How Polygon scales Ethereum with zero-knowledge proofs and Polygon ID

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode bmgm welcome to web3 academy it is the weekly doer spotlight i'm jay bird coming at you from portugal this week where i am with my fellow co-host kyle read head what's up kai hey guys we should have done this in the same you know side by side in the same view but i think that might be a little bit difficult but maybe next time we'll do it i i i don't know if i if i like you that much man i don't want to get that close my view is too nice anyway yeah you do have a way better view what

the heck so today uh really excited about this podcast we are joined by uh david schwartz and sylvia iran from polygon specifically polygon hermes and polygon id we'll get into uh polygon and that whole ecosystem because there's a lot going on over there and we're really excited to break that down let me just give a brief uh intro and then uh yeah we'll jump into it so david is the co-founder of polygon hermes and polygon id he's spent over 20 years of experience in the it industry having held different engineering and executive positions in telecom operators consulting firms and technology providers and since 2018 he has been

leading projects at iden 3 polygon zk evm and polygon id david welcome hey thank you thanks a lot sylvia is the head of business development at polygon id and she has more than 15 years of experience in corporate banking but in 2018 decided to make the shift well i believe she was in paris at ecc which also just happened recently this year uh and then in 2021 she joined ident three a startup based in barcelona and specialized in zk technology applied to scalability solutions for blockchain and privacy for digital identities

welcome sylvia thank you very much jay and kyle for having us today here you're welcome we're very excited to have you both this is going to be a good one we've got lots lots to unpack and lots to dive into uh we always like to start by um hearing a bit about your rabbit hole story uh what first got you into web 3 crypto blockchain uh what was it what was the why why did you want to spend your time uh dedicated towards this space uh david would love to start with you and then sylvia will go to you yeah yeah absolutely well my stories are probably very common

i was uh working in 90 in different let's say industries for a long time then some friend of mine my fellow co-founder jordy jordy valina he just convinced me to to check on [Music] ethereum and and everything that was happening there so after after that i just decided that i wanted to to work on this i just uh i mean there's nothing so attractive and so let's say inspirational as this we wanted to to have an impact we we started the iodine 3 project that's uh the seed of this polygon id project we

are discussing today um the objective was to have this alternative to you to users for having a digital identity which was private by default and we were just uh super excited about this so well this changed my my whole career and super happy of having done this and in my case well as you said um i i went to this ethereum conference in price in 2018. i didn't go just by chance so i i been in the banking industry we started hearing about bitcoin understanding the blockchain technology and so on and then i started to get interested in it so my background is also engineering

although i was working mainly in this banking industry and and one of my colleagues at db actually one of the other co-founders had the three anthony also started to talk to me about this technology and asked me to join this this conference and once i went there and i saw the motivation the energy the willingness to to do changes relevant changes in this in this society using this technology making use of privacy i thought well that's that's i i lost or i missed the revolution of internet at that point in time but i don't want to miss this revolution

that was 2018 but of course it's not that easy to to to just drop off that security that such a position gives you so uh that took a bit a bit of time until 2021 when um already david together with anthony and andre um already created either three and had almost a product ready to to to to deliver that was the the hermes product how much probably um david will elaborate a bit more about it afterwards and i decided well it's the right point in time to jump there i think um just just make a trial and i don't regret at all i'm really enjoying

it's a very dynamic bold people really believing on what they do and well i and more than recommend others to do such a things if they are provided i love it it's nice to see uh bankers moving into web3 space i think that's my favorite thing so let's set a bit of context um to to all the listeners today so um we're gonna talk about a lot okay uh if there's probably two subjects we've been talking about the most in the last few weeks it's identity um we actually had disco on uh recently disco.xyz um and we've talked about identity a lot and then we also talk about polygon a lot in our especially in our news role because there's just so much news coming

out of polygon so big ecosystem big new kind of use case in terms of identity and i think a big unlock that web 3 is is kind of bringing to the table um so we're going to dive into all that but before we do why don't you uh maybe uh david we'll start with you but can you just give us an overview of what the heck is all going on at polygon like this ecosystem is huge there's there's polygon proof of stake there's polygon hermes there's there's just so many different things that you guys are doing and so maybe you can just give us a a breakdown of of the goal like just the overarching goal of polygon and what you guys are trying to to build out there yeah yeah sure i mean it's true there's so much going on in polygon yeah

i'll try to just uh provide a big overview and not to bore anyone but i would say if i want to summarize what's what's polynomial about its uh polygon the polygon's vision is about scaling ethereum so polygon defined uh the founders of polygon just created this initial matic project that was a solution to scale ethereum and this vision didn't change so far the idea is to provide a suite of blockchains and scalability solutions data availability identity all these kind of technologies and and networks and platforms are intended to provide this to enlarge and enrich the ecosystem

around ethereum so the idea is still to bring all this all this group of developers to ethereum uh to to just create this kind of uh fantastic applications so it's uh polygon vision is to to provide service to developers we want to be a web3 platform that provides all this tooling to to just you know developers to approach these these platforms and be able to to access quick to to resources and ecosystem of development but the idea is the same scale ethereum so the pos was the first product the first solution to scale ethereum it was very successful and polygon last year decided to to do

more and to bring more uh let's say options and and let's say products to the family so they did a very big investment in serious synonymous technologies and the polygon hermes is one of them we were joining the polygon team last year in august with the merger of the hermes network and polygon and from that there also was the announcements of the merger or the acquisition of a mere protocol now polygon zero and also polygon biter so beyond that there's the project built in let's say an alliance with amson young that's called polygon nightfall and also polygon is developing a data

