How Polygon Is Dominating RWAs - CEO Marc Boiron

Transcript

A lot of people talk about like this chain has a great experience, that chain has a great experience, or this chain has a terrible experience. >> There's a world where I don't even need a bank account to spend my money on chain in the real world in the future. >> Polygon as a chain is a place that enables you to create a great experience if you care to create a great experience. And if you don't, that's probably >> Welcome back to the real. This is your home to learn from the biggest guests, the brightest minds at the tip of innovation. Our goal is to help spread the collective knowledge of everyone in our community. >> We are breaking crypto out of its echo chamber and taking it to the real world.

>> All right, Mark is here. Welcome to the Money Moves Fast episode one. Mark, it is the inaugural episode of this show. Um, great to have you. >> Yeah, great to be here. I'm uh I'm pumped about the show. It's gonna be a fun one. Um, I'm calling it our premier show for RWA's payments and tokenization. I'd like to just give you the opening remarks here. Uh, for your just, you know, high-profile bird's eye view of the evolution of the space. I just had Ellie on, we were talking about how really the unsexy parts of crypto are now becoming the most important things in the space and I truly believe that that is where we are today. So

Mark, maybe just some opening remarks to kick this show off first episode. Um, from your perspective, let's let's just understand uh Polygon's position in payments in RWA RWA's your your understanding, your view, and then we can get into some of the nitty-gritty, man. Thanks for coming. >> Yeah. Um, no, thanks. I'm excited about it. So look, the way that I see this is that if we actually looked at like RWAs, something that we've known for so long that they were going to be impactful. And we saw that early on with stable coins actually being impactful early on, right? I think like some people define like stable coins as RWA, some don't, but from my perspective, they're they're

real world assets that exist on chain and so they fall into that category. And stable coins is the first thing that actually found product market fit. The rest of RWA's though like really hasn't until more recently gotten kind of the attention that I think it deserves. Uh on the Polygon side, like whether it's stable coins or other real world assets, it's something that we've been focused on for years. Like the the days when everybody else kind of fell off from like, hey, RWAs don't matter. You know, we still had a team working on them. And same thing when it comes to stable coins. And this is like why when you look today at like where stable coins are at and where other RWAs are at on on Polygon um you see like a very big head start there. And this kind of ties into

like this idea of like why polyment is so focused on on that right is if you kind of go into like what you were originally saying if you go to this idea of you know we've been talking about like the kind of like trenches the the I think some of the um kind of like deeper guts of of crypto for a while. I think now we're at the point where like those dots are well built out and I think that is something that we don't really need to kind of like build it out in the same way anymore. Like I think that they're um sorry very very well established now.

Um and so really what we're talking about now is actually bringing things that people are are using. And the thing is when you think of what that you like if you really centered it on like users, right, the the idea that like you're going to have a blockchain that is going to serve users for payments purposes and then you're also going to serve them for um uh DPI and then you're also going to serve them for DeFi. To me, this is like totally ridiculous. Um, and the simple reason is because like different block space has different like use cases have different needs and therefore there's people say well you know you're just going to optimize blockchains anyway so just optimize them for every use case. The thing that's

like ignored there is first of all gaming doesn't need the same thing. Let's just give an example right payments you actually want subsecond truth analogy for payments. for gaming, you literally don't care if it takes five seconds to reach finality, but you do care about subsecond like pre-conference. Okay, so that literally that alone is an example of like why you don't need a blockchain that does both. Now, you can make the argument why not just build the blockchain for gaming that does the same thing. Like why does it hurt? And the answer is well because it's going to be more expensive to run.

