TopDAO X Polygon Interview Recap

Yesterday, TopDao interviewed Polygon to discuss new vision for Polygon in Gamefi area, here is a brief recap of the Q&A:

Carter: Can you briefly introduce what is Polygon for those who might not know？

Charlie Hu: Polygon is the first well-structured, easy-to-use platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development. Its core component is Polygon SDK, a modular, flexible framework that supports building and connecting Secured Chains like Plasma, Optimistic Rollups, zkRollups, Validium, etc, and Standalone Chains like Polygon POS, designed for flexibility and independence. Polygon’s scaling solutions have seen widespread adoption with 500+ Dapps, ~350M txns, and ~13.5M+ unique users. Polygon’s former name is called Matic Network, founded in 2018 from India. Matic was a originally an EVM compatible Ethereum side chain, plasma pos chain which share the security from Ethereum. Through the last 2 years, Matic has successfully built the layer 2 and side chain scaling solution around Ethereum. Matic had the branding and technology upgrade this February called Polygon.

Polygon is fully EVM compatible and very developer friendly for Ethereum developer, with multiple magnitude of less gas fee and high TPS blockchain performance. If you’re an Ethereum Developer, you’re already a Polygon developer! Leverage Polygon’s fast and secure txns for your Dapp, get started here.

Carter: We all know that Polygon has a sizeable ecosystem. Can you tell me more about your ecosystem? What are some areas and projects running currently?

Charlie: thanks for the question Carter, as the head of China in Polygon ecosystem, this is my main responsibility — pushing the ecosystem growth.

You can have a brief overview about the polygon ecosystem with this picture made by the Block, which they did a great ecosystem map report about polygon couple of weeks ago. The best way to have the birds eye view on the entire polygon ecosystem is checking the awesome polygon.com, which is the site has all the most up to date polygon ecosystem projects. So far we have more than 500 polygon projects in total. Around 55% are defi projects, 30% are NFT projects, the rest are DAO , wallet and other tooling projects. Polygon focus a lot on the ecosystem support and empowering the developer adoption. We are trying our best to support our polygon ecosystem projects in many ways once we have done our researches about the developer team and the projects. How does DSP help developers? https://polygon-dsp.webflow.io/

The Polygon Developer Support Program (DSP) is designed to help developers/teams with:

1 Early BUILD grants

2 Marketing & Promotional Support

3 Technical Guidance for Project Development

4 Connecting with investors and accelerators

these are the kinds of support we are giving out to the projects. Up till now, there are many types of projects that polygon team are talking with, many are defi projects, which are originally built on Ethereum. They migrated on polygon due to the high gas fee on Ethereum, also because Polygon is fully EVM compatible that are easy and low cost to migrate.

The recent 2–3 months, there are increasingly number of NFT and gaming projects that are directly building on top of polygon. We are seeing a very interesting new wave of developer teams.

We are very excited to see all kinds of new projects from different categories are building interesting DAPPs on polygon network.

To talk about some final remarks on the ares, we are seeing some projects in the DAO, IOT, commercial space, MetaVerse and even digital medical ares that are exploring their applications on polygon. It is very challenging to summarize the full picture of Polygon ecosystem, but it’s very fast growing, dynamic with solid technology development and quite a lot of innovations.

Carter: Speaking of Metaverse, Metaverse concept has made it to the trending board this year. What is Metaverse and what is Gamefi?

Charlie: Metaverse is certainly one of the most trendy topic not only in the blockchain, crypto space, but also in ares such as AI, VR, gaming sectors.

MetaVerse is a huge topic, which can take hours to fully explain.