availability layer in polygonal beyond that there's more initiatives of product development to to just try some things mature some products create more uh solutions big one is uh polygonage that's that's able to provide this private blockchain environment and now we have supernet which derived from this edge so this kind of as i said this environment of blockchains that wants to provide solutions for different groups of developers like from the enterprise to the webster community and at the same time polygon is now big innovation they want to we want to build this kind of technology

that's absolutely state-of-the-art and in a in a mode of contribution to the development of the ethereum ecosystem in a permissionless way we want to create this uh traditionalist innovation by open sourcing all this technology and create this ecosystem of collaboration uh that we believe is the right one for the ethereum community in general but for the blockchain and monetary space in in let's say in the process so basically what polygon is doing is building out a group of different uh or a suite of different scaling products that all kind of link into ethereum and they they help the overall i guess bandwidth or uh scalability of of ethereum and ultimately to um to kind of

reach the end goal which is is to build these kind of really cool use cases like polygon id we need to scale right um why though did you or why does polygon choose to scale ethereum specifically i mean you have your own proof of stake uh blockchain why not just do it from there like what is the reason that their whole mission is geared around scaling ethereum specifically well ethereum is the let's say the best expression of the centralized world i mean we believe that ethereum represents the values of a let's say neutral community permissionless innovation that uh the founders of polygon wanted

to embrace and uh this didn't change so maybe others want to do different things but that's the vision and the mission of polygon so i don't know if i mean polygon could do different things but this is absolutely in the core of the of the structural to the to the company or the team or or the project if you want absolutely and so polygon hermes is has recently in congrats on this by the way i think it was july 19th um launched the first um zk evm um uh i guess maybe you could just break down what that means um i don't know that a

lot of people understand how big of a deal that is i think it's really big um and i was really excited but maybe you can just first of all explain what zk is or what zk evms are um and then we can just talk about like what that means for the for the ecosystem yeah absolutely so uh the ck means zero knowledge and this stands for a set of cryptographic tools that are used to prove the validity of a computation uh without the need of repeating this computation uh this is one use case the other use case would be uh to just provide privacy for some data which is pretty much the same that getting some computation and not not the need to to have this

computation executed in some way so this is zero knowledge it's a cryptographic innovation that happened recently i think it's from the 1980s something like this the first implementations and now recently with the blockchain and the innovation around the the crypto has been boosting a lot so the application for scalability means that you are able to create a parallel blockchain let's say uh what's what's called off chain meaning if ethereum is the chain or unchained you are doing something else out of the ethereum and this computation of transactions out of ethereum

can be let's say proven that they have been executed with the same rules of ethereum why because you are kind of creating a signalridge proof uh that this computation has been done correctly in the same the way that the rules of this computation needs to be executed so this is a way to scale because it's very interesting has very interesting properties if you are able to prove that the computation is valid of chain you are kind of executing transactions out of histidium first thing the ethereum and the blockchains in

general have the need to to replicate computation between all the nodes in the blockchain network but this model you can just have let's see another way of validating transactions which is uh with zero knowledge you can validate computation in a single node and this node can create a proof so this is saving a lot of uh computation instead in terms of blockchain and if you i mean the blockchains in general the safe blockchains like bitcoin and manufilium they have a very low throughput this is why all this computation and all this data needs to be replicated along the network so this was about scaling so we need to find

different approaches for this uh let's say throughput to be executed somewhere in a safe way so this is a very important breakthrough because zero knowledge is kind of enabling all this scalability with this offchain computation and at the same time ck ibm means that we are building an off chain network that has the same behavior of ethereum but not by initially it was about doing some kind of token transfer or transactions of this nature now it's about executing smart contracts so we are replicating the whole ethereum virtual machine in an off-chain network that's able to create these

zero-knowledge proofs to validate this computation and then these serumless proofs are settled down and recorded into ethereum minute along with all this transaction data so any participant of this layer to network this is why it's called layer 2 because it's off chain but it's connected at the same time you could be able to read all these data and all these proofs and you will be able to reconstruct the state of this layer to network so this is a strategy of the ck rops but ckvm means that we have built a ck roll up that's able to execute the whole evm so uh this is where the scalability uh is more interesting now these things

are getting more more exciting not exciting enough so by zk evm you basically mean that if let's say uniswap or something that's on ethereum a net wants to go on to you know this zka evm it's the exact same thing and it's basically like i don't know if it's one click let's say but it's very easy to just port it over onto this rollup or this layer two versus one that is not evm compatible is that correct yes this network is connected to ethereum you should be able to use a bridge to just transport these assets to this layer to network but once your assets are there you will be able to to run the same applications that can be executed in ethereum better

one so this is uh an important breakthrough because this was considered to be very complex model because the validation incidently circuits about this kind of arbitrary computation was something difficult to imagine one year ago in fact there was a different approaches in legacy scalability we announced that last year in paris this ckvm project which was considered to be non-practical or difficult but we managed to to build this thanks to the merger with polygon where we were able to have more resources more team and also with the collaboration of other teams in polygons such as polygon miter

and polygon zero there was a lot of breakthroughs it has been a very challenging project and but the announcement we did last week or the 20th of july was that all the challenges were solved and the we open sourced the code so next step for us will be releasing a public testnet for developers to approach this technology and test and see if if it's really working if it's something they they it's practical for them and they want to use that right um two questions that came out of this one uh we've talked a lot about optimistic roll-ups so optimism arbitrary arbitrary which launched last year i think was around august and september and that's kind of how we've explained uh layer twos to most of our our audience and i

