Have they solved the scaling problem? (feat. Polygon Finance)

Hey guys, welcome back to Box Money. Today I have a very, very exciting discussion today for you guys and it's all about scaling. You guys probably felt the effects of very expensive transactions fees happening right now. I had a friend that just recently contacted me and said, oh my god, it cost me $40 to do a trade on Uniswap, on Ethereum network. It's super expensive. How can you make this go away? And today we're talking and exploring exactly that. We're talking to Sandeep of Polygon. They're developing a scaling solution to make all these pains go away. And Sandeep, I guess, let's give an intro to this whole scaling problem, maybe to kind of relate some of these pains that people are feeling to introduce this. And then we'll talk a little bit and give you guys a little bit of insight also into how their approach to scaling is and kind of gives you the edge on this whole scaling problem. So let's start with that, Sandeep. How's everything going? What's your take on the network so far? Yeah, I mean, things are going great. And I think this is a great way to start this discussion and to talk in very simple terms about what exactly is this problem of scaling that we always see and why these gas fees and everything is so big. We were promised in this space that, okay, you'll have almost free transactions between peer-to-peer transactions. But, you know, today we have hundreds of dollars in gas fees. So essentially, like, you know, to give an idea, I would say that think of it like, you know, in the current world, when you kind of interact with any system or let's say Visa or MasterCard, when you're using your credit card swipe and all that, at that time, that business, like, you know, whatever you are doing, the transaction actually is computed by one single party. And in blockchain, that transaction is actually being computed by thousands of, you know, these nodes running in a decent language. And we have to kind of, you know, kind of agree with each other, use a particular way, complicated way, which is called consensus and all that. But let's not go into that. So it's kind of funny, right? If you think about it, because you're saying, okay, so you're saying, okay, when you do it with Visa, when you do it with a digital transaction on Visa, it's one guy processing it, right? And that's actually faster than thousands of people. Because you would think, you know, like, to a normal person, they'll say, oh, a thousand computers processing this one transaction, it should be much faster, right? A thousand is better than one. But why is it slow then? I mean, what's the issue here? Yeah, yeah. So it's not like those thousand people, a thousand computers are actually collaborating with each other to compute it. Each one is computing separately, right? That's where the decentralization parts come in. And then think of it like, you know, imagine you are in a big football field, right? And you are in the center and you have 100 people sitting in various parts of that football, you know, kind of ground or soccer ground. And then each of them have to, you know, a cheat is passed to them, where they have to, you know, kind of calculate something, and then agree with each other, like, come on a common ground, right? So they have to collaborate with each other that, okay, what did you get? What did you get? What did you get? Confirm with each other and then everyone, right? So it is not, it's not like one or all these guys are collaborating together and computing a large computation. So it's faster. No, all of them are doing the same calculation. Like, let's say there are five steps, A, B, C, D, E. All of them are doing the same A, B, C, D, E. And at the end, apart from A, B, C, D, E, they have to also check with each other that, okay, are we all on the same page? And I think that's a hard part, right? That's a hard part, agreeing with each other. Because you bring a bunch of people in a room and you decide where to eat for dinner. It's impossible, right? You bring five people, try to agree on dinner, it's hard. You bring a thousand people to try to agree on dinner, impossible, right? I mean, that's the problem. That's a scaling problem on Ethereum. And we're meeting that, right? So before the past few years, I think, like, people were saying, you know, it's okay. But what's happening right now is Ethereum prices are going up, right? But at the same time, gas prices are going up. So it's like a kind of a double whammy of sorts, right? Before it was a few cents to send. Now it's quite a few dollars. And it could, you know, be hundreds of dollars, right? So we're coming to this point where scaling is absolutely necessary. And you kind of touched on a problem of why scaling is hard. It's because of getting these, because decentralization intrinsically needs all these computers to agree with each other. You know, that's kind of what people are calling, you know, Ethereum is the kind of layer one solution. But obviously, you guys are taking a little bit of a different approach. So can you kind of describe to me, like, what that approach is? Like, how would you even scale this problem? How would you solve this problem? