Polygon zkEVM AMA Rewind: Exploring the Potential of Rollups and L2 Ecosystems for a Sustainable Web3 Future

Product
Polygon zkEVM AMA Rewind: Exploring the Potential of Rollups and L2 Ecosystems for a Sustainable Web3 Future image 0

Host: A very good TGIF to all of our listeners, and I will welcome you to today's AMA hosted by Bitget Wallet (Previously BitKeep) on Twitter Space. Alright, so there's a lot of excitement surrounding the Polygon zkEVM as it has been touted to bring unprecedented speeds and low transaction costs, even in comparison to the Polygon sidechain. For today's AMA session, we will be taking a closer look at what polygon zkEVM is, and what this means for builders, users, and the rest of the global community.

My name is Moka, and I am the COO at Bitget Wallet (Previously BitKeep), one of the world's top leading multi-chain wallets and Asia's number 1 crypto wallet, that includes a host of features on top of just a wallet function, such as an integrated DApp explorer, swap feature, launchpad, NFT marketplace, OTC trading, and many more. Joining me for today's AMA session is none other than David Schwartz, Co-Founder of Polygon zkEVM and Polygon ID, Jesse, COO of Aavegotchi, Roc Zacharias, Co-Founder of Quickswap, and Vlad Siurmakov, BD manager of Cointelegraph.

We have also prepared something special for all our AMA listeners and guests. 1. We are giving away 10,000 $SUIBG during this very AMA, so do pay close attention because you wouldn't want to miss it. For those who may not be familiar, SUIBG is a credential token jointly issued by Bitget and Bitget Wallet (Previously BitKeep), and can be exchanged for official SUI tokens. Additionally, I hope you guys love surprises! Stay tuned until the end of our AMA, where we will be sending out a google form to collate your wallet addresses for you to get your hands on a mystery airdrop! And with that out of the way, let's proceed right ahead with today's AMA session where we will be exploring the potential of rollups and L2 Ecosystems in building a sustainable Web3 future for everyone.

To get things started, could I get our guests to please briefly introduce yourself and the notable progress of your respective ecosystems over the past year, as well as perhaps share with us some of your future plans moving forward for the rest of the year and beyond? How about we start with you, David?

David: Hi everyone, thank you for having me today. Well, as you say, I co-founded the Polygon project and Polygon ID, and over this last year, we have been developing a lot of Web3 ecosystems at Polygon. I am more related to the development side, I would say we had a lot of progress in the zk scalability side, and we are very close to launching zkEVM now. Moving forward, we will have a lot of challenges to continue improving this project and continue getting better figures in terms of course performance and so on.

Host: Okay, Jesse, do you want to go next?

Jesse: Hi everybody, my name is Jesse, I'm the co-founder of Aavegotchi. We're one of the first NFT projects to launch on Polygon, going all the way back to when it was called Matic. We're just super excited for what's coming up with the zkEVM. This is just a new milestone for the entire space as a whole, in terms of a lot of things but proving people wrong that doubted that we could get to a point where this kind of solutions would actually be possible. People were thinking this was years away and here we are. So at Aavegotchi, we're just watching closely and looking at how we can maybe integrate and get some great EVM solutions integrated into what we're building at Aavegotchi. So super stoked to be here and hear from David and all the people that are building on this.

Host: Thank you so much, Jesse. We're super excited to have you here as well. Roc, do you want to share a bit more about your project and yourself?

Roc: Yeah, sure. It's a tough lineup to follow, but we've got David with zkEVM and Polygon ID, two major hits, two of my favorite things in the industry. Jesse from Aavegotchi, the basically most OG, you know, Polygon favorite. And, you know, I'll say NFTs, but it's really not just NFTs, they're doing a lot more than just that, which is super exciting stuff with their whole ecosystem. And then Cointelegraph, of course, has been bringing us great news for a long time. So glad to see you here too. Yeah, I'm Roc Zacharias, co-founder of QuickSwap, the largest DEX on Polygon and oldest DEX and I think maybe the oldest project that's still alive on Polygon from the old days. I'm also a core contributor of Dogechain, which I think currently probably not for long now with the Immutable partnership, but currently the largest Polygon supernets chain, which is a Doge smart contract layer 2, and then also CEO of Lunar Digital Assets, which is a marketing and incubation firm mostly focused on building communities and projects going back, you know, like four years with Polygon and QuickSwap and Dogechain and a ton of other projects. Great to be here, guys. It's 6 am for me, got off a 20-hour flight, two hours of sleep, but I'm pumped for this.

Host: Yeah, we are pumped you are here as well Roc. All right, last but not least, we have Vlad on the call from Cointelegraph.

Vlad: Hey everyone, definitely thank you for inviting me to this great AMA session. Just an honor to see all the other guests. I will be brief and humble. I am following zk projects for a few months now. I do like the possibility to get Ethereum level of security and the benefits of quick transactions and low gas fees. Thanks Polygon for starting this journey a few years ago. And definitely, we're seeing a lot of developments now, and censorship-proof is being actually available to a lot of builders. So, I would just like to listen in and hear what is going on, and definitely will be glad to hear other participants' comments.

Host: Right, thank you. Thank you so much for bringing all of your amazing projects to the AMA. been a lot of discussion about it and how it is really impressive in making transactions much more affordable and faster at the same time. What really interests me the most, however, is how Polygon zkEVM will allow developers to migrate their smart contracts to zk-style scaling without rewriting codes. I'm curious - could our guests maybe enlighten us on what this means for both builders and users alike? Would you like to share your thoughts on this matter, David?

David: Yes, absolutely. Well, it's what the way we define the project since its inception because we come from this implementation of network in 2021, where we built a first roll-up project which was implementing token transfers for Ethereum. So, we learned a lot of things from this experience and in our perspective, usual vision needs to be reduced because the zk itself is an amazing technology but an execution layer was not designed specifically in Ethereum to run on zk. We knew it was super challenging at the time we defined the project, 2021, but we wanted to go for the big prize, which was seamless integration or usability, basically, implementing opcodes for user code but running on zk proofs. So yeah, basically what we wanted to do is reduce friction because there were the optimistic roll-ups projects that were just scaling on Ethereum and they would basically implementing the similar clients as Ethereum so the experience and layer two for the developers and users is very transparent, the same thing as it happened with the Polygon PoS. So, it's kind of a standard today. I mean, we wanted to be at the same level but implementing this on zk. So, this is why we worked so hard. We have been coming out of challenges during the last months/years. But this, for users, basically means that they can deploy smart contracts that can run on Ethereum or can run on Polygon PoS in this new Polygon zkEVM, and users will have the same tooling, the same wallets, everything will be compatible. Today, you can just deploy on testnet. You can also play with this experience. And yeah, we are super happy to receive it, but the testnet is running for a long time already since October, and next, we're preparing for the main launch with some implementations and improvements, which will be a long path. But so far, the objective of reducing this friction for users is already fulfilled, so this is probably the biggest achievement of the transition.

Host: Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. What about Roc?

oc: Yeah, I'm super excited for zkEVM in general and what you mentioned about making this seamless for people to jump in and deploy the contracts that they already have, like for example, QuickSwap. We were the first to deploy on the testnet for the zkEVM, and it was very easy. It didn't take a lot of reconfiguring or anything like that, which is really, really, really important if you want to scale Ethereum, right? You don't want to tell people, "Hey, come check out, you can move into this new city in your country and it's really awesome and it's got the super-fast railway, but you gotta learn a whole new language if you want to come move here." That doesn't work very well. That's a huge friction. So, when you see other, a lot of the “ETH killers” out there in the world that are trying to instead of scale Ethereum like Polygon is, these guys are trying to beat Ethereum or something. A lot of them use other languages and it’s very hard to get people to come over. That’s created a massive amount of friction, so making this EVM was really a genius move on the Polygon part. A lot of other people aren't doing that, with different kinds of rollups. So, I think them choosing to do that to be fully aligned with Ethereum builders and all the infrastructure that's already in place with Ethereum was really a brilliant move on their part. And a hard move too for my understanding. I don't think this was something easy to do, right David? I mean, I guess maybe if I could ask you a question, David, does that come with some, I mean, there are tons of pros, but there are also some cons to implementing a virtual machine or their virtual machine on top of rollups?