Um and so like why would you build something more expensive than what you actually make? That is just like on the block space level. Once you go like one level up from that now you talk about like all the tooling and people say well yeah but you can just build the tooling but wait blockchain okay but who's going to build better tooling the team that is building team tooling for payments for deepen for defi for all their rwas um or for gaming or is it the team that's only building tooling and everything around it for payments it's pretty obvious who's going to develop something that is actually more uh in demand so this is like just a long a long way of saying like how Polygon kind of like a has always frankly been in the trenches when

it comes to building the guts but then also stable coins and other IAS but also on like why it is that we've started actually focusing so much on on payments is because there's demand there and you actually need a blockchain that kind of fills that that that need in a very specific way. Yeah, Mark. I mean, I I uh had Nikquille, who's the CTO of Circle's Arc chain on and and I asked him, why build arc as an L1 rather than L2? And your your finality point was essentially exactly what he mentioned a and and that just becomes an, you know, very important part. A and so when it comes to Polygon, right, you guys want to be

kind of this default payment network for crypto boasting. I mean, the show is called Money Moves Fast, but it if we wanted to make it really true, it'd be called Money Moves basically damn free because you guys have some of the lowest fees in all the space for uh you know, just uh transaction sends. How do you make this vision for becoming this default payment network real when we've seen a lot of these kind of payment chains come and go? You know, we've seen enterprise chains come and go. There's been a lot of failures. How does Polygon kind of make this a real uh a a real long lasting thing?

>> Yeah, I think that's a that's a good question. So, um look, I I think when you when you look at like what chains have like come and gone. I don't think there's actually been from like a payments perspective that has come and gone. I think there's been very little that has come actually in in the first place when it comes to payments. You're obviously seeing this like way more now with like you know Tamo and Arc and Corx and Plasma and so on and so forth. Um but when you actually look at like what has existed sector specific chains haven't really existed other than gaming. Gaming was actually very early here surprisingly but like not no other really real vertical. And so now what

we're talking about is taking the one product that actually has tremendous product market fit in the space being payments and saying let's create blockchain specific for it. And I don't think that's been tested out at all frankly uh until now. Um and so I I think that right now it's a wide open space to be to be taken like when we look at it from like the polygon side of things um you basically have to divide things into like two different worlds. one is which like is existing incumbents coming into crypto and the other one is like crypto natives trying to known as >> and I think polyone is like incredibly well positioned regardless of which one it is right because if you're talking about like incumbents um you're basically talking about people who have

built entire payment stacks that are offchain first now they need to come and rebuild their stacks to be like onchain native and all their flows this is not an easy thing to do when you've spent 10, 15, 20 years like building all of that. And so we see like giants that have huge distribution that are going to come in like people name that's just one so many. But the thing is they have a lot that they need to rebuild and like rethink how they actually do things and destroy existing parts of their business, right? Like, you know, you take 80% of incumbents business and you replace it with just big blocking and it's got and there's really 20% left.

So, what's easier to replace? The 20% that needs to get built or the 80% that you need to replace? And and I'd argue that that 20% is much easier. And then when it comes to like new players, from my perspective, you've got a lot of people that have almost no infrastructure on their chain yet, almost no assets on their chain yet, almost no actual users on their chain yet. And then you go and you compare that to Polygon that has FinTech in almost every single region in the world already doing, you know, tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars of transaction volumes a month. And it feels like we're in a frankly pretty darn good spot on on the polygon side of things with frankly only an acceleration going on.

>> Man, I mean you guys also just took one from the playbook of uh like right you were saying there's kind of incumbents and uh you know crypton natives. What you guys have done is build this thing from the ground up and then recently have just uh hired uh uh Stripe's head of crypto uh John Eaggan and basically come in and build out some more of the you know um payments product suite on on Polygon. Um that is basically taking the expertise of somebody from from that world and bringing it into into the uh you know let's just call it cryptonative world. um maybe talk to us a bit about that hire, a bit about why that was important for you guys um and what John is going to bring to the team.

>> Yeah. So, look, one thing that's like unique about Polygon is we have long history of actually focusing on things that matter in the space like right and sometimes like people look at that and say, well, it doesn't have like an onchain impact immediately this or that. And and some of that's true, right? I don't think this is true of payments at all, but some of that's true. But what we did learn is like we've learned from like trial and error and like the people that you want to hire um and and and bring those in and how you actually grow. Um and when you look at somebody like like John, uh a couple things are like unique. First of all is he's very like crypto first. Like that's that's like the perspective that he has. He doesn't come at it from a like trap or