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So again, like, you know, to do it very simply, think of it like, think of a blockchain as your subway train, right? And think of every block as the single card, single card of that subway, right? Each block. So imagine like you are looking straight at one card and the, which is the current block. And then there are, you know, transactions, which think of them as people who are standing on the platform. And every time a new card comes in, new people jump onto the tram, onto the card. And then that card moves forward, right? Now, previously, like, you know, this card, let's say with Ethereum, for example, this card had at one point in time, let's say had space for 100 people. So till the time only less than 100 people were doing it, then everything was fine, that everything was very low cost transaction. And, you know, like everything was cool. But now when this DeFi and everything like, you know, these all of these use cases are coming in NFTs and all that, imagine the same station, the card still has 100 people capacity. And now you have 10,000 people to get into the card. And then you can actually bribe the ticket checker actually by paying the gas fee. So what is happening right now, why you are having that gas fee as very, very high is that some people who are like, you know, who have large transactions to do like work, what we call whales, right? They are willing to bribe, let's say $100, $200 to the ticket checker because their transaction is $100,000, right? And then when you are doing a $100 transaction, all, you know, you have to, like all of these whales are first getting in and your transaction is waiting over there, waiting for the time. Then all of these whales are exhausted, then there is some free space and then your transaction can go in, right? That is the exactly is the scaling and the gas problem that you guys are seeing. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, okay. So I think that's great. And I think Blockchain Street picturizes this very well. So basically just only 100 seats, everyone wants to get in, they're all just like throwing them, I take my money, take my money, right? And the person with the most money obviously gets on and everyone else gets left in a dust. So obviously this cannot go on. I feel like that's like, there's a point where now a lot of people are outpriced. You know, who will want, if you want to buy, say, for example, a non-fungible token, maybe this item only costs $30, right? This is very reasonable. If it's a, say, a very small piece of art, even maybe something for a video game, right? $30 for an item is very reasonable, but spending $60 of transaction fees to pay for that is not reasonable. So how do we solve this problem then? So what are the current kind of top approaches or top thoughts on this? Yeah. So like, again, like coming back to the same, you know, example, like now think you have this train, right? And, you know, just like you must have all, like all the audience I'm saying that they must have heard about layer one, layer two and all that. Think of it this way. So layer one approach to do the scaling is what you can do like on layer one, like either you can increase the size of the card, right? Each card is like much bigger, but then it has other problems. It might have some other problems because each card becomes too bulky and all that, right? Or you can, you know, increase the width of that card or you can increase the frequency of each card. Right now on Ethereum, you have 15 seconds. Every card is going 15 seconds. Maybe you can reduce it to five seconds, right? And then, you know, every single second, like per second, more number of cards are passing through it and more people can get on. Right. So these are various different, different kinds of way to scale on the layer one, the layer two, you can think of it as think of it as a double decker train, triple decker train or all that. Right. And on the double decker, you can have like, you know, the double decker train is, can be much faster. And, you know, they can actually, in a, in a way, think of it, like, you know, that train is, you know, kind of taking the passengers, but then putting a receipt of who all they took in, in one go in the, in the layer one train. Right. Think of it like that way. It's a double decker train or like a, don't think of it as double decker train. Think of it as some like plane, which is flying on top of this train. And it is carrying these passengers much, much faster. And then each time it takes some passengers, it drops a receipt of who all I already took in, into this, into the, into the train. So train is still the smaller one, but instead of carrying all these passengers, it's just carrying these receipts that, okay, these thousand people in one seat, it is carrying thousand people receipts. And that's how you scale on the layer two. And that is what, you know, the layer two techniques. And then, you know, with polygon also, we are working on various different kinds of techniques. So even like in this scenario, you can think of it, like either you can put the entire receipt of like everyone, like a simple receipt of proof of everyone who went through. That is one type of layer two scaling solution. The second kind of layer two solution can be where you put each and everyone's name, that name, height, everything. Like, okay, this was the guy he was traveling from here to here and all that, that will become optimistic rollups. Right. So, you know, so this analogy can explain you a bit, like how layer two works, like, you know, like Michael, you can let me know, like, if I want to go more, you know, deep into the tech details. I think, I think so. So, so let me interrupt you here and say, I think that's a very good analogy. So starting off, you know, layer one, we know that this, this system, even though it's very slow, it's very safe. Right. So I think something that to point out is that right now on Ethereum, there is billions of dollars of transactions happening each day. And there's also billions of dollars being locked up in smart contracts. Right. So this system is already working and people trust it with a lot of money already. So what I think a lot of the scaling solutions want to do is they don't want to say, they don't want to interrupt what's happening there. Right. They're just saying, okay, let's, let's find a solution where we can, if this transaction wants