think most of our audience would be familiar with with those now i'm wondering if one you can kind of just break down the difference of you know a zk roll up versus um versus an optimistic roll-up uh as simple as you can without going too much in the details the other question i have that i did not know is you said that you um not specifically you but there has been the research on zero knowledge proofs since the 80s but we didn't even have blockchain uh back then so i guess zero knowledge proofs is a technology that is not specific to blockchain could you just sort of touch on that and explain let me wrap my head around that no it's not specific to blockchains this is uh something that's uh a kind of cryptographic protocol so it's something you can use for many

use cases probably there's a lot of research now around blockchain but this technology will be also applied to non-blockchain use cases in fact my fellow co-founder jordy was creating as part of the adm3 protocol in 2018 we were creating the silcom programming language for certain reds which is one of the most used tools to build signal light circuits and there's a lot of applications now that are not blockchain that are using this kind of protocols so this is something that probably the blockchain was kind of a trigger to accelerate because all this scalability and we've started with the privacy as part

of it three we'll discuss later with polygon but the the the computation verification is probably most uh needed use case so it was a lot of innovation around that interesting and and the difference between optimistic and ck um i mean the optimistic projects are amazing and they have been doing about great effort and into scaling and there to scaling the difference between these kind of technologies of optimistic products and seekers basically is that the optimistic roll-ups are running the same off-chain computation they receive transactions from the users they are able to produce some batches

and they are able to to create some some state of this network uh the the model of uh validating this this state is what is what is different because the optimistic roll-ups they have uh some some model where the the nodes are doing a naive computation of this state this is what is called optimistic because it's you assume that everything is going fine and there's a model of observers that if something some computation is done in a wrong way they can just uh create a fallout proof and there's a let's say a model to this foot resolution model implemented in smart contracts so in short you are able to

the state is moving forward as the network computes and if something is wrong there's a period of time where someone can just challenge this state and if this person is right to get some incentives and so there's some big theory around this uh in ck roll ups the the model is similar because we have layer 2 we have different transactions and then the nodes complete transactions but instead of having this game around incentives to validate these transactions the validation is on the fly and it's done as you settle down a new state you need to put this together with a validity proof validity proof means the computation has been validated according these rules and

here is the same knowledge proof that validates this state so there's a state that's moving forward but it can be considered final uh of course you have to generate the cryptographic proof this has some cost discuss some delay but let's say the main difference is that the finality of the networks is uh is different the optimistic relapse they have a finality of some days and if in in the sikki relapse you might have some millions or some hours at most so um it's considered and this i am absolutely biased towards sticker relapse because it makes sense but but it's considered that the evolution of these protocols and the synology proofs

and the the polygon ck importer for example we plan to do very frequent stevenage proofs so this means that the finality will be question of minutes and this is a good benefit for users and the user experience in general of the network uh will be better so uh i don't know if it's clear but i think main difference is that uh one is knife computation with some game theory the other is uh street computation with scenarios proof and this creates different experience for users but of course the time advantage of optimistic roll-ups was clear because the ck roll-ups were not mature enough at this stage one year ago and now as the ckvm is developing

probably both solutions are closer in terms of scale bit i'm wondering if you could just try to give us some context here i think ethereum's throughput is what 16 transactions per second if that's correct i could be wrong on that but i'm pretty sure it's somewhere around there um is it 25 okay 25 transactions per second what kind of numbers are we talking about with a zk scalability do we do we know that yet well um no we don't know yet uh to be honest but uh we could do some assumptions and predictions because um i'm talking about our project we are we are scaling um let's say we're creating the first

prototype it's going to be slow it's going to be boogie for the previous version we had the harmonized network we will be able to produce 2000 transactions per second in terms of payment transfers with the ckvm we are doing kind of arbitrary transactions so it's not going to be so efficient for the same model but at the same time we are bringing innovations such as synonymous precaution so we will be able to create a first proof and then a proof of approve to aggregate and and let's say scale in a in a let's say recurrent way we we expect that we could get numbers of thousands of transactions per second so this will be the objective we are

doing all of these to scale so there's some limits probably the next limit will be data availability in terms of how many data we can we can store and so on but the initial bottleneck which was considered the the zero knowledge proof calculation now it's pretty much uh solved we think it's uh this this bottleneck is one uh let's go for the next one and so on this is a long journey but uh we expect that with one network we can handle thousands of transactions per second amazing i'm sure uh we all are excited for that to happen because we need we need scalability obviously now there's

so zero knowledge proofs are um a scalability tool or technology they're also um unlocking a lot of use cases in terms of privacy right a blockchain is kind of public and transparent open for anyone to see which is a great thing but it's also not necessarily an amazing thing when it comes to like personal data and i think zero knowledge proofs uh is sort of a solution to that which i i believe is what enables what um you are both building at polygon id maybe you can talk about that privacy side of things and sort of how that unlocks a bunch of new use cases in the world of of blockchain and silva if you want to jump in on that one feel free to otherwise david you can you can take that as well yeah so privacy

privacy was the initial project we were working on because we envisioned uh this was a big issue for digital identities we are facing a lot of pressure on users because in fact users don't have digital identity so you have some set of accounts and service providers so they are owning your account they are earning your data so we understood that this was a kind of a very urgent need for users the world three space ethos requires more we we have a clear mindset of privacy in terms of using blockchains in general but there's uh some let's say regulation trends also that's that's