like just traditional payments perspective. he just happens to have a significant amount of that of knowledge. The second thing is and this is like kind of like the more boring thing for for people. It's just like it actually just comes down to like hiring just amazing people. Forget like their their expertise and like if you talk to John for five minutes, forget like if he knows payments, I I don't even care. the dude's like amazing when it comes to product and how it thinks about product and users and that user centricity that we missed is just a a huge uh I think bonus. Now when you combine those parts and you're like okay understands crypto and payments and he actually just knows how to focus on users and what they

need. Uh now you've got the makings of somebody who's going to be like okay here's the things that you know the the open spaces right now and payments that that will be attacked and let's do it from like a very user centric perspective rather than just you know a very often cryptocentric of like let's just build something to to build it. It's like no let's actually build what what people need. Um, and so yeah, that that's why like I think everyone on our team like everyone within like five minutes are talking in con like this is like the most no-brainer possible.

I saw a post from a entrepreneur was like as a founder the I think it was it was nal the only two things that you cannot outsource are hiring and your product vision. Um, and it sounds like it sounds like you did not outsource the hiring part here. You mentioned some of the of the kind of payment chains that are yet to be created or yet to be launched. Um, and you know, there's kind of this whole new wave coming of these stable coin specific networks. Um, and you touched on it again, but I just want to give you another chance to further solidify your stance. Are you seeing these as purely competition? Are they going to drive more volume into the space at large into Polygon? Stable coins are likely to hit multi-trillion

dollars in total supply, let's say, over the next two years. How do you how do you kind of uh uh see these networks playing out? And then maybe just more broadly um how you see stable coin velocity and liquidity uh on Polygon evolving in comparison to some of these others. >> A year ago when we started talking about like hey every chain is going to need to be specific to something and like where is a Polygon and started analyzing it and realizing we're already really strong on payments. We started talking about like do we really want to go compete on on payments? uh because it is one of the most competitive things that that you can do. But there's a few things that are really important which is like yes everyone is competition. I think it's ridiculous when people try to

like paint things not as competition. It it is that's just the reality. But when it comes to payments you're going to have about 20 winners like if not more and it depends on how you define a winner but you're going to have several hundred billion dollar you know market cap tokens associated payments. you know, have several $50 billion market cap, several 20 billion market cap. There's a lot of rooms to be had in payments like across the board. And so I I think that everyone has a chance of doing very very well right now. Um, and so that's that's not something that I worry about too much. Now, I do think that it does require you to think through like what what's the landscape going to look like? Like how are they going to attack it? And you know my my

guess because this is how markets work in general is everyone's building these like vertical um specific blockchain. So for for us payments but the funny thing is what's going to happen in five years from now is you're going to be dominating hopefully we're dominating in payments in general and somebody's going to come and they're going to build something that is just niched down within payments some some sub sector of payments and then somebody else is going to attack another sector of payments because that's just how things work. you just niche down and niche down and if you look at the internet right now it's like there's you know multi-billion dollar companies being built on these title like one of the things that I think about most is completely random has nothing to do with crypto is like

some some like blogs sometimes these like blogs on like a hiking blog gets created and it's like hundred million dollar company that like just builds a blog and then starts selling like some some hiking specific products right and the truth is people get to know them for that and then suddenly they eat up a huge portion of the market. So I think it'd be like crazy not to think that the same thing is going to to play out here. And so I think more than anything is trying to understand like okay we we built something out really great here in in payments as a whole. But where is it that we're going to have to like really find some stickiness, some network effects that's going to be really hard to disrupt when somebody wants to go after a portion of that um down the

road. So, I I think that's like kind of like the the fun part of of thinking through what what that competition is going to look like. In terms of right now that you were touching on, like we hit $3 billion of stable coins on on Polygon POS, which I think is it's pretty solid. I I often think of of TBL as this target that people look at and it's such an irrelevant target for for many way for many reasons. And I take the polygon for like a really good like as as a good example which is like if we're trying to build a payments focused chain and most of the TVL is going to be in stable coins, we should look at that stable coin TVL and we shouldn't just look at general TVL because bottom line is if you hold ETH uh in within your