to be faster, why don't we build on top of that? So this is the idea of layer two. So layer two has the, or needs one of the base ideas behind it is that layer two needs to have the same amount of security as layer one. So it's like, it still needs layer one, but at the same time, it's going to be much faster and much bigger. So a lot of times it's almost like, and I think like the way I thought I saw this and why I thought it was very interesting talking to you is because there's so many different ways to implement this. Right. Right. So we have these terms like optimistic, optimistic roll ups, the ZK roll ups, and then all, all these, uh, I'm probably going to do something different with the multi chain. There's so many different ways of doing this. And I feel like, um, as okay. When I came out as an outsider to see this, I almost felt like the developers didn't really know which direction to take. Is that, is that, is that correct? You know, to, to how to, to kind of build these solutions. Like we know what the final outcome should be, but the exact implementation was quite hard to figure out. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It has been, I mean, yeah, yeah. Go on, go on, go on. Please come. Yeah. So I'm saying that, you know, there are multiple experiments in that multiple approaches. Uh, you know, there was something called state channels, then plasma, then, you know, optimistic roll ups, ZK roll ups. They're all technical terms, but essentially as, uh, as you were saying that, you know, it's all is, all is essentially trying to achieve the same situation that you have the same, uh, you have that limitation of the cart, which is very secure, decentralized. But then how do you kind of fit more people into it? If you can't fit more people, what you can do is take those people into their, to their destination on, on another layer, another vehicle, and then drop a receipt of that. So that is exactly the layer two is basically take those people to their destination and then put the inside of those people, putting those people into this layer one card. Instead of, uh, you know, you put a proof of them going from one place to another on the layer one, and which can be later on prove proven if challenged, you can prove with that receipt. That's the only part of layer two. And then, you know, as you said, there are multiple different, different kinds of approaches. Each approach has, you know, its pros and cons. Some approach allow you to, you know, process large number of transactions, but then the provability of on layer one is, is lower. However, some approaches, uh, will allow you to process only few, uh, these guys, like for example, optimistic rollups, few guys, few guys to be processed off chain, but then, uh, you know, the provability on this layer one card is much, much higher. And this is the, like, you can think of this as a spectrum, like one part where you can have very, very fast transactions, very low cost transactions. Like for example, uh, uh, you know, I'll give examples over there also. So, so this extreme very low cost transactions, but then the provability on layer one is lower. Uh, other extreme, you have, uh, you know, extremely provable transactions on the layer one, but then the scalability, like, you know, the kind number of transactions you can do and the cost of them doing them gets lower. So, you know, I'll give you an example of, let's say, uh, you know, right now, if let's say you were using polygon POS and that's the beauty in our scenario where you have like a, again, a very decentralized layer, but then also that puts the, the proof of the transactions on layer one Ethereum, but there you can do a transaction, for example, uh, on quick swap, which is now has become already, I think third or fourth largest decks, uh, in the entire space. There, uh, they have seen like, I think a hundred thousand transactions, uh, or even more than that. And then the total fees, gas fees that has been given out in those transactions, it's like less than $10. Right. So, yeah, because these transactions are being processed on this layer two. And then, you know, the proof of those transactions is going into the Ethereum, you know, main layer. So that's when like, you know, you can, you are seeing already a large number of these like quick swap. Like I would definitely recommend everyone to try that out. Uh, you know, that, that, uh, decks, so you can do the same kind of, you know, your swaps with very, very low cost. Only one thing you have to do is you have to deposit your assets from Ethereum and pay that gas fees one time. And once you are on the quick swap and you are on the polygon PSTN, your transactions become much, much faster. And also like two seconds, the block time is also two seconds. Okay. So, so, so let me get a few things right here. So, um, so there is a spectrum for all these scaling solutions, right? So there's no definitive winner here where one solution is better at this current point. So there, everything has kind of advantages and disadvantages. And that makes a lot of sense, right? Cause that's kind of like what we see in the world world. It's like shades of gray and everything has strengths and weaknesses. Now, when it comes to your approach, right? So, you know, um, you know, you guys started doing scaling very, very early on all on Ethereum for a lot of Ethereum believers out there. So, uh, which solution did you guys implement or did you guys implement them all? So we started with the, with one approach, like previously we were also doing as same as two other, uh, you know, projects with one approach, which was the Pio, uh, the plasma approach. Right. And, uh, with the EBS there, you can run your transactions on plasma, but then the industry attention kind of shifted from, uh, you know, plasma to optimistic rollups, then