David: Yeah, absolutely. The complexity is super high because as I was saying before, zk execution, I mean, the zk technology basically is to turn up and this comparison is heavyweight. It's something hard to achieve. So other projects took different approaches like getting a proprietary language which is optimized for this zk execution or to get into a limited set of app codes and then you can recompile or transform a little bit the code. But we wanted to do this fully equivalent from the beginning. I got to say that we are not 100 percent equivalent because there are some proprietary compilations on contracts that are not implemented yet, but it will be over this year. But they are basically paring some crashing functions that nobody basically uses, but we want to achieve these full equivalents to become a type 2 zkKVM, as we tell it was describing some time ago. It's super challenging because we basically are not able to reuse an Ethereum client like go-Ethereum or something like that.

We are ensuring that everything that we execute in this executional layer will be able to be proven in zk, so we wanted completeness in this sense. We started the project by the hardest part, which is the prover and which would be the model to emulate and provide to the user listen to the phase of the Ethereum EVM opcodes, but in the internal celebrity complex, super complex searching a way that it was super hard to just make a stable version to a complete version past the Ethreum test vectors. I mean, we had a version of prover last summer, and we had a March launching, so it took months to do something production-ready and the complexity is super high. So for more perspective, we want to do this in a complete way so the prover source code is available. Anyone can see that the prover is complete, anything that you can execute on the zkEVM will be proven in zk, and this approach was costly for us in terms of development, and we are putting in the complexity for users inside the system, so users have a similar experience, but I think it was worth it. The feasibility was the main challenge, and as you said before, many people thought that this was not possible a little time ago, but we are super happy that we implemented it. So the next challenge is to improve and to continue providing more and more scalability, but this fresh version is in our perspective good enough to go, and we are super excited.

Roc: When you say it was expensive, you're saying that in a very soft way, but it was very costly. You guys acquired Mir, who had the best, basically from my understanding, the best proofs in improving technology in the entire industry, which is like kind of a culmination of decades of cryptography and math, like philosophical or theoretical math or something. I don't know, it's like crazy stuff that you guys spent 400 million on acquiring the technology and the team that's been working on that for a long time, right?

David: Yes, the team that has been developed has the zkEVM was the original academic networking. We have this contribution from the Zero and Mir teams also because, as I said before, in the beginning, we felt we would face a lot of challenges, but the practicality of this in a way that the zk proofs were fast enough, cheap enough to not make the system super expensive for users was kind of the big deal we had along the way. And then we received contributions from Mir, but especially from the Zero team, which was the Mir team. They got these primitives with geographic small fields that accelerated like 40 times that proves that we were just implementing at the moment. So definitely this collaboration internal in Polygon makes this project a combination of forces and an amazing result.

Roc: My last question here, and I'll let the host take over. I'm sorry, but I'm just really interested, and it's great to be able to talk to David himself about this stuff because there are a lot of questions I have. But for the audience that you know, they saw you guys acquired the team from Mir for 400 million, Hermez for 175 million, and Miden for 75 million, so basically you guys like, is this accurate when Vitalik said in an interview like maybe a year and a half or two ago with Lex Fridman, I believe he said that you know, I think it was that interview that Optimistic rollups will come first. Those are the easier implementation. There are a lot of negatives to Optimistic rollups, but those will dominate first, which we're seeing with Arbitrum and Optimism because they were able to make the market first. And then you see some cases of ZK-rollups in application-specific like Loopring and some others. But then he said, like basically the holy grail, the end game is ZK-rollups. Once those are able to be solved, but that's incredibly hard to solve at the time still very theoretical. And I think he said it would be like three to five years away. And you guys basically, by bringing three of the greatest teams and minds in rollup technologies together, taking some parts from each and maybe even having some of them like from what I hear maybe even kind of compete and figure out like the best methods that you guys would use in zkEVM and some of your other stacks like pulling on Nightfall and Avail. So, I don't know the full details of who was used where, but basically that you guys were able to bring ZK-rollups forward maybe a year to two, is that accurate in my understanding, David?

David: Yeah, we joined hands with Polygon in August 2021, and we are just shipping this March 2023. So, less than two years, I would say. As you say, it was a big investment from Polygon's side because this vision was clear for the Polygon co-founders, and then an internal effort of research collaboration and engineering that bring us to where we have today. So it's super exciting for Polygon overall, but we also think it's going to be a huge contribution to the community because we absolutely believe, maybe we are biased, but we also believe that the zk scalability is going to become, let's say, a public domain, something that's going to be more understood than more work in the future, and it's going to be, let's say, something more understood and common.

Jesse: If I could jump in here real quick. Roc, I'm really glad you shined a light on that because I feel like, you know, the work that David and his team and everybody at Polygon has done, there's not enough that goes into or is communicated about how we've gotten to this point, like exactly, you're talking about Vitalik's comments not that long ago, and we were talking about, "Oh, we're gonna be in, you know, kind of Optimistic roll-ups for X amount of time before we can even talk about the zkEVM." And yet, here we are, and it's like we may not be under budget, but we're definitely ahead of schedule, and I think that's awesome. But it's really, you know, that's a key point we should be highlighting more, and I'm glad you brought it out here because you guys really, like, how did you do it is like the most interest, possibly the most interesting angle here is just like, how are we here already? And so Roc, you kind of, some of the points you made there had my wheels turning, like, okay, yeah, they really went above and beyond and paid the premium to get everybody together and speedrun this whole thing. So yeah, congrats to the whole team.

Roc: Yeah, congrats. I really like what Vitalik said when he used the words, he said, basically, because Vitalik didn't acknowledge Matic Polygon for a while, it was like, you know, all of us working on stuff in Matic were all like, you know, we were looking up to Vitalik as kind of the high priests of Ethereum in a way, and hoping, you know, that he would support, but for a long time, he didn't, and that was frustrating. And then when he finally came out publicly supporting Matic, and he basically said that, you know, because Matic was originally Plasma PoS, like, you know, similar to OmiseGO, which Vitalik advised, and then that one, you know, Matic Plasma was able to beat them to market, and then eventually they realized, you know, there was a lot of friction with Plasma with withdrawal periods and a bunch of like writing. I know Timmy, my co-founder, who I think is listening in the space, he was like telling me about the history of like, you know, basically him telling Polygon, like, you know, "Hey, this is like really hard for me to build stuff using the Plasma framework. It's just, it's really not going to work very well or it's just too much extra work for you builders."