chain and people are supposed to use ETH when that number 5x's then your TVL 5xes. That's not what happens with stable coins. And so instead when it comes to stable coins we try to like look at things like velocity right so on on polygon like stable coins have higher velocity than velocity of money in the US economy like that is something that is good that means it's probably more useful and people have more to to do with it you look at like where the flows are right and so we we look a lot at like the latin flows that we're very very strong on and some of like the specific corridors where where you see a lot of transactions happening And so those start becoming a lot more relevant than like the broad numbers that we like

often talk about in crypto. >> I completely agree. I mean I think uh TVO was like last cycles uh you know metric and I think there's a lot of other important ones and just kind of broadly when you're thinking about the the landscape I had circle CEO on earlier today uh speaking about you know their entrance into hyperlid ecosystem and and all of that that jazz that happened last week right and he compared the current landscape to you know some of the early mobile app era uh days as well as Apple TV and Netflix and his thing was like we want to USDC like Netflix is trying to be on every every device. You can get Netflix on your laptop, your iPad, your phone, your

smart TV. We want USDC to be everywhere. That was one thing. But then when when it was actually coming down to thinking about how these chains are going to interact, he was like, "Look, man, Apple TV used to just be on Apple. That was the only way to watch it. Now you can watch Apple TV on Sam on your Samsung TV. You can wa watch it on your on your um on your PC. you know, you can use Google Chrome on Samsung, you can use Google Chrome on Apple, like these things are all going to come together and blend in. And actually, it's really refreshing to hear both of your takes on this because it it they're quite similar, which is that it's really just like a grow the pie blue ocean type of mentality, right? And I mean, look, you guys have already pioneered quite a bit.

You know, Stripe, Reliance, Geo, there's others that are live on Polygon that I know that are coming up really soon that you guys are super excited about. Um, maybe you can talk to us a bit about this kind of grow the pie mentality when it comes to working with enterprises. You know, what are what are some of the next big enterprise milestones that would really cement Polygon's positioning and and status as the payment chain? Um, you know, I don't know if you can drop all the alpha, but what are some of those milestones that you're looking for? >> So, I I think of it more from like a holistic perspective. So, like a few things that I think are really important to like uh think of like completeness, right? So, one thing I think about is like stable coin diversity. Like, how diverse is the stable coin ecosystem,

right? We've got 51 stable coins on Polygon POS. And then you think about the diversity of currencies. That's that's those 51 stable coins are in 16 different currencies that end up being able to be be used. So, those two things are important. Then you think about like where the on andoff ramps are. You've got on and off ramps in almost every single major country in the world. So people can on and off ramp anywhere. Then you think of like fintex where distribution engines for this and we talked about this earlier but like you've got fintex in every major region of the world on on polygon and very rarely do you see a fintech that's actually on a chain and that is not on polygon. Um I I can't even think of one but I can think of some that are on

polygon or coming to polygon that are not elsewhere. Um and uh uh just not going to drop that alpha for you here. Um and then uh um so so that that part's nice but then the missing part that I think is very relevant is um I'll call them just general enterprises like non-institutional enterprises um that's something that we will have more uh early next month on is one very very big enterprise coming and starting to do those payments right so you hear the examples but spac space using them for different things um I think payroll providers uh is is another one so really getting that that complete ecosystem to end up using polygon. I think we've got many many pieces of it. Um I want to see all pieces touching it and and most

of that focus is going to still be on like cross border, right? Like if I think of the value I give this example all the time like if if we were to go to dinner somewhere in the US and you were to say like send me USDC, I would like beg you to just know you like like please like don't make me do this. But if my family in Canada asks me to send them money, I like beg them to send them crypto. I'm like, "Please don't make me send you like fiat money." And that that divergence is like actually very real because it is much easier across borders. And so that's definitely like an area that is really up for grabs still today that needs to up for grabs.

But I think that when we fast forward, you know, two years, three years from now, why wouldn't Venmo just underneath the hood actually just be using >> Yeah, there's no reason for them not to. Um, and so you'll get to a point where I think those do domestic points are actually happening um like on Polka D. It's just users don't even know that that's actually what's what's happening. Um, and that's when you start getting like something that's really truly complete and network effects start really getting built when it's that ingrained in your cry system.

