FluidAI Live – Korea Blockchain Week Exclusive: Arpit Sharma, VP of Global Enterprises, Polygon Technology
Korea’s premier crypto and blockchain event, Korea Blockchain Week, saw crypto enthusiasts from around the world converge in Seoul for inspirational keynotes, panel discussions, pitch competitions, investor meet-ups, and world-class networking opportunities.
In an exclusive FLUID Live interview, FLUID’s Head of Marketing and Communications, Matias Jeldrez, spoke to Arpit Sharma, VP of Global Enterprises, Polygon Technology, and discussed FLUID’s problem statement and what the future holds for Polygon.
Q. How was the Korea Blockchain Week for Polygon?
Korea Blockchain Week was pretty exciting. This ecosystem is quite active, and the market appears to have a lot of potential. Particularly impressive was Vitalik’s presentation here. The guidance he provided and the insightful questions they had were truly amazing. We discovered a lot, especially in Meta, where there is a lot of activity. We were particularly struck by how dynamic the startup culture here is around gaming and DeFi.
Q. I want to talk about one part of the overall solution, and that’s something that Polygon also focuses on. FLUID is trying to solve fragmented liquidity and we’ve got a partnership with Polygon as well, where we are going to be working on our layer two fertility on Polygon early next year, and low latency is a really big part of that, and also low fees. We are aware of the incredible work you guys are doing in this area, but could you perhaps elaborate on what else you guys are focused on in addition to low latency and affordable fees?
We have a lot of offerings in the making currently; I will try to walk you through them.
We have POS, of course, which everybody is aware of. We have around 20,000 apps already on that, so we are making some improvements there. Other than POS, we are working on Polygon Supernets. Polygon Supernets removes the complexity of blockchain development by providing premium support to help clients build their own blockchain without the hassle of maintaining blockchain infrastructure.
On the scalability side, we recently launched zkEVM, which is getting a lot of traction and which is going to be critical for scalability in the future. Other than zkEVM, teams are working on two other zk solutions: Polygon Miden and Polygon Zero.
Polygon Zero uses the speed of Plonky2 to enable a more scalable and decentralized ZK L2. It offers both rollup and validium modes, giving users access to higher throughput and lower fees. Polygon Zero is going to be optimized for speed. Polygon Miden is a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum. Miden relies on zero-knowledge technology to roll-up thousands of layer 2 transactions into a single Ethereum transaction, thus, increasing throughput and reducing transaction fees.
We are working on a data availability solution called Polygon Avail, which is slated to be released soon. Avail is a modular blockchain that records transaction data for other blockchains so they don’t have to. This is going to be important from a scalability point of view, both in terms of latency and keeping those fees down.
So two more projects that I would like to share with you are pretty critical. We are working on Polygon Nightfall, which is, again, being developed jointly by Ernst & Young and Polygon, so it’s a privacy-focused public blockchain offering, which is going to be really critical for enabling enterprises to enter that public block ecosystem. We are seeing a lot of interest there because it addresses a long-standing concern that industry clients have had around the privacy of their business logic in a public network ecosystem, which is why this is going to be pretty interesting to look at.
Another very interesting offering would be polygon ID. We have been working behind the scenes to fulfill this promise, and today we are proud to introduce Polygon ID, the self-sovereign, decentralized, and private identity for the next iteration of the Internet.
What makes this new identity platform unique is that it is the first ever to be powered by zero-knowledge cryptography, a privacy and blockchain scaling technology. Polygon ID is the latest product in this rapidly growing portfolio.
A lot of exciting things are rolling out from the house of Polygon really soon.
Q. Let’s look at the question a little more specifically. When it comes to the technology that you’re working on and with every project, there’s no technology that doesn’t have its challenges. That’s one of the amazing things about technology, it’s forever evolving and improving. When it comes to the most obvious kind of products in the market such as the exchanges, the CEXes and DEXes of the world, how much effort and focus do you put out in R&D, design, and thinking when it comes down to finding solutions for those types of day-to-day use case scenarios?
To be really candid, at Polygon, we work on the protocol layer, so that’s the core of what we do. However, we have a very strong focus on ensuring a very good developer experience and we are in that space of tech evolution, so it is necessary that we focus on the end customer.
At Polygon, in terms of enabling developers, we have a very strong suite of developer tools available that are already integrated within what we offer right now. This greatly reduces time to market and enables developers to develop seamlessly.
In terms of end users, we are focusing very closely on how we can enable a better UX for the end-user. We have teams working on that, designing for a scenario where, for example, if someone has to log in on a wallet, how can we then make that experience much more seamless. So a lot of research is currently happening within different teams in Polygon. We have both these elements as our priority—the developer experience and the end-user experience.
Q. What does the future hold for Polygon? Where are you looking at in the next five years and where does the industry go from here?
That’s a pretty interesting question, and I would take some time to answer it. First, I’ll speak about where I think the industry is heading. I strongly believe that this is the time to build strong fundamentals at protocol, tooling, and security levels, so I think this development phase that we are in is going to be a critical foundation stone for where we want to be. As to what the future looks like, I personally believe that it is going to evolve into this new type of internet where you have this blockchain layer as a decentralized layer that enables ownership, creation, and identity. So it’s going to transform into a really composite, beautiful new internet if I could use that word.
For Polygon, the objective has always been mass adoption. So in mass adoption, and if we look at the diffusion of innovation curve, we are right there – games have adopted Polygon. DeFi applications have seen a lot of user traction, but still there is this gap between the mainstream adoption that we see today and what we are working very hard to enable that mainstream adoption. For that, there are three fundamental things that we have to focus on. So how do we simplify the technology so that it is invisible to the user? You have a job to do and it just gets it done right. We are far from there, so I think we need to focus as an industry on how to simplify this. So it essentially reduces those entry barriers for enterprise clients to retail customers. Everybody should be able to interact, so that is one.
The second would be that we need to get into very quick iterative build cycles, and essentially, that holds for pretty much any product development. To ensure that you arrive at a quick product market fit, it is important that you iterate. We want to focus on quick iterations of products, and ensure people start engaging.
The third would be creating some sticky applications where, for instance, we solve real problems looking at the world not from the technology point of view but looking at technology from the point of view of the world. Essentially, focusing on value first and tech later. These perspectives will enable mass adoption in the coming years. I strongly feel a mass adoption wave is building up as we speak; a lot of work is currently ongoing with many of our enterprise clients. We work with a lot of government entities across the region and we’re seeing a lot of traction and interest from all of these clients which was unthinkable a few years ago. We’ve also got into a partnership with Meta on their digital collectibles and we are working with Stripe to enable crypto payments.
In India, we are already working with different state governments for citizen delivery services. We help issue certificates with asset tracking and eventually this will culminate into something much bigger for the country.
To watch the full interview, click here.