let's say put in some different model and that will apply in some way but uh the privacy uh with zero knowledge is the second use case i mean you want to to protect a set of data you want to prove something about your data but you don't want to to show your data that's what we were building from the beginning in advance three applied to an entity we want to create a let's say a digital identity is a distributed private key model where we are using keys compatible with with blockchains so we can anchor states in blockchain so for some specific let's say use cases we can discuss later

but uh it was about creating some data structure based on blockchain so we can interact with web3 applications but at the same time we apply this synonymous technology for users to hold information uh and um being able to decide if they want to share this information or not so it's about holding privacy and if we go one step forward probably the next step uh that will be kind of understood will be this concept of uh reputation that's kind of owned by the user and that's reusable so you get some kind of interactions with applications you get some credentials you get some data that you get by using some uh

some kind of web two or three applications and at some point they want to prove that you are eligible for something that you have some experience and you have some reputation so this is the another use case and the next one will be something we aim to implement also is this kind of decentralized identity verification so you can prove you are human and you can prove you are unique and you don't need to to hold and have a nation nationality document or something like this because there's so many people that don't have this kind of documents the challenge here is to to provide access to the webster environment to all these people that's not able to access to the economy today

and this was kind of a one of the initial objectives we had from the beginning so see knowledge proof and privacy is kind of an enabler of all this uh new model of a human relationship and and community and people coordination so this was what uh why we i fall in love personally with the wesley space and why we need to finish all of this there's a road map to implement all this there's other teams also that they are building specific niches and and parts of this process and we are super happy to to produce what's not developed yet and connect and interact with other things i may may add something because in some

cases when i talk about the digital identity solution we have and the privacy we have to colleagues or former colleagues that are not that familiar with this world they they try to understand and the most easy example that we can tell them is we provide privacy here because you are proving things about yourself without saying any type of um personal information so you can simply with zero knowledge proof technology really prove that you are older than 18 that's the most typical example we say without even saying whether you are 20 40 or your date of birth and and that's what this technology is allowing which i think is very very powerful and as david said can be

applied to really many different use cases as many cases you can imagine um like private voting reputation and and the benefit of the solution is as also david said is that the creation of a self-sufficient identity where you as a user are owning your own identity and not having your data on by a third party that has your digital account or digital identity and your digital identity is not any longer scattered so you own it you have it in your wallet you control you start controlling the data that others have issued on your identity and with that with that you can start proving things

about yourself and of course then that data is portable right so data that was issued in one space you you hold it and you can use in a different space that's that's um i think the beauty of this solution in addition i would say we bring some additional features um thanks to this you know it's proof so that for the website become very handy uh it's not only the privacy per se in the way you you prove things but later on whenever the entity or the application receiving that proof can check that um online also without having access to the real information the actual data

by certain methods that allow the the recipient of that post to validate it yeah very interesting and i love the examples because i think once you hear some examples it really sort of just allows people to understand what exactly uh you know you guys are trying to accomplish and what this does um and i think that the you know improving that you're 18 but not saying how old you are is is the perfect one to sort of to sort of grasp that concept um i'm just trying to figure out how else we can explain it to listeners so they can really sort of understand it's like where do we encounter this in the real world right now where it's a big problem i don't know if you have any examples that you can share where it's something that someone would do every day where

you're like oh if you just had polygon id and zero knowledge proofs it would make your life easier or make your life better in some way do you have any of those examples just that you could pull out of a hat and like yeah this one right here this one everyone will understand i would say we could find almost on a limited number of examples but i would go with a simple easy ones when when you start transacting with a new financial institution being centralized or decentralized where you need to go through that kyc process that everyone hates right so in theory you you are keywords at once and if the party that this key wants to keep or seeing you is a trusted party by the recipient of the proof then you can

start reusing that without having to whenever you operate with different um exchanges having to go up once and again through that gyc process that's one example another example is just figure out that you you have all your records um regarding your health or even certificates of vaccination uh somehow we already have that right so so the wallet you have when you show that you are caught with that vaccination certificate is somehow part of this identity in in in our solution most hollywood would work slightly friend but um that could be one case and as david said at a certain point in time we

believe that um all these documents that we have nowadays id cards passports um maybe even both certificates and all these paper that you you really need to to be sure that you very well organize and save at home finally it will be in one place where you can simply use it by holding your your your your telephone and then making use of that information and change not information per se but proving things out of that information um the only handicap here of course is um you need to be very careful of how how do you manage your digital identity and that you don't lose the keys of that

digital identity right yeah probably could have some other examples um you could you could think about this model where we will be able to verify that that someone is a person with a some decentralized model so if i am a human and i am unique uh because by identities i only have one identity you can imagine that the potential of using this across applications in the one three there's a common problem of uh bots and and you are probably interacting with the blockchain you only need to have an htm address or an account so

uh what's the application where you would like to interact with persons by just i don't know example of an airdrop or something uh and you don't want to have bots and you don't have to have one person with multiple accounts so that's a lot this is a common problem in the work three in general so twitter yeah twitter for example so the the other example could be this kind of um imagine a credit score if i am able to have a decentralized verification that i pay my debts in some broad concept then i will be having some portable reputation across many many services so if we get some kind of standards of reputation and agreement what's the kind

of desired score uh many applications could benefit from that you don't need to store a civic was saying to do a new privacy to get your own database of users because there's a lot of compliance around that you don't want to have personal information in general as an application and maybe some banks want to do that to do that but some small the apps or applications they want to just have users that you know they are human that they are unique and you don't want you want to interact with them that's it maybe you are over 18 or something like that so there are some basic let's say attributes that you want to check and reuse across many applications so if we are able to provide this reusability and we are able to provide good