Introducing extended exclusively on Stark, a nextgen persp. You get the best experience on chain today. Deposit in the community vault for attractive returns EMD compatible and engage in unified margin spot trading lending and per trading. Yeah, let me pick let me pick your mind on if you think there will be a future where you guys have the right set up such that users can access uh like point of like point of sale systems and interact like so let's say I have a polygon account on polygon POS chain I want to go spend money at you

know I I had a Panera Bread uh sandwich for lunch today if there's a crypto or polygon you associated card and I can and that is able to transact on the Visa network. Basically, what I'm getting at is there's a world where I don't even need a bank account to spend my money on chain in the real world in the future. And I know that teams are working on this. that's why these corporate chains are coming up and they they've got these pieces put together. But like is that a reality that you see possible for Polygon in the future where users on Polygon POS will be able to spend stable coins that they have in their accounts in the real world in mass? Like like how how real is that? How far away are we from that?

>> Has been announced yet. So I'm not I'm not going to say it that that maybe the biggest payments processor in the world and point of sale provider at least in the US has integrated Polygon and can currently be used and so yeah 100% like underneath the hood people can go ahead and pay for stuff in in crypto. Um and so yes I'm I'm very very excited about that one. >> Very cool. Okay cool. All right cool. So yeah, I mean that is that is a vision that got me excited, right? Because it's like the the like stable coins are great and the payments for like using a crypto card that like I have like Etherfy card and like a Crypto.com card and it works.

It's cool, but it's still like okay, do that and then pay the fee to sell the crypto and then you just spend the dollars or whatever, but it's not like like it's not fully removing the system. And so I think we're getting there slowly but surely. And and on that note, um I mean you you mentioned uh some of the technical uh work that is being done and that is needed for these specific use case chains which I think that we've been a big proponent of at the rollup over the last 18 months just you know generally these niche specific type of idea chains will likely win whether it's a market segment a specific use case the technical creation to get there is what matters and so I'm curious you know you guys already have uh you know like sub

sub4 second finality. Um, you know, you have some upgrades coming, but like when when you're looking to establish Polygon or just generally a chain as a payments chain specifically, you know, what are the technical requirements that you guys have built already? And and what are you guys looking to achieve in the future from the tech side that will help you to support your partners and the teams that you're working with now? because I assume that you know these these big payment processors, Stripe, these these big uh uh institutions, you know, they require a little bit of a different maybe setup than you know the average folk like myself uh you know in in the DeFi world. Just generally speaking, what is the tech stuff that you need to or that you have done and that you need

to do to uh help get to this payment chain vision? Yeah. So, I think I think the first one that that you touched on is really that ability to have uh finality like very very quickly. It's it's being able to to to you know ultimately like subsecond finality, but like really once you get under subsecond, you can start relying on pre-confirmations to make it even shorter, right? you can get to 200 millisecond, 100 millisecond like confirmations, which is frankly like faster than using my credit card today, right? Like if I use my credit card today, it takes much longer than that for me to actually feel like there's like real finality there. Um, and so that's I think that's like a a very very

big part of it. There there's other like specific things that you'd want to see. So, for example, what uh privacy um there's no doubt I mean people have been talking about privacy in crypto for so long and and most of that privacy has been been demonized, but I think we're getting to the point where you're going to actually have to seek privacy and and we are talking to a few large enterprises that are like, "Hey, we're going to start, you know, doing XYZ type payments and we need a privacy solution." and they're they're going to demand it. Now, that doesn't mean you're talking about like a tornado cash style mixer. Like I I can guarantee you the

solution is going to look different from that because nobody's going to go ahead and and take that kind of risk uh in in crypto anymore. Um but but you're going to need to see that that kind of solution. I think you're going to need to see um some of the the the kind of like more simple things than you have in the payments world today. Um, so like dealing with chargebacks for example is something that's gonna like need to be done in in like when when thinking about like a payments related chain. Um, I definitely think we're going to see like a massive growth in just aic payments in in general. Um, and so you're going to need to build that infrastructure. Like kudos to Coinbase around like X42 and the work that they've done there. I