The MetaVerse consists of 7 layers (at least), from the infrastructure layer, human interface layer, decentralization layer, spatial computing layer, all the way to the creator economy layer, discovery layer and experience layer. In my humble opinion, Metaverse is the wider scope of future of web3 society with all kinds of technology solutions such as VR, AI, blockchain, IOT, edge computing, 3D printing, 5G, etc etc all together, with a much higher level of immerse experience, built in virtual being, virtual assets and decentralized digital social structures. It is a very digital native future with all kinds of digital twins, digital creations organically coordinating together. The blockchain technology and infrastructures such as Polygon play an important role in the decentralization layer, creator economy layer, which enable the virtual assets and creation within the metaverse transparent, immutable and trustless. Polygon is very bullish in the future of Metaverse, we already established the Polygon Metaverse Alliance that consists of many important, leading innovative players in the space. So this is metaverse, this is a huge and hot topic which I recently just did a separate AMA specifically around this topic with some Metaverse builders and experts.

Talking about Gamefi, this is a very new topic. Although, this term has been coined by Andre Conje last year already. But recently, this has becoming a increasingly interesting topic due to more and more real gamefi projects that are coming out in the space. Gamefi, in a nutshell, is the web3 game + defi, with some embedded token economic design and interesting architect within the web3 games. The defi element still play a major role in the gamefi field, however we are seeing the gamefi projects are trying to build better user experience, higher quality user interfaces and better story dapps with built in defi incentive layer within the web3 games. We believe that quite a big portion of defi projects (especially b2c driven products) should be more fun, gamified design model and higher level retention for users.

PlaytoEarn model, defi incentive layer embedded into web3 games, interesting gamified design in defi platforms, there are many sub-categories innovation approach within the gamefi field. This is such a early stage and high potential topic, we are still collecting more user cases and data point, which we would like to share from our future research. One major news, Polygon ecosystem is launch the Polygon gaming studio this week. This is the Polygon gaming version of “Consensys” within the Polygon ecosystem, which plays the acceleration and incubation role for all kinds of future web3 games, gamefi and NFT projects.

For more specific information, we will share in our official social media channels later this week, please stay tuned.

Carter: Can you expand on how Polygon is working in web3.0 gaming?

Charlie: As I mentioned previously, polygon is really bullish on gaming side. This is one of the major strategic direction that Polygon would like to push. In the web3 gaming side, Polygon aims to become the go to blockchain infrastructure with the best tooling, full stack scaling solutions, best support in all aspects for the future of web3 gaming Polygon Studios will focus on the Gaming side, which will help developers create blockchain-enabled experiences through the best-in-class infrastructure and simple to implement SDKs plus broad general support including investment/marketing/technology/community support.

Providing 360-degree support

1 Co-development and investment

2 Incubator/accelerator with technical and subject matter experts

3 Tooling availability

4 Developer ecosystem

5 Marketing support

the objectives on the web3 gaming are

1 Mass adoption of blockchain in the gaming industry — by developers, gamers

2 Polygon to be at the forefront of the global blockchain gaming space

3 Becoming the bridge between traditional and blockchain gaming

This is certainly challenging to achieve, but Polygon team is trying their best and pulling all the possible resources to gradually build towards the objectives.

Carter: What are some follow-up plans for Polygon ecological? What’s next?

Charlie: Although, there are already hundreds of ecosystem projects that already built on polygon. We would say, the polygon ecosystem growth journey still just started. There are many major milestones that remain to be achieved in polygon. Regarding to the follow-up plans for the ecosystem growth, definitely more awareness building, more support and education for the developers, innovators and product people in the space. Polygon is always trying to be the most developer friendly infrastructure in the blockchain space. For the developer, by the developer is one of their slogans.

For more specific plans and action items, we believe more regional level adoption and community growth is definitely needed. Polygon needs to outreach to more markets such as south east Asian countries, middle east Arabic countries and latin American countries etc. What’s more, more ecosystem partners are needed to build this ecosystem and future of web3 together. Polygon cannot do that by themselves. More strategic level partners such as Chainlink, the Graph, quickswap, sushiswap, AAVE, dune analytics, nansen AI and all kinds of wallet solution providers, custody providers are definitely needed.

There are certainly still a lot of things need to be built, to be improved and to be innovated in the long run. Journey is challenging but certainly also have a lot of fun.

That’s the end of our recap with Polygon! For more interview with cool projects, Join our telegram group! https://t.me/TopDaoGroup