And so then they pivoted to like PoS, so it's still, it's still POS Plasma like hybrid with some parts still using Plasma, not very much these days, but I like what Vitalik said, which was basically they did the quick and dirty thing, which was like, you know, maybe medium the high security, but not perfect security like a true roll-up would be to Ethereum. They stayed aligned with Ethereum while a lot of people are trying to build ETH killers. They were provided a release valve for Ethereum when the gas fees went up, which we knew that they would, and Matic was there and ready to capture that flow when the release valve came. And then they were genius enough to go, "Okay, now we're in a way," compared to any kind of roll-ups, Optimistic roll-ups, etc. They were actually like Matic PoS chain, which is one of the biggest chains in the world, just because it was able to get their first, be aligned, a great community, all that. But it was now an outdated technology, and that's okay. They got to market first, and then they did this genius idea of, "Let's now be fully roll-up to Ethereum, and let's use the money we've made and the treasury that we built by building up by doing the Matic PoS chain, which we all know and love. Let's use the money from that to acquire and take all the money we made, a lot of the money we made, a billion dollars about, and let's invest that in becoming the next generation. Let's skip some stages. We're going to skip Optimistic roll-ups. We're going to skip application-specific zk roll-ups, and we're going to go straight to the holy grail. It'll take us a couple of years, but the Matic chain is good enough to keep people happy and do everything most people need. But then let's look forward multiple years. Let's pull the technology forward instead of three to five years, now two years. And then, like, now they leapfrog everybody in the industry, literally. So, like, it's just insane. I don't think they planned this at first, but God, it couldn't have worked out any better than this.

Host: Thank you so much for sharing all of your views on this very insightful conversation, and let's move on to the next discussion. Um, I think that, yeah, probably you have touched on this, but this question is for Davis specifically. Um, I guess for the benefit of all of our listeners, could you share with us what the learning opportunities were for the Polygon team since the launch of the Polygon zkEVM testnet in October 2022, and what the developmental roadmap is like for Polygon zkEVM moving forward?

David: Yeah, sure. Well, the design was the first time that we were implementing the client we developed for this solution together with a program, for us, it was kind of the methodology of development, was to build a complete prover, I mean something that proving every single execution that derives from the user transactions, implementing the whole set of opcodes, everything we have today. So the design was already completed in October. We could have been launching by then, but of course, we needed to do some things first, especially security. Because I would say that there is, you know, started in December. In fact, first we just tried to put together the testnet, which was stable, which was able to receive some feedback from the community. I remember also from QuickSwap here, and it was very positive. It was probably even surprising for us how well it was working from the beginning. We needed a lot of improvements from this initial testnet, also increased the number of transactions per second that we began to report, and a lot of the optimizations. But I would say that from the testnet, a big part of improvement have been in security, because in zkEVM, to be honest, I think nobody's asking the right questions, because Optimistic rollups are a model what you have is fork proving. Or you're supposed to have them. And in zkEVM, the consensus, the trust goes to the prover, because this is the cryptographic part that ensures that the execution is correct. So this prover part needs to be public, needs to be audited, needs to be known as something that's trustworthy and complete, and we did this from the beginning. We don't have anything that's not complete in some way, and the other nodes confirm that. And we were just doing a lot of improvements and following things today, so feedback from the auditors, very experienced, and some of them come from the Ethereum Foundation, and we are super happy with the process itself and the level of trust and security we feel we have today. And yeah, it's what we are basically doing in the zkEVM.

The other thing is just a client, and running a network on a single server is something you can do, but it's not the whole point. We are just improving the trust model on these solutions, and we want to inherit the Ethereum security. But this also means that you need to have a complete river. So the learning is worth basically improving performance and completing the security of the approval since then. From now, what we will do is we have several parts of optimization. The first thing is we go on mainnet, we might have some issues because technology is super novel, and we will also communicate these to users. This is the beta mainnet. It's a full mainnet for this beta, which means that anyone can access this permissionless. You can deploy your smart contracts, you can transact, you can do what you want, you don't need to ask for permission. It's open to everyone. But at the same time, we expect some issues, like how reliability and some things might happen because in the end, we start with a single sequential, we control our process. We want to open gates of security as we are more material and secure. We also have a bug bounty process open from today that will open their way to receive more feedback. But this security process is an ongoing effort. And on the other side, we will accelerate more and more. We want to have more TPS, we want to have also lower cost, because our security is complete in the sense that the vulnerability is also happening on chain. But at the same time, this is potentially the biggest part of the cost. We expected the cost will be basically the synergetic proofs, but we have such optimized proves now that it's not like this. For me today, the cost is in the data availability, such as it happens to the end of the Optimistic roll-ups. So we have a path to optimize because with zk technology, there’s possibilities to do that, and we are super excited and also the improvements on Ethereum, potentially in that availability. But we will also do our part, and from here, proven security and improve the level of throughput and TPS we will be able to achieve. So, this will happen about this 2023.

Host: Yeah, thank you for the thorough explanation, David. Like you said, it's all about the improved security and being trustworthy. I'm sure our listeners are very excited for the future of Polygon zkEVM after this call. Now Jesse, the next question is for you: It seems like 2023 will be an interesting year for Aavegotchi! Could you perhaps share with our listeners more about what Gotchichain is and why the team has decided to build on Polygon?

Jesse: So yeah, we just were at GDC with Polygon, with so many in the space right now, QuickSwap and others that are in San Francisco right now advocating for blockchain gaming. This is where we are focusing right now as a DAO, as a community, as Pixel Craft Studios. After two and a half years in this space, we love Polygon PoS. We've had an amazing experience there, and we were so pleased when the leadership team at Polygon approached us early on to consider looking into supernets. And so, this is a little bit different than what's going on right now, as zkEVM. But we feel like we can do two things that want. So, we're exploring zkEVM, we may have some announcements there soon, stay tuned. But we just announced a few days ago, our news with a supernet deploying called Gotchichain. And this is really powerful because what it is, is a seamless, super-fast, dedicated, permissioned blockchain just for everything Aavegotchi. And so, this is something we've been looking forward to for a long time, and we're super happy to be right on schedule with, you know, the sandbox getting in there, starting to get ready with testnet, and hopefully get a live rollout of this supernet as one of the very first, hopefully by summertime we're able to go live with it. And what that will do, if you're not familiar with Aavegotchi, is we're kind of like the ultimate crypto pet. You know, at the core, every Aavegotchi is a game in and of itself. You're taking care of a true crypto pet. We wanted to build something that addressed all the issues that give you emotional attachment to a digital unique creature that actually has dynamic traits. But beyond that, it is also your avatar for all sorts of gaming experiences. And that's where the supernet comes in because we're going to be able to have all these super-smooth experiences, whether it's onboarding, whether it's the actual gameplay, it can still be on-chain, but you're not compromising user experience to do that.

I feel like we're starting to move out of that era of like, "Oh, it's blockchain, everything's janky, everything's kind of like, I don't know, really hard to onboard anybody that isn't willing to put in a lot of extra effort." And we may not be to say, like, onboarding grandma level yet or grandpa level yet, but I think that's totally fine. We don't need to do that. We just need to get to Gen Z, the Millennials and put a product in front of them that is compelling, unique, something different than the same old same old, and yet has a smooth UX. And that's where these supernets are going to excel. So yeah, we just announced a few days ago at GDC and we'll be going live this year with it. We want the very first supernet rollout, other than the only one that I know of that's live with Doge and everything Roc’s team is doing, and it's going to be like Aavegotchi Universe, literally Gotchi-verse. So look out for more news there in terms of different game studios coming in to build on Aavegotchi IP. You're going to be in for a couple of really cool surprises. And yeah, it really can scale to any level we want. So I just am so happy for, you know, when we go back to Aavegotchi two and a half years ago, and we were looking at Starkware, we were looking at Matic, we were looking at all these other options, Avalanche even. We definitely feel like we made a choice that made sense for us, not saying it's right for everybody, but working with Polygon Matic team and the technology that you guys continue to deliver has just been perfect for everything we're trying to do with Aavegotchi and dynamic NFTs. Yeah, the supernets coming. We, you know, just type it in, Aavegotchi supernets, you'll see what we're about, what we're doing, and it'll be live here sooner than you know. So we're super excited about it. Thanks for asking about it.