usability for the keys silva was saying that's another topic we are working super hard we are probably lowering the bar for users to interact with web3 and this is kind of the objective we have and connecting to what you have said david so the first use case we have now in place live for polygon id is for polygon dao actually where we are supporting uh what i consider to be a revolutionary method of governance for those right so nowadays most of the dollars are governed based on token ownership um but we wanted to move to a more uh governance based on meritocracy on on on how good are you at uh

knowledge relation related to that to the dow to that project and then what we are doing at the at this point in time is ensuring as as david said that there will be a unique human voting so one human one boat so resolving that single resistance um a challenge because actually that challenge and then allowing to board um that individual into a specific uh proposal published by the dao and at a certain point then we will be able to connect uh some reputation to that individual to that digital identity that will allow that that votes can count more or less depending on your reputation connected to that specific project and proportion right so i think

this is this is quite quite powerful um and well this this opening new new ways of governing uh those and that can be also applied to not only those but even real real life right [Music] is that reputation that you're talking about it's really interesting i love that how it's like let's try to find the right people to be able to have the ability to vote is that being done via like soul-bound nfts like through credentials or you mean just by like interactions and activity that they're doing just in any dap and on any basically across the blockchain is that how that works

would you like to or shall i david uh well this reputation is something that we need to to just construct and collect from many sources this is why we define this protocol as very open and very let's say multi multi network with 2x3 and also from different sources of credentials so tokens could be an option uh both fungible and non-fungible let's say interaction with the web website in general but also of chain credentials because we understand that most of the activity

today happens of chain so we need to provide compatibility with legacy credentials we we need to be able to to issue credentials in a format that's optimal for zero knowledge because also if you remember we are let's say unique in privacy as let's say this is our own strength main strength and also we we need to be interacting with weather so reputation can be something complex because the application that's requesting for some reputation decides what's a valid reputation so we created also a technology called a claim request language where the application that's recipient of this information

can define which are the requirements so my requirements here are these this and that so the user in their application needs to know which are the sets of information they need to to have and compose approve uh to have this access to this service so at this moment we have uh let's say build this uh protocol layer and we are building the platform uh the platform is gonna be something that's uh gonna be evolving over time but of course with the developers in mind having some libraries and so because this concept of reputation uh is something that evolves from

the current situation that's a basic credential that's a common case today until something that's very complex and requires a lot of analysis we would love to be able users to collect interactions from existing web 2 applications so they are able to together collect all these information such as connections in twitter or followers or tweets or something something that can be proven that you are someone who has a social activity or maybe with open banking getting information about your banks uh whatever and then you go to web 3 and get some token balance or nfts or something so

this is going to evolve over time and we will see which which is the best solution but the platform is designed to support all of it so this is why we are very excited about polygon id you mentioned standards as and that seems like such an important topic here uh obviously when we build any new technology we're kind of figuring out standards as we go is who is working is there any consortiums working on standards of reputation standards of humanity who is doing that and what is what's coming out of that so far is that is there sort of a status of where that's at that you can share yes so at this point in time

to my knowledge the most known standard being discussed is the web3 consortium and that is developing um and deciding how how to work with verifiable credentials um however we we have decided to not to be restricted and limited by certain standards because we wanted to provide a solution that maybe goes beyond those boundaries and and actually although this is not very humble but maybe yeah we if we achieve the right adoption and critical mass at a certain point in time we can't even become an understand that right so since we are

making this open source uh making it available to the development community so we we believe we can even become a different standard of course we think that we would like to be compatible right so to provide the best benefits to the end user at a certain point in time we might need to think on creating bridges between both the standards in order and the same user that has received some credentials based on verifiable credentials and reuse or those in our protocol under the form of what we call claims right so that's that's that's the idea um that's not sure um david if you if you

want to elaborate something yeah no absolutely i mean i agree with you what you said is absolutely let's say complete the only thing i would say is that since we want to be open to any scenario we want to benefit from these standards and also being practical to propose things such as practical reputation for web3 where there's nothing so probably we want to provide a solution as soon as possible so standards have a different cycle and a different approach they are they are a lot based on this kind of sense of interoperability so the industry has been working on standards for a long time

and to be honest the option hasn't been hasn't been crazy at this stage we have seen we start to see some some movement around this technologies recently but uh we want to embrace standards and also create proposals that are going beyond the standards because we don't want to be limited to something specific we want to be let's say connecting all these worlds like uh verifiable credential standards for the off-chain world the token standards and nfts and transferable tokens in the web 3 and other standards that might happen in the future but we need to be absolutely covering all this spectrum because we

want to provide a solution for for all of it the users need a donkey solution i have an identity i need to use this for everything so from having a vaccination credential to have a let's say web3 eligibility for another drop so need to be the same so this is how we approach this and so let's let's talk about the roadmap a bit for polygon id what's what's coming in the future so as david already elaborated before so the first thing we want to ensure is that we allow uh participants to become

users of this protocol run right and at the moment of course we have um our code is open source but really building use cases on top of it is not that easy right you need you need to understand very well the the zk technology how to use credentials and so on so what we what we would like to do first is to create a platform what we call a polygonal platform to allow issuers and verifiers to be able to connect easily with this platform by apis and for instance to facilitate to issues the degeneration and management of those claims what we call claims which are the statements that they do on specific identity

