**A** (0:05):
All right, Two ecosystems collide. We have a special guest from Polygon. Get to the fireside chat. All right, let's bring Sunny and Sandeep up on stage. Let's get to it. Welcome.
**B** (0:27):
So I'm so excited today that we have two ecosystems interacting with each other. We have Sunny and we have Sandeep. Have you guys met before?
**A** (0:36):
I don't think we did. We meet at Devcon 5, I think.
**C** (0:39):
I think, yeah. I mean, I tried to meet Sunny. Sunny is a legend. And like, you know, I came here for like, this was very last minute managed and it's far, but I said that I have to go. If Sunny has called me, like, I'll go.
**A** (0:53):
Thank you for so much for coming. Means a lot.
**B** (0:56):
Are there any topics we want to cover before we dive straight in?
**C** (1:01):
No, I mean, we can, we can get in.
**A** (1:02):
I want to learn about Polygon 2.0. Tell me, what is Polygon 2.0?
**C** (1:06):
Yeah, so I mean, we started with this as, you know, like, you know, our ethos have been very clear that we. And the mission is very clear that we want to have like 100 million or even billion users in web3. So how do we take web3 mainstream? Has been always the quest for Polygon. And back back in 2018 when we started, we saw a lot of activity on Ethereum and we. I myself was a Ethereum developer. My other co founders were also Ethereum developers. And we thought that, okay, you know, in order to go mainstream, we need more scalability here. So at that time, plasma was the approach which was like, you know, more popular. So we started building a Plasma Layer 2 ecosystem and then eventually, like, you know, plasma became dead and all that stuff. So but for us, the eventual goal is how do we provide infinite scalability, you know, for the Web three. Right. Which is like fairly secured, fairly decentralized and things like that. So, you know, after plasma, after multiple years of research, like, we were very clear that ZK is the end game. And then we, you know, spent like $1 billion in like, you know, acquiring a lot of talent from zk. And then today, like, you know, we have one of the, you know, topmost team in the ZK space and we launched our zkevm and after multiple years of this, like, you know, research divergence and convergence, now we are sure that what is the architecture which can bring in infinite scalability to Web3? And that architecture is, we have proposed as Polygon 2.0, which is essentially like, you have a. It is very similar to Cosmos Vision, also when it started, but it's more like aggregated and liquidity is unified across the chains and all that and same security zones using the power of zk. So very simply, it's a multi chain environment. Using the power of ZK proofs, we prove all the proofs into an interoperability layer where all of them aggregated. Because we are the leading team in the recursive ZK proofs, they recursively get combined and then they get put on, on Ethereum. So this way you can have hundreds and hundreds, even thousands of chains and none of the chains have to trust on each other. If you want to do a cross chain transaction, the moment you have put a ZK proof on the aggregator layer, every other chain can simply see a ZK proof and the incoming transaction and they know that this transaction is kosher, right? And then you can have this. That's why we call it like infinite scalability. That means as many chains you wanted to start. Even if you are a college dorm student, you can launch a chain and it will be fully secure. And all of those chains, those transactions have composability across these, these chains. So they, this whole block space will almost feel like one single block space, an infinitely growing block space. That's the vision about it. And using the power of zk, that's, that's brief example.
**A** (3:55):
Yeah, you know, I used to hang out with Mihailo a bunch back in like 2018 and he used to come and tell me like, sonny, Cosmos is cool, but I am going to go build Polkadot on Ethereum using Cosmos technology. And I'm like, man, you guys did it.
**C** (4:11):
Yeah, yeah. And I think as we say, we are very die hard fans of Ethereum community. But after Ethereum, if there is a layer one ecosystem which we have the most respect for, it has to be Cosmos. Like the stuff that you guys have built, like Polygon Positive, like we were joking in the Celestia event on stage is that, you know, using the Tendermint, the Polygon POS has probably put like multiple times more than the, you know, probably the whole Cosmos ecosystem. The value that has transacted and the users that have transacted with the chain. And even now like when we, you know, discuss about like building these new clients for some of these chains, decentralizing them, like Tendermint and Cosmos ecosystem built technology keeps on coming up on the top. So yeah, absolutely, like huge respect for the Cosmos ecosystem on all the fronts. And yes, like Also this Polygon 2.0, if you see this aggregated Liquidity is like kind of what you guys thought about ibc, although the construction is different, but the concept is the same, like interconnected chains and interconnected almost sovereign chains, but they have a provability on Ethereum which gets them additional security and provability. But this ibc, this interconnectivity layer or this multi chain ecosystem and all that, I think the roots of these innovations lie somewhere in you guys ecosystem. So big shout out to you guys.