think that's really that's that's fantastic and frequently polyon's been doing a lot of work um around uh agentic payments there as well. So very excited about that. Um, those are some of the things, but like I'd say that more importantly, frankly, than like than like the these are some like core like blockchain related stuff that you need, but I actually think the more important thing is like how seamless of an experience you can give to the the users who who want to use it. It's like okay so you get these basic requirements and like frankly I think every blockchain is going to get to the like any payments blockchain is going to get to those basic requirements within a year. I mean frankly every blockchain that is like

building towards a specific purpose is going to look the same within two years. Um right like every general purpose chain is converging to the exact same design right there's nothing like new from from that perspective. And so I think that's true like where there's real differentiation is going to be like that that kind of like okay I'll call like where offchain meets onchain components and like what that experience is like right I think like um the smoothness of like offramps and on-ramps and like how integrated those end up being with other products that you're offering I think ends up being like a very very important piece of it like uh wallet products and like treasury management around those wallet products I think ends up being really really important. So that kind of bit you can

rely on like third parties to build it and integrate it into your chain which is what a general purpose chain is going to do or if you're point payments focused you're going to build a lot of that. I'll give like one one really interesting thing that we've started thinking about differently is we used to give like a lot of grants for people to like build stuff because you're like hey we'll give a grant and then you can like build some piece of infrastructure around like polygon and like that's how you know Ethereum did it originally it's how everyone does it but the thing that happens in like a a multi-chain world now is you get that grant and within six months they've spent that money to build what they need on your

chain and then they go on the back of the money you gave them as a grant and they go and give it to every other chain and if it's not six months it's a year but like they're in the business of making money and like that's okay. um you know any smart person's going to agree to like exclusively build something for you for six months 12 months if you really really need it but eventually they're going to bring it elsewhere and that's definitely one thing that we are really like we will be building much more inhouse than we have historically because frankly I don't need every competitor using the exact same product that I funded like I'm going to keep that for for myself and so I think we'll see like a set of like open-source you know onchain infrastructure that we'll continue to build um open source and there's going

to be more like closed source things that we end up building that ultimately are things that we don't need competitors getting their hands on. >> Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. I mean I think on the technical side of things uh the the the key point on privacy I think is going to go a long way. We don't really have a chain that is high throughput, extremely easy to use and cheap and private. doesn't exist today. I mean, Zcash and Monero are like the closest things to it. I'm not I'm not asking I'm not asking for us to turn Polygon into a uh into a uh you know FBI experiment here, but you know I think that that there is going to be a lot of

a lot of demand for that first one and then like like that is like I would not use a public chain for payments consistently right now because any blockchain sleuth will just be able to sort that all the way back to all the other addresses that you are associated with. That's that's that's an easy one. the finality one. Yeah, >> being on chain nowadays to me is like incredibly annoying. Like to be frank because I I personally like look some people like no offense like they like their dodits and they like everyone knowing everything they do and their lipsters a public I don't care for anyone to know anything that I do and what that single time I do something on chain I have to go through a centralized exchange to onboard new assets onto that

exchange so that nobody knows that that's mine. I can't do it from a wallet that I think some people trick. It's like these suits are really freaking good and they will figure out it's fine. And that is like a horrible experience every time to need to go through a centralized exchange to do anything like I should I I don't need to have like 75 80 wallets 100 wallets. Uh it's like ridiculous. And so um I can't wait for the day where we have privacy. And I look the good thing is there are new chains focused on that that will be entirely for that and and there is a use case for that like you know polygon maiden is what we spun off it's now just miden like that is a chain that is very much built for for scaling but through

privacy and I think there's going to be like a awesome loop case for something like like miden and so I think that you're going to have chains that like are ultimately going to be by default transparent but you will have privacy and there will be others that that by default will be private. Um, and most likely you'll be able to have transparency there if you want as well. >> But you agree that from the payments perspective, privacy is uh is is a non-negotiable. >> Gotcha. Cool. Um, now kind of zooming out into the broader Polygon uh POS landscape as we've you know kind of drilled down on the payment side. you know, the one application in crypto that is probably the most prominent

application in all of crypto, Poly Market, has been absolutely exploding in usage on Polygon. Um, and when you use that app, you don't really realize that it's on Polygon, and you don't really realize that you're even really doing crypto as much. Um, I'm curious, you know, from your on the consumer side, how how does the Poly Market success, you know, how do you attribute that to Polygon stack? Is it about consumers actually caring about speed and cost? Is it more about culture and just a good product market fit? Um, you know, maybe you can explain to us a bit about the consumer side of Polygon as it relates to the payments vision.