Roc: If I could jump in really quick about like supernets, supernets is pretty cool. So like, you know, I was talking about the journey of Polygon, you know, Matic doing the quick and dirty thing, and then, you know, leapfrogging and basically you get to follow that same journey because Aavegotchi was able to come out so early when Matic was still, you know, relatively young and early, and like you grew basically, you know, a gaming, dare I say, like gaming ghost empire, and now you guys have like, you know, were there so early and getting building your community for the last years, and then now you're able to utilize all the newest technologies that the Polygon's building. So like, you know, Polygon going back the Matic chain was, you know, it was just this Matic PoS Plasma hybrid. First starting Plasma, then they put PoS Plasma hybrid, and when they rebranded to Polygon, it wasn't just a lot of people who realized actually, and maybe part of the reason it, like, mooned so much and got so much excitement was it was a change not just in name and branding, but philosophy. So instead of being, you know, this one chain, they're an ecosystem of chains, and they absorb all the newest scaling technologies, and then there could be lots of chains that are built by Polygon themselves like zkEVM and Nightfall and Avail and all these, and then there will also be now chains built by projects and by companies and by different teams, and they might use some of the stack from Polygon, the Polygon SDK, via, you know, at Polygon Edge or Polygon supernets, which I think are either merged or gonna be merged eventually. Eventually, when, you know, David has said that zkKVM will be more publicly available, anybody will be able to switch to that. So, like, for example, we're thinking about with Dogechain, you know, switching to make it zkEVM at some point.

And so, like, supernets is like the idea of having it. It's a little bit similar, like, Cosmos, so like where there's a bunch of different chains, these chains speak to each other at a more fundamental level, like a kind of layer zero type level eventually is what it'll look like, I think. And then they'll, they can communicate more seamlessly without like 3rd trusted parties, and then they'll be eventually the ultimate goal is to make them fully interoperable where you can utilize liquidity on one of the Polygon supernets chains, let's say, that you could use it in the Aavegotchi, you know, Gotchiverse, you could use it on their supernets chain, you can do a swap on the PoS chain that is out now on QuickSwap, which has the highest liquidity, so you'll be able to do your swap. But as a user on that on the Aavegotchi supernets chain, you won't even know that you're using another chain for your swap. So there may be what I think will probably happen, there'll be like a few supernets chains which will be more like liquidity hubs where you'll have a lot of the DeFi and stuff built and where liquidity be holding like QuickSwap, Uniswap, etc, and then you'll be able to utilize that, you tap into that liquidity. As a user, you'll be inside of a video game and you won't even have to know not only are you swapping on another chain, you know, cross-chain swapping using either natively with the Polygon infrastructure or earlier on it'll be with Axelar, maybe all-bridge and some of these other bridging cross-chain functionality projects that are built on top. But eventually, it'll be fully seamlessly. You'll be in a game, you'll get a loot, and you'll say, "Oh, you know what? I just got this loot, but I don't really want this loot. I'm gonna swap it for, like, USDC." And right there, within the app, you won't even know that you're doing a cross-chain swap. It'll just happen, and as a user, you won't even need to know necessarily that you're using a blockchain. I think that's the dream here.

Jesse: Rock, if anybody wants the true alpha, just look for Roc on spaces because this is, this is like, you're giving it away, man. This is too good. This is the truth. Like, zoom out a little bit, and this is what Polygon's all about. And this is why, like, when they say Polygon's inevitable, it's not a joke. This is where it's going. So you nailed it there, and I'm sure David could speak to it, although he may be under NDA. But it's so exciting, it's crazy, and that's why we're so bullish on all the things that are lying ahead for the Polygon ecosystem.

Roc: I tried my best not to leak alpha. Where it's still alpha, but I sometimes because I don't remember like which conversations were like NDA or like, you know, stuff that we get from these early builds, but yeah, I mean, that's the general vision. Yeah, yeah, I mean, and it won't just be, you know, Aavegotchi and the Matic PoS. It's like with the new partnership with Immutable X, which actually you said Polygon is inevitable. I would also phrase it maybe as all roads lead to Polygon, which is our actually Twitter spaces that we started, a weekly Twitter spaces about All Things Polygon, which will actually be coming right after this in an hour and 15 minutes. Maybe towards the end, we could even put up a link so people from here can flow into the next one, but yeah, all roads do lead to Polygon, my like thesis, my kind of overall crypto thesis for the way that the ecosystem is going to grow over the next five to 10 years is: Bitcoin will become, and it already kind of is becoming but will continue to become, a value settlement layer for the industry, where banks will settle their value and countries will settle their value, and layer two like Lightning will settle their value, and even Ethereum can settle some value stuff. Like I mean Ethereum is a layer two of Bitcoin and Polygon is a layer three of Bitcoin, you know you can trade Bitcoin on Polygon. So my thinking is, Bitcoin will be a global value settlement layer with layers on top like Lightning Network and Ordinals and Taro and all these other things that you'll be able to do other functional stuff like transfer value or even smart contracts maybe.

I think Ethereum will hold the crown for global value, a global smart contract settlement layer. So all smart contracts will settle to Ethereum using things like Polygon's zkEKVM, the PoS Plasma chain, Optimism, Arbitrum, all of these different layer twos will settle to Ethereum. But Ethereum won't be where you'll do your smart contract stuff. Like we're seeing more and more that becoming the case where at one point QuickSwap had more daily transactions than all 50,000 plus Ethereum DApps combined. So like the point is not to bash Ethereum, it's that Ethereum is incredible. It's the most decentralized, best security, etc. So that's where you'll settle value. That's where all the layer two chains and all the supernets chains and all the Optimistic roll-ups and whatever other technologies we may come up with in the future will all settle to Ethereum. Other layer ones, I believe, will become largely irrelevant unless they find a way to settle to Ethereum, which some are looking at now because we're seeing Ethereum is really not killable. But yeah, so Ethereum will be the global value settlement layer, global smart contract settlement layer with all the layer twos being the functional layers like in your organs. You know, like having like there's like your the functional surface area of your lungs, but you get the point. It's like there'll be functional layers and there'll be the settlement layer in the middle in the bottom.

Host: Awesome. Thank you so much for the response, Jesse, and the add-on, Roc. I guess that we are all very excited for the super-fast blockchain just for Aavegotchi or should I call it Gotchiverse. And also, your point of view is that Ethereum will be holding the crown for the global smart contract settlement layer. I guess that the audience will love to have a conversation with you after the AMA. So, the next question from this AMA is, ZK-rollups definitely have their benefits in terms of introducing scale and affordability in transactions into the Web3 space. That being said, what would you say are some of the potential weaknesses in ZK-rollups technology and how do you think they can be further improved in the future? David, do you want to share your thoughts first?

David: Yeah, well, the potential weaknesses in ZK-rollups were these problems with equivalents and compatibility with Ethereum. This is basically overcome today. The second one was anticipated. It was the cost of proving because they had these proofs or heavy computations on this polynomial problems that we need to solve to prove the correctness of the execution. So we have progress today that they are super efficient and fast. As a reference, the proving of an Ethereum transfer in our zkEVM will be around $0.0001. The cost basically comes from the data availability today. And I would say the third one is that's the one that's potentially continuous for improvement, which is the security because this technology is novel and the engineering is complex. You are implementing a lot of technologies together to build this prover, and this is something you need to continue improving. I would say from this security potentially derives some potential issues on availability of prover, but the proving process is a batch process that executes this verification of computation that's not online. So you could continue operating the network and proving later, but in our model, we don't have this delay of feasibility on chain. We put the data onchain at the same moment that the transactions are processed. I mean, the same moment. It's not because we are matching this pair, but it's very close, almost near real-time. And the second process is proving that. So, you know, it's going to be challenging to see these thin knowledges live in Mainnet with different kinds of transactions, different projects, different kinds of use because we need to learn from that, and we need to apply improvements here. But this, for me, basically, is the risk. Because the other two are potentially something in the past.

