teams and some of the parts of the arrangement is tied to the actual adoption of the solution and we set incentives in a way that if only one of the teams kind of make it uh in terms of adoption adoption bonuses are being unlocked for all the teams they're kind of already incentivized to work together there's no incentive to work against each other but that being said these people are already great guys and highly ethical and they don't even need these incentives to be honest but even the incentives are i guess kind of there and it's like really amazing if you remember anna i invited you maybe you can come one time to this weekly course that we have with our zk teams so

the energy just to attend this one call and hear and feel the energy there it's like super exciting and every time on this call every week basically i'm being humbled over and over again and and really proud that you know i can call myself a co-founder of a project that has such a great team it's like it's uh really amazing yeah and just to kind of finalize my my thoughts so this is the current situation and these projects are indeed separate now and each of the teams are pursuing their dreams and we want to enable and facilitate that polygon but none of the teams or us as polygon co-founders are excluding the possibility that some of

these projects will converge somewhere along the way you know like someone drawing hands maybe not like we really don't want to put any sort of pressure or influence any sort of decisions there we just want to be a facilitator we just want to be that positive force in the ecosystem not some big evil you know project that now has a lot of money in the treasury and goes left and right and buys projects and tells them what to do whatever i can actually already imagine one part so zkevm which uses something from stark technology and snarks i would love to see if there's any kind of collaborative points there i can already picture like bobbin and jordy

potentially sharing some info there absolutely we already have now scheduled in real life irl like um basically meeting in in denver now by some equal effects so all the teams are gathering there we will be there we'll spend several days again working together brainstorming as i said it's really a great great atmosphere uh among all these teams yes so we're super super happy about that and we'll see how that will actually um what will be the epilogue i guess of that collaboration we just want to let it happen organically basically cool cool i actually i want to mention something because you know we're talking a lot about this group and how their their sort of the the ideas are being

formed and they're sharing and all this we actually me hilo like polygon and myself actually have a a fun collaboration coming up around the zika hack so the zk hack polygon is actually the building partner for the zika hack mini which starts on march 1st i think i have it actually in the ad of this episode as well and polygon as the building partner we're actually going to get to hear from a lot of these projects and the workshops that we're hosting we every week we're doing a workshop it will actually be a bunch of these polygon teams so i'm very very excited to also share some of this even further with the audience so anyone who would love to get a little taste of this should definitely check it out yeah super exciting please check it out and thanks anna for inviting us to to

collaborate totally so we had surcom at zeke hack one but we didn't have anything from the polygon universe really and so we thought it would make sense for us to feature you yeah definitely thanks again for for inviting us we need to be definitely we are very much aware that we need to be more out there it just things are happening very fast on our side and we want to be technology uh first we want to focus on great tech and facilitate processes on that side and then we want to of course step up the the communication side of things and marketing and basically uh speak with the community more and uh engage ourselves with the efforts like the one

you mentioned now that's this was really important but but for us it was more important to establish the processes establish road maps establish teams allocate resources etc uh all of that happened basically in the past four months or so with for all these four teams so it was quite a run yeah but this we will be out there more now i want to ask you a little bit of like what's next and maybe another even more pointed question like everything right now is very very focused on being being evm compatible but do you even see like an evolution of what that means ever or would you stick purely to what exists now because i know there's other kind of

evm compatible chains that are thinking of like adding things that evm the current evm on ethereum doesn't i love saying that the current ethereum virtual machine on ethereum anyway the current evm like the ma the known ethereum l1 evm uh doesn't have so like actually adding new features is this anything you're ever thinking of of course so so to answer your first question what is next so i believe uh for this year our goal is mainly kind of consolidation so polygon in the last year grew exponentially and of course when that happens you have these growing pains and

your internal organization is i don't want to say a little bit chaotic but it is it's at times it's just kind of i guess unavoidable when you grow exponentially and we're kind of trying to to establish this organization to to become more streamlined and everything again without centralizing the project too much so it's a delicate kind of balance that we will try to really establish uh this year that's important for us and just to further facilitate and continue with these efforts that we have we don't foresee introducing too many efforts on the new efforts on the tech side i think we covered all of our major interests pretty well for now we just need to focus on the existing products and

help them build as good and as fast as possible on the adoption side and business side i think we are very focused on that my co-founder sandeep is leading that that side of things and uh he's doing that extremely well we're focusing on this major mega i guess niches nfts games and dfi and enterprise uh division that is currently being established pretty much and we have also some great uh uh projects they are lined up so that's about it for us i guess and uh i love that like that's about it that's all only these like yeah there's

another another i guess major effort is this upcoming token redesign it's something that we really need to do and we're working on it already that effort started i guess like one month ago what does that mean what is a token redesign like are you talking the mechanics or the yeah yeah so polygon was as i said in the beginning of the of the episode so uh at some point i decided to join hands with matic and our talking is still called matic yeah and it's kind of the maybe the last i guess maybe legacy of metic itself and it was designed to power the the architecture that was introduced back in the days with matic