and on the other hand allowing the verifiers so the the recipient of that proof as uh also david said to define with that query language easily so the type of proofs they would like to receive from the user like um are you older than 18 and you're not content in that list of sanctioned countries and so on so allowing these verifiers to define exactly what they want the user to prove and also defining uh what are the the sources of trust they they they rely on right so from from which issuer they would they would like that user to to to have a claim

for the generation of the proof and that's the first step of course we are also having a a wallet in place a polygon id app um also open source but we will allow also other other wallet providers to integrate with us using our sdks and on libraries so we need to continue working hard on having documentation allowed for them to easily make that happen that will be the first step um and and then from there it will be creating reputation and then making use of uh a party that we call our layer i don't know if that's the right term um

david i think we we call it three layer that will enable um um [Music] the issuance of credentials um between in a peer-to-peer manner and also um so to say handing over the complexity of having to to to issue the credentials on your own on your own note and so on to a third party that will provide these services to issuers that don't want to have these these headaches and then of course um be rewarded for that and this this of course can later on be scaled um to a level that will allow to to issue credentials at the

country level in an easy and relatively um [Music] cost effective manner and i think here most probably david has much more to want to eat yes probably i will get to the point where cbr was probably explaining in a different way so today we have the option for a user to create kind of a data structure that's an entity imagine that the entity is your wallet then in your wallet you receive some credentials imagine that there are credit cards ids points from your providers you receive some stuff in your wallet you have something something to show when you get around so

the application the application can ask you okay prove that you are a member of the club and then you get to the wallet you get the credential of the club and say look i am member of the club uh we can do that with zeroness proof this is what we call a passive identity because passive identity is an identity that receives credentials you receive this kind of cards information that you collect you own and then you can prove something about you you can prove that you have access to something because you are a member whatever this is what the face we are today the second phase will be that any identity will be able to issue cards to other entities so you will you could have a card from me not only from the club from the country club you can

have a card from me saying that you are a very nice guy and or you are my friend or something so this is where this is where identities are active they don't not only collect credentials but also they can issue credentials on other identities so this is where we are enabling the ecosystem of the website applications decentralized applications because with this model of active identities you could build for example a decentralized twitter you know what i mean if i am able to issue a credential on sylvia this this this credential could be a tweet and say look silvia or a direct message but i could also be able to issue a credential that's open and there's a server that reads this kind of

credentials on the publish and it decentralized because this credential is from my identity i signed this piece of information and is certified i am a certification authority and whatever i issue is certified so you could have in your wallet credentials issued by me and application developers could just use on the relay on this to build the centralized applications that have the need of certified messages because i could i could build an email system on this because i can send a piece of information with my signature so it's like an email so this is where we are very excited because we are enabling probably web3 ecosystem of decentralized

applications you don't need any more central server with this model of peer-to-peer communication so syria was referring to the relay the layer is kind of a technical name for something that enables these active identities to work because if you are doing this of chain it's fine it's for free but if you're doing something on chain somebody needs to pay the ass fees on the blockchain for that right and we want these transactions to be free or almost free or susceptible to possibly to be sponsored so if you put a model of a sponsor that pays the gas it's kind of a same model of a roll-up the roll-up is kind of a

off-chain system to scale transactions so the reliance for us is kind of a so if in fact this is a a side story we developed hermes because we were thinking on this roll up for identity transactions so so we were building identity transactions i thought okay but ethereum gas is super expensive 2018 remember device booming so it was impossible our identity project was not dead and we decided okay let's build up first and when we scale ethereum then we will come back and scale identity transactions so this is

another differentiator and very key topic of polygon id this is in the rom probably we will talk about this by the end of the year beginning of next one and the next story is to to build this scalability solution or this is to do this identity transactions uh with a big scale so ah a nation can use that for a voting because you need to do millions of transactions in one hour so let's let's find out how we can do that because if we are is let's say having this scalability model we need to do this uh it's very connected with the ctv in fact you see that there's a parallelism here uh at the same time we want to develop

this model of a peer-to-peer entity verification and to enable identity providers polygon id is designed to be a middleware for developers and we also want to enable applications to be identity providers with their own brand for example i don't know any country could have the nation id or something but it's compatible needs to be part of this ecosystem so users can reuse this across any polygon id compatible application so that's in short what's coming in in the next year let's say a lot it sounds like is coming would you say that when i think about and i listen to you talk about all the different um

things that you're doing here with polygon id some of it sounds similar to apple id uh you know i can store my health records in apple id for certain apps i have my my credit cards and my airplane tickets and a bunch of these different things in my apple id it allows me to go and interact with different applications i can sign up and buy things in apps with it and i do it all with just basically my apple id is that sort of what would that one would that be your biggest competition i guess and is that basically what you're trying to recreate but in a decentralized way and then i think one of the big unlocks here in the web 3 world is that there's just so much more information because everything is open and transparent and so you can take

interactions with one like peer-to-peer with applications with so many different things there's just so much more data is that a good kind of take of what you're trying to do here with polygon id or what's the comparison like with with apple id well of course all of this was let's say ideated and all this made sense because we wanted to get out of this this centralized systems so the usability of the web 2 is incredible i mean web 3 is not getting to this standard so far of course we want to do the same as apple led is doing uh but in the centralized way because we want the users to be

we want to provide users with a new option which is the decentralized option of course many users would not be interested they would say okay but i feel it is more convenient because you know what it's working and i don't care but but you don't care until you you care you know so at some point people will say okay but i have a problem all my information is owned by apple so then you might be in in a problem you might decide to do this the web3 space of course they understand that but the challenge is to provide all this tool set and be available and ready it will be if we are