Host: Amazing. Roc and Jesse, who would you like to go first?

Roc: Go ahead, Jesse. I've been speaking a lot.

Jesse: Sure, sure. I can't really speak to any weaknesses because I think it's basically invincible and perfect. No, but there is a part here that I feel like we haven't brought up, so maybe this is a good point to shine a light on that, and that is that when I think of zkEVM, the thing that comes to mind most that personally excites me the most is the privacy aspect, and that hasn't really come up yet in this conversation. So I'd love to pick David's brain on this and see if I'm off on this. But my impression and my understanding is that it reminds me more than anything since Bitcoin launching of why we got into this in the first place. And in terms of, you know, when I think of real-life impact on humanity for the big picture, if we really zoom out and think about what matters, up until very recently, everybody thought of cash as a very normal thing, and everybody had cash. And if you paid for something in cash, it didn't mean you were a criminal or there was something seditious going on. It was just, “This was a private transaction. It was simple as clean. You pay with cash, and you go.” And because everything is going digital, and other than blockchain, there really isn't a way to do anything without an intermediary. Over the last decade or two, we've gotten used to this idea that, you know, everything's traceable, everything that's just the way it is, it's “normal”. But I think, in my hope, is that blockchain would again be able to unlock some sort of behavior like cash, just for the idea of privacy that really should apply to all humans. And that's my stance on it, and one of the reasons I got excited about blockchain in the first place. But the irony is with Bitcoin, everything is actually extremely transparent, it's all on a blockchain, but it just so happens that you don't have to KYC. You can generate a wallet at any time, and it, in effect, kind of ends up acting like cash. I remember there is a project at one time called Bitcoin Cash, a quite controversial one. But with zkEVM, I would love to know while David's here, how much of the privacy aspect, the fact that you don't have to give so much information in order to prove a transaction has settled, how much of a role does that play in this, and are we downplaying that, or is there something quite powerful here? I feel like there's a lot at stake in the current context, and maybe zkEVM has a much bigger role to play than where you've been giving it credit for.

David: Well, as you say, the zk technology has two uses. One would be this privacy of inputs, where basically, this is what we are using in the Polygon ID project to protect the usual personal data. And the second one is this verification of correct competition. That's what we use for scalability. In the zkEVM, we are basically replicating Ethereum behavior, so we are just mimicking this whole set of opcodes and the same public behavior, meaning that the zkEVM is not private at all. So we are just doing the same, but we have possibilities to do extensions or different things in the future. In fact, there's the Polygon Miden project that is experimenting with some privacy functionalities, but I think they have not already implemented them yet. zkEVM enables these potential features that Ethereum has, but in our case, we basically apply privacy in Polygon already today, and we have this line of work in Polygon Miden towards privacy.

Jesse: Okay, cool, so that sounds like the potential's there, but maybe it's an extension or something like that. But yeah, I'm very glad to draw attention to that part and the potential that zk plays.

Roc: David, would you say that ZK-rollups, I guess, I would think that they are one of the ways of solving the blockchain trilemma – the scalability trilemma, where it's very difficult to get security, decentralization, and scalability all at once, and you have to kind of give something up for others. ZK-rollups have found a way of kind of cheating that or solving that by being able to do a lot of the computations offline or off-chain. This is actually an important part we should mention for the audience that helped me to understand this better when I was very confused about all of this. Basically, you can do very large computations off-chain. Let's say, like a AAA video game, like Fortnite or League of Legends or something. They have massive amounts of computations, and every action you take involves many computations. For example, landing a headshot involves computing where the character and the other characters are moving, where your bullet is, what your velocity is, and how fast the bullet is. There are all these computations that happen that are way too much to be on a chain. But what you can do is you can do those calculations off-chain, compress them into this 45kb proof, and then stamp that to the chain. You know that it's accurate, and nobody cheated or gained the system or whatever because mathematically, these are actually very easy to prove. But compressing them is a little harder. But you guys are basically getting better and better at that. So, does this kind of, in a way, help solve that? Is that what this is doing? Solving the scalability trilemma?

David: Yeah, we basically, as you said, we are just deploying, let's say a mother of off-chain computation that runs on a chain, smart contracts. The smart contracts basically verify proofs that come from off-chain. You know, we say layer two, but it could be anything. Layer two means that it runs on layer one but as you describe, this basically involves doing this offloading of execution in a network or group of servers. Or, if you apply privacy to compute something on anyone's device up to a level, and then the network is very fine-tuned for this computation. This is where scalability happens. In our case, we also need to put data on chain, but there are other models of zk scalability with various type of chains. As you said, we basically also use the model of proof recursion. For example, we batch the transactions in groups, and these batches are proven. These compositions are proof objective, and we create the proof, and then we aggregate proofs. Basically, it's a proof that verifies a set of batches that compose a set of transactions. So this model is called recursion, and this recursion can just happen in layers. And as you said, you can prove onchain a lot of computation that happens offchain. So this is why the zk scalability is so interesting because in the Optimistic rollups, for example, you have this fraud proof. Everyone that's participating in this game theory of fraud proofs needs to recompute the whole set of transactions. So in the ZK model, one single system can just propose a set of transactions on the proof attached to it. So it's where you avoid this repetition of computation that this scalability happens. Otherwise, you are in the layer one where any single node needs to repeat to elevate or to sign some kind of button. This is the limit of blockchains today. So we are breaking these by this model that's a second layer. Basically, layer one verifies proofs and proofs include a lot of competition verified.

Host: Thank you so much for all of your insightful views, Jesse, Roc and David. And it is very interesting Jesse brought up the blockchain trilemma of security, decentralization, scalability. And we believe that, you know, it's also a good point that the ZK-rollups will find a way to solve that by doing the computation off-chain. Before we move on to the next question, let's shift gears for a moment and introduce our first airdrop for today's AMA! We are giving away 10,000 $SUIBG in red packets to new Bitget Wallet (Previously BitKeep) users, which can be swapped out for official SUI tokens! You should be able to access the link to the red packet right about now in our Twitter Space, so do go ahead and click on the link and redeem your $SUIBG prize now if you are new to Bitget Wallet (Previously BitKeep)!

Roc: By the way, we haven't heard from Vlad. Vlad has been so quiet. Do you have any thoughts on any of this, Vlad? And by the way, v, are you the same Vlad from Cointelegraph I was talking to like years ago in Telegram by any chance?

Vlad: Hey, good question. Not sure about years ago. It's not been years for me. It has been a year and a half probably, thanks for bringing this up. Hey guys, I mean, I'm not a builder, but I am listening in carefully because for me, this is actually like a question of what technology is somewhat best. I do believe that you are very Polygon-positive. I didn't want to bring up a lot of the competition today, like StarkNet, for example, right? And ZK-rollups is a raging topic currently. There is news coming up every day on different technology providers working in this space and even providing, let's say, chain-agnostic or company-agnostic options. So for me, this conversation is really valuable in terms of understanding the potential for Polygon, in particular, and all the ecosystem projects that are working with and on Polygon. You finally put it that way, basically, this is what going to happen. For me, I'm drewing Ethereum as the holy grail, as you guys as well, especially when it comes to decentralization and security at the same time. As we all know, that Ethereum is not perfect, with layer twos, we do solve a lot of the challenges, and just trying to understand for myself: which solution, like a universal solution to Ethereum's problems, is the best and gonna be recognized by Ethereum themselves, which we mentioned as well. This is like a long answer to the short question why I'm being so silent. I don't have anything new thanks for bringing to the table in terms of the developments. Like you're a representative for media, I'm listening in and trying to synchronize between all the other projects that I spoke with that I know which is best and where.