**B** (5:37):
Hey Sunny. So now that you know more about how Polygon 2.0 works, how do you say that compares to the ethos or kind of the technology of Cosmos?
**A** (5:47):
Yeah, so I think like all these ecosystems seem to be kind of converging towards a very similar end design. I think the one main thing that kind of differs with Cosmos ethos is we come from a very sovereignty first like bottom ups approach. Almost where our default in Cosmos is that every chain is sovereign, has its own staking system, its own validator set. And then we start to layer on top, like secure, like shared security systems on top of that. So you know, we have like mesh security that's being developed which is saying, hey, like two chains that want to enter a shared security system can do a bilateral agreement to do so. And what's different here is that instead of relying on any one token as the security root of the system, we say, no, actually, why don't we take the sum of all of these market caps? So we use a restaking system very similar to eigenlayer or it seems what's going on now in Polygon 2.0. But we say, hey, why don't we allow all of these tokens to be used for restaking? Why don't we allow OSMO tokens and atom tokens and axle tokens and Mars tokens? Why don't we, why are all these chains being secured by the sum of all their market caps? Like the idea is that the sum of all these market caps is going to be stronger, higher and more resilient than any one token. And in the Cosmos ecosystem we've seen what happens when you put all of your security in like one basket and all your eggs in one basket. Where you know, we had this huge ecosystem all dependent on the security of one token called Luna. And then, you know, if everything can go to zero any day, you know, we want to make sure that we have more resilient security, multi dimensional security systems.
**C** (7:44):
Yeah, no, that's, that's brilliantly said. I think this sovereign ethos, like each chain is sovereign and all That I think that's, that's the core ethos of Cosmos and we coming from the like, how it like is slightly different from our side is that we come from the Ethereum background. So for us we are relying on that one single layer that, okay, Ethereum is the ultimate level of security. And on top of that, if you see the multi chain environment I'm talking about there, these, all these multi chains are layer twos proven by zk. But actually we are trying to borrow some of these ideas that all of these chains individually can be fully sovereign. That means they can have their own stickers and own data availability, like modular, like what, you know, another protocol from your ecosystem, Celestia. Like they are modular, they can have their own provers, they can have their own data availability, whatever they want to choose and all they need to do is like just participate or collaborate in this aggregator layer. But then they are also more sovereign because then it's kind of more inclusive. Everybody and anybody can do how they want to do. And I think to provide developers those, you know, those, those ethos or those functionality that you do, you are the, you are the sole, you know, kind of owner of your, of your, of your identity and your chain and ecosystem. How you want to do is completely up to you. Our job is to provide you those small bricks with which you can create your house.
**B** (9:08):
That's a good point. It's also kind of interesting, as Sunny had said earlier, how there's a lot of convergent design happening in crypto. Like what other areas of like crypto do you think there's been a lot more of designs have been converging into one vertical or one area.
**A** (9:24):
So you know, like I said, I think everyone has like adopted some notion of this restaking concept. I like even Avalanche with their subnets has a very restaking style model to it. I think now we're starting to see everything is like, you know, there's always this idea of like oh, Cosmos is only light client proofs, not like fraud validity proofs. But we're starting to see that like with things like rollkit and stuff you're going to start to get these fraud proofs for Cosmos SDK chains as well. I think one interesting place that I think there's still a lot of divergence and is just like with it seems that every other ecosystem has kind of converged onto the EVM as the like standard development platform. And it feels like Cosmos and Solana as well. But I feel Solana's activity has kind of died down quite A bit. But like these are sort of the only two ecosystems that are like really kind of holding out and like experimenting with a different stack than the evm. And. But now you're starting to see that, you know, I saw the presentation from Arbitrom at. Etc they're adding like a WASM VM. More people are finally starting to experiment with new VMs. So I guess like Sandeep, like how, how do you see the evolution of these VMs? Like do you, are you an EVM maximalist or do you think that eventually the EVM is going to be replaced by other frameworks?