>> I think about it is like well apps define the experience on a chain. So a lot of people talk about like this chain has a great experience, that chain has a great experience or this chain has a terrible experience. And every time that I go and I like ask like hey what was the experience they'll point me to an app which makes sense by the way and the app is defining the experience. So I'll hear people say Polygon POS is like has a bad experience and I'll be like well have you used Poly Market like because that's clearly not the case which tells you that Polygon as a chain is a place that enables you to create a great experience if you care to create a great experience. And if you don't that's probably ugly. is just like the the

reality of it and poly market Shane is just so obsessed with like users and the user experience and that's why he's actually cared to create that that experience and so yeah I think there is the baseline basic things of you need to be fast you need to be cheap like those are like baseline but after that it's also do you have the tooling that they need so that they can actually create that experience that they want and then you just need good devs like good activives who can then create that that good experience on it. So I think there's like a baseline thing that Polygon that we've done that makes the chain like easy to use, but then the credit goes to like the apps that in this case on just creating like an awesome user experience that like really

you know hides anything related to a chain which is exactly how it should >> and then you guys have this Rio upgrade coming that's live on testn net. I think the mainet is expected next month. This should even further help the native application ecosystem and just further fundamentally improve Polygon's ability to be a payments first chain. I is there any kind of like metrics internally that you can share or like what you can expect the tangible difference to be? What is in that upgrade? You know, how is this going to help your vision? Yeah, I think the biggest thing like when you when you actually look at like Polygon PS like the one issue that Polygon historically has had is like these reors that happen every once in a while and this upgrade is one that is

going to completely there will be completely out of existence at that point in time which will be awesome and it's obviously like super important for for payments and so that that's one of them. It's bringing block times down to one second um which I think is is again like very very important. um the the bringing TPS up from from 1K to 5K. Um this is this is nice like what we've seen with blockchains that so in most businesses, one thing that's unique is you you kind of like look at demand and then you increase supply based off of that demand. And one thing that's like I think different in a newer technology um is that if you actually don't increase demand before supply before

there is actually demand for it, what ends up happening is the demand doesn't necessarily come because they don't trust that they'll need it. And we've had conversations with enterprises that say, "Hey, you know, like um you know, we're not shipping this on Polygon yet because we're not sure that you'll be able to handle it." And we're like, well, bring it and we'll handle it. Like, we'll just and and and the answer is actually easier, which is just go ahead and increase the supply. They see that the supply is available and they come in with the demand. And so that's really what, you know, a lot of this is is to completely eliminate your store while get increase that that TPS. You know, we've got we're at 1,000 TPS right now and that's like real TPS. So, we've actually seen that onchain. It's not just like a a number. And so we'll get

to 5k TPS which will be a very very real um TPS. Um those are like some of the key like chain specific upgrades that we have coming. >> Beautiful. Mark what? Zooming out of Polygon, zooming out of um payments directly more into this RWA tokenization payments realm here. This is by and large the biggest opportunity in the space right now for everybody involved. It is the most impactful. It is it is going to change the fundamental way that finance uh you know exists in our world when you personally are are stepping into work each day right the show at Polygon you're part of this kind of

transition period of time where I think we'll you know you and I will look back in 10 years and be like we we were there when we were onboarding you know Stripe on the Polygon you know you mentioned this huge payment processor right you know in this moment of time what what have you been really kind of noticing about the industry, noticing about the company. What have been your like key, you know, just like takeaways broadly about how this is is progressing? Perhaps it is like you thought it was or it's not. Some things are going faster or slower than others or generally like what you've been right or or wrong about. You know, quite open-ended here, but this is happening. It's happening fast. It's in your face and it's it's a