Roc: That makes sense. As a journalist, that's your job, I guess, is to assess the situation, take in as much information you can, and then find a way to feed that information to the public. So, David, I am guessing you'll probably be somewhat politically correct here with your position, how like Polygon stuff you are, and I know Polygon doesn't like to really take any shots at anyone else or compared to other people, but could we get a little of your thoughts on pros and cons of some of the different scaling solutions for Ethereum? And then I'll ask the most important question, like is ZK-rollups the best, or is it subjective? Are there other things that are competitive to zkEVM right now, or is it, as I think, that zkEVM is literally, at least I think the most optimistic I've heard people say, is that it's 8 months to 10 months ahead of others right now, but some others have said maybe it's like two to three years ahead of everything else. Am I accurate there? Maybe you're biased, maybe you're politically correct. I hope you'd make this controversial though, and remember Vlad's a journalist that he's gonna write whatever you say, so…

David: Okay, no pressure. Now I mean, I personally have full respect for everyone and everything that's trying to scale Ethereum, because it's the mission most of these teams we have, and we are super excited to bring our contribution, and we feel our, let's say, project is something that everyone agreed two years ago that was the best shot if you need to design a perfect solution, probably we described it. But some teams they thought this was noticeable, some teams for Optimistic rollups to other teams that are doing ZK-rollups with zkEVM. There are many ways to achieve the similar objectives. I would say the differentiation is more important in my opinion, it’s the trust model and which are the trust assumptions. When you have a solution, like Ethereum, for example, this is completely centralized, there's plenty of validators, a lot of stake in place, so you feel that Ethereum in your mind is safe. The problem is it’s expensive because of these limitations in performance. But when you go to these sidechains for POS, was a lot of criticized because it's a sidechain, there's a bridge, some kind of risk, all of these. I mean, then you go to layer 2, you get Optimistic rollups, they don't have even fraud proof implemented.

Basically, in many projects, you have to trust the team. For our project, because we have these initial steps of security, we are just telling anyone that we have the right to operate the smart contracts. So, this means that we reserve this right to correct if we find some big security issue. We have the right to change things in the network, so we are basically controlling the network initially. But at least our technology has a clear path to avoid this in some way because, I would say, I think I said before - for zkEVM, to become really operative in my standard of the requirements, I will ask that this technology be approved. That's, you know, open source that anyone can update, that has public updates out because nobody, I mean not everyone is able to understand such a complex technology, but you need to have references that solid teams have checked. And the prover, which is the source of trust, is complete and it's working and have some kind of, you know, it's solid in some way, and it's something that's trustworthy. Otherwise, you don't know what you're trusting.

Because in the end, you work on this path on Web3 to end up trusting a bunch of guys or a team with a single server. I mean, we heard this before, you know, the promise of Web3 and limitless integration. So, you know, we have a tech solution that's enabling this very soon. I would say, after we feel more comfortable on security, but we have a clear path on that, and we will have challenges on decentralization for proof generators, and also the sequencing part, but we have also have a path to do so, and we explain what's the trust model in our project today. You send a transaction, it will be super fast to confirm for the initial one second. You're not trusting us, then after five minutes, details are on chain, so you don't need to trust us. And after 30 minutes, there's a proof on chain, so it's final. So, finally, we have this three-step trust model, and everything is on chain that you will see. That, I would say, we need to ask the same question quickly - one in the ecosystem, for clarity and to understand which are the risks we are assuming, because, of course, Web3 is not as fast as Web2 because center of the races are super fast but in the end, we wanted to decentralize and we wanted to allow this decentralization to be effective, so for me, this is the main topic. And also you can discuss our finality, you can discuss about the cost, you can discuss transactions per second, the throughput. These are features that will improve over time in every single project, but I would say let's go to the route which is, is this becoming trustless or not. I would say this is where we need to ask the questions.

Roc: Okay, so that was like a very detailed politically correct and respectful answer, but Vlad and I still want to know who's the best man. I'm just kidding. Okay, how about this? Maybe I'll trick you by answering something different. Whose work do you respect the most from your side?

David: No, no, I respect everyone and I think every team is doing their best because it's complex. Even in Polygon, Polygon acquired three teams and every team had different approach, so it was kind of a model where Polygon was trying to cover any potential intervention model and there's no good or bad. Probably we are becoming fast and more material at this stage and we are super happy and proud to achieve this. I mean, I would say we have an advantage because if you see the report, we publish about our feats. You'll see the completion, you'll see the model, you'll see the performance, and you'll see the EVM equivalence. I mean, we are potentially ahead, but these things will just change with time because potentially some optimistic rollup teams will also try to include proofs in the future because these Optimistic rollups potential is limited in their TPS at some point or with some security assumptions, so I think this is a race that evolves over time and potentially for me, I absolutely want the best for Polygon, but I also want the best for the Ethereum community, which was what we wanted to do in the first place. So full respect for everyone, and I would say this is something that is just starting. We need to see what happens in the mid term. As with every technology initially, there's a lot of teams that are trying to to solve something, and with maturity comes, you know, commoditization comes consolidation, we will see. We will see that we are solving the problem overall, and our contribution is here, and we are super excited to become part of this.

Roc: While it's not the answer I was trying to push your buttons for, I do respect your take, and it's really cool to see how, I mean, this is actually, I like, I know us in the community, we want to hear like, come on, say Polygon's the best at something, but like actually, the fact that you guys have stayed so neutral and just supportive of Ethereum in general, I think it's a big reason why Polygon has succeeded, you know, like a lot of other people took different paths, tried to bad-mouth, you know, Polygon and stuff like that. I mean, I remember in the early days of Matic, I remember making, it was either me or someone from my team made an infographic like comparing Matic, Ethereum, like EOS and some of these others, and you know, and I think it was Sindhi Pu, that was like, hey, like, don't do that, please. Like, we were not trying to compete with Ethereum, that's giving a bad, like, that's misconstruing what the point is here, and the point is to strengthen Ethereum and all of us to work together to make Ethereum better. So like, comparing to Ethereum is not the right way to approach it, and um, and like, no, I took note from that, and I never did it again, and you know, and that's like, that shaped like QuickSwap's philosophy and narrative as well.

So like, I really do respect actually, as much as I'm trying to poke you here to get a juicy answer for the media, um, I do respect the way you approach this and the way the whole Polygon team approaches Scalability. It's is like, let's find a way to solve this together for the entire industry and for humanity, 'cause like this is really gonna change a lot of people's lives in the world. You know, we see around the world right now censorship is like crazy. It's like we're in a dystopian novel. We're seeing censorship, we're seeing sanctions, we're seeing the dollar and multiple dollars being weaponized across the world, we're seeing freezing of accounts for protesting. If you're a trucker protesting, you know, COVID shutdowns in Canada, you know, a developed nation, they are freezing people's bank accounts, freezing people's paypals for like Wikileaks originally or like porn or whatever it is, you know, like if you're not hurting someone, the government shouldn't be trying to get the bank to freeze your account. And so I think, like, for all those reasons, you know, crypto is so important. I mean, like, we noticed on Quickswap from the early days we were comparing like different DEXs like average trade sizes and the average trade size on like Uniswap on Ethereum because it's expensive to settle in high gas fees was like, I think it was like 10 or $20,000 per trade. And then on Quickswap on Matic with, you know, a 1,000th of a penny gas fees or whatever, it was like the average trade size I think was like $50 and we saw like lots of $2 trades and $10 trades and we're looking in where I would just watch the explorer and I would just be in all like who the hell is making these trades, this was before like arbitrage bots and stuff for more prevalent, so this was really from what we saw in the community, this was just people from 3rd world countries using this stuff, like to have like a financial system that they had access to because if you're in Nigeria or you know any other 3rd world country, it is very hard for you to get access to a bank. I mean, you might and if you do get any banking services, they are the most basic, they are not, there is no borrowing and lending, there is no like credit score based borrowing and lending, there's none of that, you might be able to put your money in a bank and that's like maybe a third or less of the population. So we're basically bringing this financial sovereignty and freedom to people in countries that would not have it, which is over half of the world.