ZK rollups. And then, you know, there are multiple different kinds of approaches also. Uh, so what we kind of went, you know, and we delivered our previous first promise, which is the POS and plasma hybrid POS and plasma solution, which has got this enormous amount of traction. You guys must also be hearing, uh, you know, more than 200 applications we've got over there. Uh, but then, uh, you know, we realized that, you know, in order to build a long term, uh, and future proof kind of solution, uh, we need to, we need to break away from any particular kind of approach and not go too deep or too kind of, uh, logged in into one kind of approach. Right. And, uh, you know, kind of be able to provide. And the other part is that all of these scaling technologies eventually, just like it happened with Ethereum, they're going to be commoditized. Right. So once they are getting commoditized, the value would be in providing them in a more developer experience, uh, centric way. And, you know, in a better way where developers can build with ease, providing the tooling and everything. So that's why, you know, we expanded into polygon, which is a multifaceted layer two, you know, kind of scaling technique or layer two scaling framework. And within that framework, we will provide various different kinds of approaches. Like, you know, you will have a POS chains, you will have standalone chains, you will have a, you know, kind of a, and that this is kind of the biggest takeaway for the people. Like, you know, when you are talking, you're looking at the, like, especially for my, from my talk that, you know, you know, when you see some layer two project, like polygon is a, is, is an aggregator of layer two. Like, you know, like any kind of layer two can be there. And in a different form, it is also an internet of blockchain. Like when we have multiple of such layer two solutions and they can interact with each other, it kind of makes it an internet of blockchain kind of solution also. So, so, so, so that's kind of the reasoning for this, right? Because previously you guys were known as Matic. So you guys focused on kind of one-on-one sailing solution. And then you realized, okay, look, there's, because there's advantages and disadvantages and drawbacks, you want to provide a solution that's suitable for everyone. Right. So I think that was kind of the take home last time, because like, you know, we had me and Matt, me and Sandy, we had this conversation before. And the first question I really growed about, I was like, why, why this rebrand? What was the point? Right. And also, of course, which solution are you choosing? So you're making this ecosystem. Obviously it's a little bit more hard to understand now, right? Obviously, because there's so many different phases to this, it's hard to understand, but, you know, you touched on this idea of having different chains, right? How does that work on Polygon right now? Yeah. So, you know, as you rightly said that, you know, like, and the key takeaway from that is that, you know, the developers, each developer has its own requirements. Like enterprises want to work on a different kind of chain. They don't want to work on a shared chain, for example. And, you know, like some, let's say big players, like, or DeFi would want a composable chain. Composable chain means where one smart contract can interact with other smart contracts. Like NFTs want very big players to work together. So, and then, you know, like NFT, like, for example, they want very low cost because they are doing gaming millions of assets. So all of these use cases have different, different, different kind of requirements. And the developers have different requirements. So the idea is that there will be multiple chains built on top of or connected to Ethereum. And these chains can host different kinds of businesses, business use cases. And then these chains will also have interconnectivity amongst them where they can interconnect with each other. And then, you know, kind of, you know, have this kind of like multi-chain ecosystem. And then all of them eventually are connected to Ethereum. So that is the kind of ultimate of Polygon. So the core for this will still be Ethereum. So I think, yeah, very early on, you guys said you're a big believer in Ethereum. So the core, you know, at the center of this is all Ethereum, but you're allowing different multiple use cases, right? So you named a few, say, for example, gaming, right? Lots of small transactions or DeFi. You want all these projects to be able to work together or enterprise solutions where they probably need to have large, smaller number of transactions, but they have bigger sizes. Right. So they all have different specific and privacy. So you have all this being built up. So you're allowing. So does everyone like, so to come on Polygon, I won't say Matic over there, but to come on Polygon. So for these developers to develop, how does this work? So do they have to create a chain themselves? Is there a tool set to do so? How does that work? Yeah. Yeah. So again, that's a very cool thing. And, you know, I think a lot of the audience here or the viewers would be able to know this very important milestone that we are going to reach is that we are going to come up with something called Polygon SDK, which will be an equivalent of, you know, Polkadot substrate, for example, wherein using Polygon SDK, you would be able to create your own chains, right? Initially, and eventually you will be able to launch a rollups and, you know, various different kinds of approaches. But initially you will be able to launch your standalone chains, just like you can have parachains on Polkadot. So you can launch your parachains on Polkadot. So that product, you know, we are looking to come out soon and we'll be, you know, talking more about that. And