very close to this usability level then i guess everything will be fine because we have a big difference and in privacy and this privacy quick when it comes to personal data is not a detail you know it's something something important then um yeah i totally agree with maybe what your point is makes a lot of sense i mean uh apple led and all these let's say operating system providers with uh with native devices they are doing a lot of progress lately i don't know why if it's maturity it happened by by chance but uh we started the project in 2018 i can tell you we were thinking on something superior

to apple id today but it's good that the standards of usability are better it's more challenging to get to this level but we want to provide this because if the market of this application use these say use cases exist users will understand better but you have a wallet the concept of a wallet the concept of the credential the concept of having tickets having all this information in a single point is good for us it's good for us because before that you you have the identities pretty many accounts you don't you don't know what you have things so opalis apple is helping to to get this concept of a single wallet of

course they have intention to to get all this let's say information from users but we have the intention to remove this from update which is also fine well finally our our main proposition here is the privacy and decentralization you know so compared to the apple solution in here you are the only owner of that of that information of your wallet and no one will be able to remove that and and and let's say close that account whatsoever which i doubt uh will be the case maybe with apple right um so that that's and that that was at the core of our values what we wanted to provide here privacy decentralization and

and allowing uh supporting uh opening the gates to website the whips he wants you keep mentioning the wallet is there is there a polygon id wallet currently or where is where is that out i feel like i'm missing the boat here that i haven't already downloaded and started using it yes you can you can download it from the app store or it's also for android um nowadays the the main use case we have in that wallet is the one for the dark so you would be able to for instance uh get some credentials issued by an entity we we created called uh polygon very fine that will drive you through a kind

of kyc process in order to ensure that you are human being uh so you would receive a claim related to your proof of personhood uh your membership of the dao date of birth and country of residence and with that you would be able to go to um a platform which is called the crail where polygon dow is publishing certain proposals authenticating with your identity wallet and then being able to vote on one proposal by proving that you are a member of the valve so that's the current use case say there is one wallet of course um but we of course need to continue growing on use cases and applications where you can start using it and as we said before uh we will

enable other wallet providers to adapt our protocol so if you prefer uh to use maybe metamask or any other wallet then that shall be that shall be possible yeah yes yes i mean in our model for privacy um most of it happens in the user device so quality is kind of a first implementation a reference implementation so we can prove the concept and everybody can see that this is working we probably will keep this application alive for developers to reuse if they want but as silvia was saying we will also be enabling developers and

we will have sdks and and the tools for this identity system to be integrated in any previous existing application so we want this to be absolutely available for any developers even enterprises it's fine so they can do what they want with this i mean it's gonna be it's gonna be something we need to see how it how it evolves because um [Music] we are we are kind of a middleware we don't have ambition to become kind of a main provider of identity but maybe the market on the developer uh let's say use cases guides us to to this to this scenario do

i don't know if this is something you i'll talk about internally at all but this makes me think about you know you just talked about apple id and how you know big this is and what they're doing but they're taking all this data which is obviously very important to them do you see this is like a or them as a barrier to entry here like they could be basically a walled garden to not let this id come into play is there something you guys can do to get around that i mean like solana for example is launching their own phone and their own operating systems and i guess polygon actually has done the same uh partnering with i think is it huawei i can't remember who the partner htc i think it was um to start building their own you know ethereum based operating systems in the phones

like is the hardware or the operating systems gonna be a a problem here at all or does that not really does that not really matter no no no this uh as i told us we want to be a middleware very portable we want to solve a specific problem and we need to be let's say veritas and transversal and portable across many platforms i mean today is something we we are running into ios and android devices there's some smart contract set that's uh let's say ethereum compatible with smart contracts we are starting on polygon pos network

but we will be portable across different networks it's not going to be even tied to polygon pos so interesting um it needs to be universal in some way we've got just a few more questions and i think we can start to wrap up we could talk talk all day i'm sure uh i'm just i'm curious sylvia you know running business development at polygon id um who is showing the most interest right now we have from every different corner you can imagine um interest right so from um really

incipient startups working in the website world in defy in gaming in different taos applications from also enterprises and also tech companies a very well known tech companies the biggest ones right um everyone willing to know what we do at least to pay attention to how to resolve certain certain topics around this digital identity and our approach to privacy decentralization um so i i wouldn't say one more than others

right so it's really on different sizes different industry sectors and the the interest is it has been amazing so we we are really it has been i'm i have a luxury problem i see right i i need more more people joining the team to be able to to serve all these different requests and be able to guide them for our solution to start uh working on defining the the main use cases the proof of concepts we want to work on so i have a luxury problem at this point in time i'm curious it seems like nation states would be a huge win here are any nation states

taking interest in this yeah yeah actually earlier today i i i got approached by a colleague in in the impact region saying um this interest of this government to start working on the on on a digital identity and they would like to hear about polygon id so yes you're paving the road that we all want to walk down thank you thank you the government is also banks although they are very related they also would like to know what we are doing um it's um yeah as i said every industry sector you can figure out um transportation everything yeah

i just have one final question and then um we do a speed round at the end that i think uh jay will will finish this off but just curious um and this can be specific to to polygon id uh or what you're doing with the zk evm side of things but if we just look out into the future let's say maybe three five years um where where are we at in terms of maybe polygon in terms of polygon id polygon you know evm and hermes where does this whole ecosystem look like is it is it a massive change by that time or are we still thinking this is like gonna be decades away kind of thing like what are your thoughts there what maybe predictions on that sort of time frame do you mean the impact or do you mean