And this kind of scaling is really important because we see, with Ethereum, as much as we all love Ethereum, someone in a 3rd world country cannot use Ethereum. And that's not how it's going to be. Like I said, it'll become a settlement layer and then all the functional will be on all these other layers. So you guys are doing the Lord's work here, bringing a lot of freedom to people all over the world that are having their money debased and all that. So kudos.

Jesse: Just to echo what you're saying, and David, I appreciate everything you're saying, and I think it's actually more accurate and very on point to what I'm about to say, but I'm gonna echo, bringing up like all I can think about is something we talk about internally about, which is when we think about Matic and Polygon and everything that's happening with zkEVM and supernets. You know, you could just go back to, I think there was some interview with the Rolling Stones, I think it's the guitarist Keith Richards, he'd be like, you know, "there's just nobody doing what we do, mate", and like everybody else is making music, but there's only one Keith Richards, there's only one Rolling Stones. And I gotta say, humbleness aside, Polygon is proving it day after day. We are so happy to be building on Polygon and seeing that, like, we do our thing at Aavegotchi, and then we look ahead and we see what you guys are delivering for the next thing to deploy on, and it's that much better, and that whole leapfrogging of one whole generation to just focus on the next. And that's what we're excited about. So just props to the whole zkEVM and the 27th, we're three days out, and yeah, just, you know, go Keith Richards on, I get a little braggy about it. I think it's well deserved, and you guys have done so well.

Host: I completely agree with all of you, and I guess that we are all big supporters of Polygon because there are builders like you moving right along to the next question, I believe we were talking about ZK-rollups technology.Now, we, as builders, are constantly trying to source for ways to galvanize the mass-adoption of crypto and blockchain technology. One of the main complaints that new users have when traversing the Web3 space is that gas fees can be high, and it can take quite a while for transactions to be processed. Do you think scaling solutions are the way forward to onboarding the next 1 billion into Web3? Why is that so?

Jesse: Sure. So, I can say a little bit about what we're doing with the supernets. And I bet this would also apply to zkEVM for a lot of the projects there. But in terms of what we're going to do with GotchiChain deploying as a supernet, we know we can basically get to a point where we can have over 2,000 transactions per second at a very reasonable rate, still highly secured, and so yeah, it's going to be great. We're going to kick off this and use a lot of our treasury and the DAO's treasury to cover the gas cost. So people will be able to onboard in a seamless way for the first time ever to Aavegotchi-branded video games and experiences. And this is something that we've been looking forward to for a long time. They could theoretically come in, it could be anybody who maybe has never experienced a blockchain game before, and they don't necessarily have to have had even Matic or GHST token or anything else in their wallet, and yet they would be able to get started right away because we'll be covering those first initial transactions for them. So that's going to be a big part of our strategy, and a huge part of this whole move to supernets is not just to be able to do things marginally better like if you're still going to be clicking every transaction to sign and you're going to feel like it's what you've been doing for the last couple of years, except the transactions settle that much faster. I don't think that's enough. What we deliver has to be so good and so smooth that it abstracts away all of the drama that we usually experience when it comes to, you know, the gas fees and all of that stuff. And so yeah, I think, I think this would probably play well for zkEVM as well. But in terms of our supernet, this is like literally the one thing we have to get right, which is the onboarding and the reducing of friction. And I think that this bodes very, very well, and it's going to be a whole new ballgame compared to what we've done in the last cycle.

Like this new cycle is not restricted by the same frictions and the same issues that plagued the onboarding experience before, and that's the game changer. And so yeah, maybe David can speak to a bit how that applies with zkEVM. I'm pretty sure it's pretty much the same in terms of reducing cost, and there are ways to abstract away those initial costs for onboarding, but that's the way we're thinking about at Aavegotchi, and I think it's a game changer.

Roc: Maybe David is having some technical difficulties. I could jump in and just say that scaling is something that continues to be worked on, right? So I remember for a long time in the internet and computers, people said, like, you know, it was all because internet and computers were text-based at first. There were no images or videos or anything, and, you know, people would argue like, you'll never be able to put a photo on computers or online because it just will take too much computation, too much storage, it's never gonna be done. And then once we figured out pictures, then it was, oh, you'll never put music, and then we got that in audio. And then it was, we'll never do videos. That's crazy. That's like, you know, a video is like, you know, 20 something or 50 something or hundreds of frames of images per second, multiplied by however long the video is, plus the audio. We'll never be able to do that. And then it was like, we'll never be able to do 3D, and we'll never be able to do virtual reality. And you just keep like, scaling as this thing that just... Keeps going, right?

And so right now, what we're looking at is we need to get Web3 to be as scalable as Web 2, but Web2 is not even done scaling. So we actually need to get Web3 to be better than Web2 over time because Web 2 will continue to get stronger and stronger with, like, you know, eventually, we'll want to have videos on the blockchain, we'll want to have virtual reality and metaverses fully within blockchains, or at least stamped to blockchains using roll-ups, etc. So, scaling is this thing we're going to continue working at, and it'll never end, I don't think. You know, we'll get quantum computing someday, and then we'll get something, you know, after that, and we'll continue to until you'll be able to store anything and everything, and you'll be able to do everything on blockchains, and it'll be seamless, and you won't care anymore. It'll be easy. The cost of transactions will be commoditized to zero, similar to how music used to cost a lot to store and to access and to buy albums, and now, like, you know, I pay 10 bucks a month, or I can get it for free if I want to use torrents or something, that you know, I pay whatever five or 10 bucks a month or like Pandora or something, and I have the entire world's music collection at my fingertips, and that's how it's gonna be with all this.

Host:Okay, thank you all for sharing your views on the last question. Finally, to close off the AMA session, I want to quickly talk about how our guest speakers feel about the rest of the year, so if I could get each of you to briefly share with us what kind of technological advancements you are most excited about in the industry moving forward into the rest of 2023, what would it be and why?

Roc: I would say like making accounts more usable for users to where regular people can make an account by, like, maybe through social logins, maybe like your Google account will be a multisig with, you know, maybe your Facebook account or whatever you trust, and maybe like one of your family members' accounts, and it can be done even using ZKs to where Google won't even know that they're multisig necessarily, and these different parties won't know, so they... Would have to: one, collaborate and two, have to know who each individual person is that is signing your transactions are, so you could basically have like a bolt where you know, you don't even need a private key, it'll just be your like, it'll be like 1 out of 5 or like a 5 out of 10 or something multi-sig. I know it sounds complicated, but the way it'll work is it won't be complicated to the user, it'll be complicated on the back end, but it'll be easy for the user, and then you'll never have to worry about losing your private key or whatever.