as you asked that, you know, that is the product which you can use to launch your own chains. Got it. So it's almost a situation, right? The type of skilling for this is like, so instead of everyone jumping onto the same train on Ethereum and clogging it up, because Ethereum only has a hundred seats here for different applications, they're having their own trains, right? So they're having their own trains that can be configured to run at different speeds, have different size compartments. And the beauty of it is that it doesn't clog up Ethereum. So it's kind of like, it's kind of off on its side, but it's also connected and bridge back to Ethereum still. So that kind of, the communication is still there. So you're not losing, you're not losing anything by creating this, right? So that's coming up. What's the timeframe? So this can all be done by the Polygon SDK. All right. So this is one of the key tool sets that's coming out. When is this going to be launched? I mean, obviously you're super excited for that. When is this coming? Yeah. So we, you know, I'm expecting it in the next few weeks. Exact timelines, we have not like finalized yet. We are doing some testing internally, but yeah, it will be, it is going to be soon. Like, you know, in a matter of few weeks. Got it. And so, so that's, that's, that's, that's first one coming up. So you're taking these advantages. And I mean, obviously Polkadot is very hot right now. So kind of taking some of the best parts of that, bringing that to Ethereum. So what, what are the kind of, I've obviously, I've seen a few projects also developing on Polygon right now. So, so what is coming? I mean, do these developers already have access to the SDK already? And then they're using that or, you know, will, will you launch this? And then we'll start the way for all the developers to adopt it. How, how, how, how does that roadmap look like? Yeah. So, so, you know, the thing is that, you know, this Polygon SDK is a separate solution from our existing solution. We have existing very highly utilized, you know, plasma and POS chain where the people are developing, which is a composable chain where, you know, you can contract will interact with, can interact with multiple contracts. So it's like, I generally call it Ethereum running on top of Ethereum, right? So, you know, it's like, just like any kind of this quick swap when I talked about, or these 200 plus applications, all of them are running on this PS chain. Okay. But this Polygon SDK, yes, there are already few, you know, kind of teams who are kind of in their fundraise, you know, kind of more than all that. And are testing out this early version of this, like internal version of this Polygon SDK, these people will be launching their own chains. And you will see a lot of these para chain kind of the, what we saw with the Polkadot ecosystem, you'll be seeing many of these, you know, kind of protocols launching on Polygon also. That's very exciting. So, so, so right now you already have your main kind of primary POS chain that's already running. So that's why, that's why I've already seen, you know, it's built on Polygon, it's on there, but there's also the other variant that uses the Polygon SDK. So that's a key thing to look out for is that if they're using Polygon SDK, they can be on their own chain too. And that's kind of bringing another flavor into this whole mix. So I feel like there's a lot to, to take in. That's the very cool thing for Polygon also, like again, that it is going to have multiple main nets. Generally any project will have one particular main net, it will have multiple main nets. So that is also a key takeaway and, you know, various different applications can be different, different on different, different main nets. So I think there's a lot to take in, but I think a few things to, to really talk about here is that definitely scaling is not easy. Obviously it's very necessary. I think all of the developers know, and you can definitely tell from the experience that Sandeep has. It's, it's, it's been something that's been trying to tackle the multiple fronts for a very long time, but it's a very difficult problem to solve, but the solutions are coming out. So already out already is the Poly, is the Polygon main POS chain. And then of course the SDK is coming out and obviously it will, I think in the future, I'll definitely want to invite you to discuss a few into a lot more detail. You know, this time we briefly touched about, you know, the mechanics of how roll ups work and you know, optimism works. But I think we definitely want to do a few future episodes where it goes into a little more detail to provide you guys that insider insight into this development work. Because if you guys understand the flow of this, then obviously you guys can have an edge when it comes to understanding blockchain and the future of everything going on. So today I definitely want to thank Sandeep for coming on. So if you guys want to know a little bit more about Polygon, like what's the best way for people to know more about Polygon? I think our Twitter handle and our Telegram community, like at the rate, like, you know, the Twitter handle is at the rate 0x polygon. And our community is still like at the rate Matic Network, it's still in the transitioning phase. But these two are the most important sources where you can have this community conversations. And our website, Polygon.technology, obviously is the, you know, entry point of that. So, yeah. Cool. Cool. So I'll put those links down below. I'll definitely want to thank Sandeep again for coming on this. And I'll definitely want to invite you more. Like, we had some really great conversations about scaling. I want to feature that. And that'll be coming up soon, guys. So thank you guys so much for watching. And I'll see you guys next time.