battle right now between effectively, you know, people to go into these institutions, these larger players who don't really understand the space that that well, but they need to be educated and then effectively convinced of your value and of your integrity and of your trust. Um, and then eventually adopted. And this is happening everywhere. And so, yeah, just open-ended here to kind of close us out. um talk to talk to me a bit about this progression and how you're seeing it from your viewpoint. >> Yeah, I think the weirdly enough like the biggest differentiator it from my perspective that we're going to see is is it all comes down to like the teams that you built. Um and that's like again

like the boring answer, but that's just like the the reality. Like one thing that that I'm obsessed with that Polygon is like bringing in just like amazing people that you can hire like we talked about like John coming over from from Stripe but it's not the only one like we've got early bridge employees or like checkout employees like it is it is about like just bringing in like really really good people. um they're the ones who are ultimately have the relationships um and they also understand what people actually need which ends up being really really important and and because they understand what people need they also know how to like uh uh present that to them in in a certain way so I think that's one part of it the other part of

it um it's like this cliche of like thinking from first principles so you know people are talking about um like sector specific chains out. I mean, a year and a half ago, I just sat down and I just sat there where where's the space like? And it's pretty simple when you just sit there and you just break things down and say, "Okay, cool." So, we have these chains that do everything and they are pretty good at all those things. They're great at none of them. What's like the next thing that's going to happen? And and most people jump to like app specific chains. I think a lot of that was because when it comes to the DeFi um you know like like gas

requirements are a lot higher and demand was very high. So people thought like oh you can stick stick skip skip to like these application specific needs but that didn't like actually really make sense because there's too little demand for that to to actually make sense. The thing that you're going to want is something slightly more specific, right? And so that again gets down to like these these sector specific chains that allows you to build more specific to those needs. But then what you need to think and which I was touching on before is like where are things going to go next? And the the important thing is like navigating them not figuring it out. I actually think that if you spend the time, you should be able to figure out what I was saying earlier, which is that like a sector specific chain is

just step one because it's going to end up happening is you're going to have payments chains just booming all over the place and people somebody else is going to sit down and think, okay, how do I beat them? And they're going to realize that if they do the same thing, they're going to lose. And so what they're going to ask themselves is, what is it that I can do differently? Like where is it there is a gap where I could build something more specific that's going to do better? and then they're going to go build that thing. And then eventually what's going to happen is we're going to get to the point where that specific area is going to get incredibly saturated and companies are going to get big enough in terms of like what they have on chain that then you'll finally get to app specific chains or

like company specific chains. But like I think we're like six, seven, eight years out from that because you need so much actual volume coming. But that ends up actually being like the the end state that that is real. And in that state is where something like the alay that we're building at Polygon from an interop perspective which from my perspective is what allows all of this to be true. Like you can't build sector specific chains without great interoperability. Um and why you need something like the agent why it matters to us. And so, um, you're going to end up having this this idea of like we've talked about like what are we going to do when Polygon POS's block space fills up because like some people think their chains block space will never fill up. I don't think they're

bullish enough or they live in La La Land as to like what's going to happen. The reality is that block space is going to fill up. And what we need to be able to do is actually seamlessly spin up another chain um with the same dynamics and allow people to then use either of those chains in like a seamless way. And that's much much much further out, but it's something that you need to start thinking about today. Uh, and so yeah, I think like um really like I think the interesting thing about this space is it's like so new. There's so much evolution still to come. But I think there's there's a lot that if you think from first principles, you can start solving for.

>> Mark Boron, CEO at Polygon Labs. Thank you for the first episode of Money Moves Fast. This show is going to be a journey into different financial institutions, fintexs, inst in institutional leaders in payments in our in our RWAs and tokenization. Uh looking forward to putting the rest of this on. We've got an amazing several months ahead turning this show into one of our core pillars at the rollup TV on our stream. Thank you, Mark, and appreciate your insights and really looking forward to the future of these unsexy, albeit the most important use cases of the space. Men, thank you.

>> Thanks for having me. All >> righty, Mark. See you soon, man.