And even if someone loses their key, then it's okay, you still have other keys, and you know because it's three out of five or five out of 10 or whatever, so you could just have like 10 of your close family members or friends or your multi-sigs, and like if like three of them lose their key somehow by losing access to their account, which they could probably recover anyways because they have the centralized benefit of account recovery through "forgot my password," so you'll use that kind of stuff, and then you'll use even more advanced features in like, for example, multi-multi-sig DK, which is where you could have something be a 5 or 10 multi-sig, but let's say no transactions happen over like 1 year period, it goes down to 1 out of 4 or 10 multi-sig, and after another year, it goes to 3 out of 10 and 2 out of 10 and 1 out of 10. So if you want to keep it whole, then you just keep resigning something every year or whatever, and then if you're not able to access it because so many of the people lost their keys, it'll decay it to being 1 out of 1, someone, you know, you could even assign which 1 out of 1s or things maybe that will be able to access it, so maybe eventually like decay to being like your mom will be able to sign for you or your sister or something or whatever order you put it in, and then there's going to be things that we haven't even thought of with that that'll make it even easier than this, and so eventually we'll solve this problem just like we've solved passwords in general across web 2.

The other thing I'll give a quick shout out to is Lightning Network for payments. I think Bitcoin's Lightning Network has absolutely incredible scaling technology, and more for just generalized payments. Maybe later, smart contracts. There's been some news about this with Taro, and I actually saw another one this morning. So, I think smart contracts will come to Bitcoin Lightning Network eventually, but that's still many years out that that'll even be functional. But Lightning Network is a really cool way of approaching scaling on a different side, more just for payments, where you get instant payments and like kind of infinite scalability. So, we're really excited for Lightning Network for Bitcoin.

Host: Okay, Jesse and David?

Jesse: Sure. I think the year ahead, there's going to be a lot of innovation. I think a lot of it is going to come from Polygon. We've already spent most of this space talking about the reasons why, and so that's pretty clear whether its zkEVM, the supernets, but I guess the one part, if I could look at, you know, where I see the potential for a lot of innovation and that kind of taking that next step that everybody's waiting for, I would shine a light on DAOs in general. We haven't seen that next iteration, yeah, just the kind of on-chain, like we've all been doing snapshot for so long. I love snapshot, but to be honest, that's just signaling to tell somebody what to do on behalf of others, and it's not trustless. And so, you know, we were at EthDenver here recently, and there were some announcements coming out from Aragon, and Aavegotchi has a unique history with Aragon. Two and a half years ago, when we got started, we bootstrapped everything off of an Aragon template which had on-chain voting, and that was involving a bonding curve. And so, that recently, we actually just closed that about two weeks ago. It was kind of a huge milestone and it was very, very good for our community. I feel like the DAO has leveled up. It's come to that next level. The tokenomics of GHST has changed. The DAO is well-funded going forward, but the next step for Aragon, ironically, was happening at the same time. So, we're reaching out to them, letting them know that this was happening, and that was all happening on the Ethereum layer, which is pretty cool 'cause Aavegotchi is truly multichain.

Like, we, that's a whole new story, but we're on ETH layer one, NFTs are on Polygon, and then we're telling Aragon about our supernet, we're telling them, "Hey, that's gonna work out fine because we're about to announce our new Aragon on-chain voting mechanisms in the whole product line, and it's all brand new, and it's actually built for a multi-chain world where you'll be able to do your votes on-chain, self-execute the smart contracts regardless of whether you're on whatever you want to call it Layer 3, Gotchi Chain, Polygon, or zkEVM, or even Ethereum. So I think there's going to be a lot of news coming out around DAOs in the months ahead, and you're going to see them continue to stretch their arms and do more in terms of having real-world effects. You know, in the last bull run, we saw things like buying the US constitution and all of these kind of things. We're going to see more of that, but maybe not in the sense that it makes you go like, "Oh, that makes me curious," or it's kind of like, "I don't know what they're doing," but it's actually going to be a "holy cow, they're really having an impact," whether it's on-chain or funding something in the real world. You're probably going to see a little bit of both. And when it comes tAavegotchihi, you're definitely going to see our DAO continue to flex its muscles. And I'm not saying we're 100% running with Aragon on Gotchi Chain, but we're definitely looking into that and all options for really empowering DAOs to get to that next level. So that's kind of where our mindset's at, and that's what we're excited about.

Roc: Yeah, what's interesting for DAOs is like, you know, virtual nations too. That's like kind of like maybe an endgame for DAOs, which would be really interesting. I'm very excited to see how that might shape up. Right now we're doing it for games and for online communities, but eventually, I think, you know, DAOs will just keep growing larger and larger, and people will have a more personal connection to a DAO than they might have to their physical nation, even possibly.

Jesse: The interesting thing about NFTs in general and the guilds and the blockchain gaming is... For cryptocurrency, it's like, "Oh, they're tribal. They get so, like, they get maxi about their favorite cryptocurrency." With NFTs, it's like, of course, we do. Of course, we do. So, it plays really well until like, you know, pulling together online communities, and it's a little bit different approach than the cryptocurrency angle, and I think in some ways it's better. It just acknowledges reality, and it's kind of cool how it works out.

Host: What about David? Do you want to add on your thoughts as well?

David: Yeah, well basically, I agree a lot with what they just said. I'm more in this technical, uh, you know, kind of project and from the perspective of uh, scalability. I'm super excited to see the evolution of these projects, especially, especially in ZK. I see a lot of applications and many use cases of ZK. I think this is gonna be a strong driver for, and not only blockchain but also apps' evolution, and I hope this can get a lot of hyper-specific use cases to Web3 and how we can combine these two use cases of ZK which is piracy and and magnification of competition. Superset is also an identity project we are doing in polygon but also about the whole identity ecosystem but we are trying to trigger from polygon to by connecting all these, you know, parties like identity providers, issues of trust. So, I think this is a very exciting year and I hope we can bring a lot of options to Web3.

Host: Thank you everyone for sharing your points. It sounds like we truly have exciting year hiding 2023. On our end, we are also similarly looking forward to more innovation that can bring about a more seamless onboarding process for new Web3 users. Moving ahead into 2023, while we may not be out of the bear market just yet, there are clearly many promising projects that are currently on the way across the Web3 space. We'll do our best, we're closer with this project, and deliver them right to our users. And now as promised, as a token of appreciation to all our loyal listeners for staying till the end of today's exciting AMA, we will be sending a link to input your wallet addresses for a mystery airdrop that we will be distributing soon!

larkLogo2023-03-28
    wallet
    Recommended
    • Celebrate Brand Upgrade and Trade Futures to Share 100,000 USDT
      Product
      Celebrate Brand Upgrade and Trade Futures to Share 100,000 USDT
      We're thrilled to unveil the 6th Bitget Wallet Futures Carnival! To celebrate the official rebranding of Bitget Wallet (Previously BitKeep) to Bitget Wallet, we will hold a grand futures trading competition with a total prize pool of up to 100,000 USDT! This rebranding marks a pivotal moment for Bit
      larkLogo2023-08-11
    • 【Invite2Get】Bitget Wallet x Giant Mammoth Airdrop: Invite Friends to Share 8,000 USDT
      Product
      【Invite2Get】Bitget Wallet x Giant Mammoth Airdrop: Invite Friends to Share 8,000 USDT
      [Invite2Get] Season 4 is coming! To celebrate Bitget Wallet (Previously BitKeep)'s Official Rebranding as Bitget Wallet, we have teamed up with Giant Mammoth to launch an airdrop with a total prize pool of 8,000 USDT. Giant Mammoth is a public chain project that focuses on on-chain governance and de
      larkLogo2023-08-11
    • Swap $SDEX and Share 800,000 $SDEX Airdrop Rewards
      Product
      Swap $SDEX and Share 800,000 $SDEX Airdrop Rewards
      DEX is the cornerstone of every public chain ecosystem and the category of projects with the most value-capture capabilities. As a new-generation DEX, SmarDex can solve the problem of impermanence losses and convert them into impermanent gains in some cases. Bitget Wallet is cooperating with SmarDex
      larkLogo2023-08-10