polygon is a kind of new paradigm of this multi-chain system built around or on top of ethereum and the token that we envision should power uh and secure this whole multi-chain paradigm it's not going to be a mandatory like it's really important to say we don't want to force anybody but don't we just want this token to actually enable security we don't want it to be a mandatory token that everyone will have to buy use or stake or anything it should be stay under the hood for majority of the users but we see a lot of potential in uh introducing some some changes to the token design itself the mechanics and how it is utilized within this ecosystem

and that's where we're probably gonna change the thicker also so for us the announcement of polygon it wasn't just a mere rebranding for us it was the announcement of fundamental you know shifting in vision and and some new chapter for for the project itself so also that's why we decided okay let's just leave the token for now as it is and once we actually change the ticker uh to something polygon probably like polar whatever it doesn't even matter for now we're going to decide on it later when that happens we want that to be also a sign that we have put a lot of thinking into this token actually and how it brings value how it adds value to the ecosystem how it is utilized across the ecosystem and when we actually have a

clarity uh or clear vision on that that's when that also uh event is going to happen so i would like that to happen this year it will take quite a lot of work i'm not sure we already have a lot of our plate i hope we can do it this year would you have to redesign this somehow to like work across all of the different networks as well or would it still live on the pos chain no no absolutely it's going to be used in hermes in maiden wow zero it's just we have very clear kind of principles already or high level and core ideas it just needs a lot of analytics simulations to to become kind of confident about

ideas that you have is there any influence is there any other token influence like i'm trying to pick is there any other token that actually natively lives on multiple chains can it like it's always wrapped versions as far as i know yeah it can be rep version it can live on ethereum but it facilitates or secures this other these other chains and these other projects there are multiple ways how it can be utilized but maybe mainly to provide security or to pick operators or validators or introduce introduce rewards because when you're bootstrapping for example some new network let's say we want to have we ideally want to have hermes 2.0 and zkevm is a decentralized rollup we wouldn't want to have it

centralized in the long run so uh you want to bootstrap that network so ideally if you have a token that's providing rewards in a similar manner like other pos chains or polygon ph chain that should help uh bootstrap this network of operators compared to when you don't have any token there so you have i guess to rely only on transaction fees and then it becomes this ticking and egg problem typical for any marketplace you know you don't have enough fees you don't have enough validators and then water that uh i guess uh vicious circle at some point or things like that so definitely we have i would say very interesting ideas we just need to formalize them more test them

uh do a bunch of simulations we want to involve some prominent people from the industry who are experts in the field i don't want to i guess name names now but pretty pretty known in the industry uh to help us with that effort and yeah i guess these two things are main focuses mainly for us in this year apart from all the work that we're already doing like these products and then the adoption side i have to go back to the question that i first asked because i've realized we forgot to get back to it which is the evm the edm itself like the like yeah is do you actually imagine in a zk evm does the evm eventually evolve too

uh yes i wanted to get back to that now uh so uh evm is kind of the fact of the the standard right now in the industry and we just for the sake of adoption we are acknowledging that and we are acting accordingly okay so but we're not being evm maximalists we want technology to move forward we never want to consider any technology perfect every technology is far from perfect of course especially in this early phases and we are open for all the alternatives and all alternative approaches and that's where uh for example these uh alternative virtual machines like the one being built by polygons uh zero for example or polygon midden are

interesting in a sense that these virtual machines you can think of them as a or their instructions set as a super set of evm instruction instruction set and that practically means that it is possible to for these virtual machines to be ethereum compatible or solidity compatible but they're they have more potential or wider potential so they can actually be targeted by some other programming languages for example bobbin who's spearheading polygon maiden is really interested interested uh recently in move the the programming languages programming language built facebook snowy and you can also have deterministic subsets of

rust or whatever any other popular mainstream programming language targeting uh these virtual machines so i don't think we're we're gonna have evm you know in use forever it will happen but i doubt technology involves technology moves forward especially again like for the 10th time we are still in very early phase with web3 in general but i think if we replace evm one day it's gonna be by some sort of soft fork as we say in blockchain it's not like something that will completely disrupt tvm it's gonna be rather something that is kind of compatible with the evm for example like polygon zero but it has brought their

instruction set or can support other high-level languages or something like that and then you can kind of gradually replace cvm that's the most likely scenario we see for replacing evm i guess in the long run cool me hilo i want to say a big thank you for coming on the show and sharing with us this amazing kind of product suite all of the different solutions that you've been building or investing in or kind of gathering together under the polygon umbrella yeah thank you so much for sharing this with us thank you so much anna for inviting me it was really a pleasure and i hope your listeners

will like the episode then i hope this was somewhat clear i i know we have a lot of going on on the product side and it might not be very easy to try to digest initially but i guess what is important is that we at least have clarity or we believe we have clarity conclusion what are these components used for in the long term and uh yeah it's definitely going to be exciting year or years to come it's very ambitious and i obviously wish you luck and actually as i mentioned earlier in this episode we do have one of those projects polygon zero who will be on the show either next week or the week after so very soon so we can continue to explore even more of this ecosystem thanks again thank you so much

anna i want to say a big thank you to the podcast producer tanya the podcast editor henrik and to our listeners thanks for listening