**C** (10:50):
I mean so we are developer maximalist, right? So right now we see there are so many developers in the EVM ecosystem who want to build there. So you know, we want to provide them that level of security and sovereignty with their own chains using the power of EVMs. But, but if you see like we have actually, you know, already like a, you know, three, four years out plan for us is Miden vm. Miden is also so Polygon has basically three ZK approaches. Like one is a zkevm which is a Type two zkevm which is already live. Then we have a type one. Type one is basically it can prove any EVM chain. So a lot of you know, cosmos EVM chains if, let's say later on they want to just prove the execution back on Ethereum also you should be able to use that prover. So that, that is also we are building pretty strong progress has been made on that. And the third one is the Miden VM which is essentially non evm. It will support Rust at the start. It will, it is also supposed to add the support of Move and Sway, these kind of languages and that VM will have all those different kind of functionalities also like for example user level privacy. Like I mean if some of you guys are not following Bobbin, just follow like this guy is next level person, right? And, and the kind of innovations that team is putting in. Like for example you can have private execution on your phone itself. You interact with a smart contract and the proofs you keep with yourself, you don't even have to relay them on chain. So extreme level of user privacy and you know like providing developers all these kind of different functionalities. Plus since it's a different vm so it the performance wise also it can be like 100x faster than EVM. So we are not EVM maxi, as I said, we are developer maxi and we do see that there is a space for a lot of like developers who want Rust and Golang and you know, different kind of languages. So that is Myden is our that product. But then like right now looks like 90% of the developer activity is around EVM. And I think these are financial applications is also power of EVM comes from all this legacy audited solidity code. This that like you know when you are building a protocol which you are expecting a $1 billion of capital to be managed with them. You want like reputed auditors who have done like a lot of audited work and all that. So I think all of that network effects plays into EVM and it kind of is like JavaScript, right? Everybody used to hate it but then it is kind of like the most popular. So that's why we have to be closer to EVM I guess.
**B** (13:22):
We have so many options that are coming out or they'll be in the future. How do you prevent I guess decision paralysis for developers? Like now you're like okay in the past, like okay, only Bitcoin now Bitcoin Litecoin and now everything.
**C** (13:35):
Yeah, no, that's definitely true. As of now, you know, at Polygon like if you went six months back there was even more chaos, right? You have this, you have this, you have side chains. If you want to launch an edge based side chain later on it will become layer two and all that. But only after the R ZKEVM went live and some of the ZK stuff that we have done, we understand that okay now this system works. That's why we propose Polygon 2.0 which actually is 80% already built out. Like some of the productionization and you know, closing up of these interoperability layer is is remaining. So we believe that eventually more and more consolidation will happen. But for now like this evm, EVM and non EVM is still separate for us. But you are right like you know eventually for the developers there should be something like AWS and I call it trustless compute. Like they just simply should be asking that I need this much billion gas or like some compute in it for me and I'll pay thousand dollars a month for that. And you know, after that you should not be thinking about which chain. How you just define your level of decentralization and all that and it happens for you automatically so that convergence needs to happen. But for now it's the situation only thing is that this developer choice is generally very. It's an engaged choice. It's not like you are buying a toothpaste in the market. It's like a It's not an impulsive, you know, purchase, it's a engaged purchase. So we are hoping that developers right now will do their due diligence, but eventually we have to reach that place, I guess.
**B** (15:06):
Sunny, what's your perspective for the Cosmos ecosystem? Because within the Cosmos ecosystem there's already dozens upon dozens of app chains. Like how do users decide which one to use? How do developers decide which one they want to build on?
**A** (15:17):
Yeah, so I think within the Cosmos ecosystem it kind of really depends on what application you're building. There's some apps that like people want to build their own app chain for, right? They go use the Cosmos SDK, go build on that, which we still see a lot of. You know, I think there's over 60, 70 launched Cosmos SDK chains at this point. But what we've seen recently is much more focus on Cosmos as the smart contracting framework. And so that lets you write Rust based smart contracts. And what's really cool about CosmosM is it's this asynchronous actor based model which is very well designed for interchange composability. The way of calling a contract on the same chain is almost identical to the semantics of how you would call a contract on a different chain. And by pushing developers into this paradigm and it kind of, you know, is more, much more similar to how like web development would work. Right? You have to write from asynchronous programming first, right? Microservices basically. And so how, you know, now there's a number of cosmosm chains, you have, you know, Neutron Juno, injective say, you know, number more and more cosmosm chains launching archway for us at Osmosis. We, we kind of focus on like we're not trying to become a generalized smart contracting chain. We are trying to build a DEX and a DEX first. And that's why we have permissioned smart contracting on osmosis to say that like we don't want NFTs or games and stuff on the osmosis chain. We want the osmosis chain to remain simple and focus on defi applications that provide this unified DEX experience. And so, you know, how people come to build, choose to build on top of osmosis is they're looking for, okay, well where in the Cosmos ecosystem has the most liquidity, has the most, you know, the DEX infrastructure built in. We have a lot of custom developer tooling that makes it much easier to develop on top of osmosis. And yeah, so that's kind of how people make their decision, I guess.