the situation of uh polygon maiden uh either or okay so well and in five years i i personally see polygon leading the infrastructure layering web stream we have a very comprehensive strategy of touching all the potential keys and being super aggressive in terms of not only serving customers and approaching them but also creating and shipping products i i feel very very privileged and happy to to be part of this project in terms of infrastructure i feel like

in five years blockchains will be scaled absolutely i mean there will be other players not only polygon of course but we think we will have a very strong position but the idea and the objective was to scale this idiom so i in five years i guess in three we will be also doing that but in five for sure and the impact of the blockchains will be will be amazing because what we need is secure transactions but also low cost and applications will be embracing that i think the the kind of interactions we have at polygon with enterprises and and many also i mean sylvia was talking about id but uh

in let's say in scaling we have a lot of transactions similar to that interactions with customers so i'm super positive and very excited i mean we have a lot of work to do in the next years this is a long long objectives in terms of time we need to we need to be uh building this and improving a lot in terms of excalibility for example ckbm we are just trying to build the next the first version by the end of the year but as you said how many transactions we will support we need to do thousands per seconds and probably we need to do hundreds of thousands per second so

this is going to be a long project and in terms of id we we are just in the starting line but uh you see the roadmap is very broad and as we get more information of our applications and the market we will need to guide decisions and we need probably to open some other fronts but i think in three years ide will be will be out there competing with apple id for sure and i just will add not not on how i see it from the evolutionary technology perspective but closing a bit with how i started i i see that this is going to be a revolution we are already entering into it i see that the the first movement of the will takes a

bit more effort right but we are starting to get more more acceleration velocity uh what we cannot forget in here and i think that's one of the key areas that are relevant to to improve the adoption is making it much more easy to use to the general uh public and and resolving certain key aspects that uh keep us quite busy on a daily basis which is recovery of keys right so usability user experience um basic aspects as recovery of keys when all this is improved and resolved that's gonna be that's gonna be a game changer yeah

yeah and i think a big step to or the first step to usability is also just education understanding you know so thank you to both of you for taking the time and joining us today and sharing the uh the all the incredible work you're doing and really offering this learning to so many people who are you know trying to stay on top of web 3 as it moves at this incredible pace just hearing you say where you were a year ago to where you are now it's uh yeah it's exciting to to see the progress so yeah fantastic okay i've just got a a few sort of fun speed round questions uh before we let you go um

and we'll all ask the question then you can both answer it i've got four questions first question uh what's one token you'll never sell can be fungible or non-fungible can i start yes sure i was i was on salmatic i knew you were going to say that i knew you're going to speak so of course we are true believers of our project so why would i say anything [Music] what's alpha alpha what's alpha here what's one what's one nft you'll never sell nft

uh i don't have an office i'm sorry i mean okay interesting i mean i i there's nfts i see the utility of the nfts i guess but i don't collect them they're too focused on on building a revolution right now it's amazing yeah yeah it's amazing because i i do you need to get some time to understand this and yeah i'm just building stuff i'm sorry don't be sorry right so we we as i said i have some gray hair so from a generational perspective i think we still need to to get much in depth on on on these nfts and the values

the perception our perception of the value so david i don't know any nft we'll see we'll see maybe that change soon i think we could have a another podcast of uh that discussion right there because there's yeah there's lots to lots to unfold there uh okay other than polygon what's another 3 project that you're excited about and that you're following website project i mean i personally love ethereum i i think there's a lot of good projects out there i have big respect for the guys of uh

avalanche the guys of starkware scrolls casing the guys they're competing with with us also in the secret role up space but also with optimism and arbitrary all the layer 2 space i think it's a it's crazy good and i have big respect for them especially because we are trying to do the same which is scary feeling yeah in in my side i i i don't name any particular one but i'm very interested on the evolution of the d5 right industries since i'm coming a bit from that from that corner so i'm very interested to see how how this is gaining some some some space and i'm taking some market shares so to say

to the most traditional banking sector and and it's it's very interesting to see the evolution and how how the certain certain challenges that we had in the traditional banking system are being resolved here or taken from a different perspective that's that's really interesting okay final final question uh and this fits well with sylvia your revolution uh when you're starting when you're part of a revolution you need to get the masses on board so my question is if you had a billboard which was going to be seen by 1 billion people

what would you write on that billboard don't don't sell your matic decentralize everything um be the owner of your identity on your everything be the owner of you everything fantastic wonderful this has been an absolute delight thank you so much for taking the time and for sharing your knowledge with us and thank you for building don't worry about nfts keep building [Laughter] if someone wanted to get involved or

wants to just keep up is there anywhere that we should be following you or you know anywhere that we can keep tabs i don't know if you guys want to give a quick a quick shill but if there's any way that we can um you know send our listeners in the right direction please let us know where they should go well if if you have questions around us the program id i can i can generally run um an email address where you can send that to us right um and then we'll be happy to to take that up um in the team right so if you like its um id add polygon.technology crazy and if anybody wants to help sylvia with her influx of questions around polygon id send her an email maybe you'll get a

job wonderful wonderful we'll put put those links and we'll put some other links in the show notes uh your twitter and your website and other places where people can find out more about you and i think you know possibly i was going to say a year from now we should do a part two but in a year from now the whole world might be different so hopefully we'll have decentralized more by then so at some point we'll have you back on the show i'm sure sure we're keeping going thank you so much for coming thanks thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey if it does please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss

the next one by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are missing out this is where all the magic happens this is where we learn where we ask questions where we network uh you want to be in there the link to join is in the description below and finally a quick disclaimer nothing in this podcast was financial advice crypto and web3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one