**B** (17:26):
Do you think there are Natural monopolizing tendencies within cosmos and Polygon 2.0, will all liquidity and users kind of gravitate to very specific rollups or instances? Or do you believe users will be more spread out?
**A** (17:39):
I think in any system there's always power laws. And like. Yeah.
**B** (17:44):
So should we try to break up these power laws or power laws considered a feature or a bug?
**A** (17:51):
It depends on what hat you're wearing. When I'm wearing my Cosmos hat, the goal is decentralization of power between the chains. When I'm wearing my osmosis hat, obviously I want to be on a certain SP caught in the power laws.
**C** (18:02):
No, I mean, I think it's. It's also. Even if you wanted to break this, power laws are very hard to break because these are like some first principle laws. Right. Like liquidity begets liquidity, as they say. Right. And that, that you cannot break. And what, what, what Sunny was saying, like, I was just thinking in that direction, like with this Polygon 2.0 interoperability layer, actually we. What we want is like all these chains are individual ecosystems, let's say. And they are all, you know, they are all owners of their own destiny. How they are playing. But they are. If they wanted to, if users in those chains wanted to, they would be able to interoperate with other chains. Like, that's the functionality we are aiming to provide. But yeah, like, I understand that liquidity laws still apply. I don't know how you bypass them.
**B** (18:54):
Yeah, I think you'll never get around that. But as long as you just have the option or choice to move between chains, I think that's very valuable in itself. Crypto is extremely collaborative. And so if you think looking outside of your own ecosystem, where do you draw inspiration from.
**C** (19:11):
In terms of collaborativeness or protocol design? Yeah, I mean, I think like, outside of our. First of all, inside of our ecosystem, we see a lot of collaboration, both between developers. That's why Polygon communities are so strong, because most of these communities are actually helping each other. Like, whether it's the DeFi community, NFTs community, and somehow like, you know, there is a good, like Purple Heart vibe in the community. Everybody supports each other mostly. There's not too much of infighting there. And in terms of collaborative between the protocols, like, I think, like, I think Cosmos is the most, you know, collaborative protocol outside of the, you know, Ethereum ecosystem as a layer one, I feel. And we still like, you know, keep going back to, I think Mihailo and us, like, whenever we are. We have any thoughts on these things, like, we will reach out to Sunny or some other, you know, top people in the space, Ethan and everyone, and try to get help from you guys. Yeah. Even Delphi Labs. Like, you know, we will come and ask for help. Like, that's the symbolic.
**B** (20:14):
I guess in our last, like, 30 seconds, you have a favorite crypto story or antidote from your. I guess, Sunny, like nearly a decade in crypto, and Sandeep, I have no idea how many years, but do you have a favorite story?
**A** (20:27):
Wow. Favorite story in all of crypto. You want to go first?
**C** (20:35):
I'm thinking because this space is so addictive, every other day there's a favorite story. Right? So it's very hard to think of one single story. I'm thinking, I'm thinking, like, I can say, like, you know, we have had some surreal events. I don't know about stories, but, like, you know, imagine the last year. Like, what, what we have survived. Like this Luna FTX3AC this, that. Like, every other day you. One day you are feeling that, okay, no, this is going to be the future of the world. Next day you realize, oh, shit. Like, this is. This is the crappiest place in the whole tech industry.
**A** (21:07):
So, yeah, I mean, I think maybe like three most stressful moments was probably like, the osmosis launch, the Terra collapse, and then the osmosis bug last year during osmocon. So I'm just very happy that this year's OSMOCON is way more chill than last year in that regard.
**B** (21:27):
Famous last words. Give it up for Sandeep and Saniya.
**C** (21:30):
Thank you, everyone.