BIG update - As the largest holder of POL and someone who dedicated his life to development and success of @0xPolygon from the very beginning, I have decided to take full control of Polygon Foundation and will be its CEO going forward. Polygon Foundation owns and oversees multiple entities including one of the major contributors, Polygon Labs, which will continue to be led by Marc Boiron @0xMarcB as its CEO, who in my mind is the best executive/leader in the entire crypto industry.
I’ve always stayed away from moving into the CEO role because I’ve been focused on building PF as an institutionally governed foundation. But right now, Polygon needs clear direction and focused execution and that means stepping up.
With a healthy treasury and several hundred million in cash, we’re in a great position to keep building for the long term, without any distractions or pressure to raise.
Today, I’m announcing a series of much-needed changes designed to deliver greater value to POL stakers and bring increased clarity to the broader market.
1. We will depreciate Polygon zkEVM next year. Polygon’s razor focus is going to be Polygon PoS and @Agglayer, nothing else. Polygon PoS will focus on Stablecoin payments and RWAs, while Agglayer will focus on building a trustless Internet of Blockchains.
2. The first milestone of the Polygon POS's Gigagas roadmap is now live in testnet. This first upgrade pushes network capacity beyond 1,000 transactions per second early July and it's only the beginning. We already have the plan to move to zero reorgs and <1 second finality with >5000 TPS achieved in a devnet enviornment. This will put Polygon PoS amongst the most performant blockchains by Sept-Oct timeframe. And beyond that, we have a clear path to scale to 100k+ TPS over next few years. These upgrades massively increase the economic viability of Polygon protocol and thereby the value for POL stakers.
3. Agglayer v0.3 has been in the making and I am announcing week of June 30th as the rollout date. This version of Agglayer is feature complete except fast interop which we anticipate to be completed by end of Q3. We are back to massive shipping mode.
4. The Agglayer Breakout program will continue to spin off projects resulting in increased focus for Polygon PoS and Agglayer and massive airdrops to POL stakers. We are in the business of building blockchain networks and ZK is an important tool to bring that internet level scalability to blockchains. We have contributed a lot to ZK and will continue to do so in a more neutral way by spinning out more of ZK research efforts. Next up is Polygon ZisK led by Jordi Baylina @jbaylina. More to come.
5. Now that the SEC has dropped its investigations and lawsuits related to MATIC as a security, which should have never existed given the nature of MATIC (and now POL), we are excited to see several large market makers coming back to the table in recent days to make markets in POL that strengthens the liquidity of POL on exchanges globally.
6. The Foundation will also engage in educational campaigns to ensure everyone is aware of the upgrade of MATIC to POL.
7. Bringing the Polygon brand front and center into what was previously the neutral Agglayer brand. It’s time to align the ecosystem more clearly and boldly under the Polygon identity.
Also, going forward, major announcements from Polygon often will come from my twitter account, so follow me to be up to date and turn on your notifications.
So why am I doing this?
During 2021-22, we made a real effort to institutionalise the project by onboarding some amazing people as co-founders and board members and laying the foundation for scaling Polygon from the 10-100 stage of a venture.
But little did I know, Ethereum itself was going to go into an existential crisis that would pull Polygon and the entire Ethereum ecosystem right back to the 1-to-10 stage … or by some measures, even 0-to-1.
And the 0-to-1 stage is a different beast. It needs speed, courage to make bold bets, and the ability to handle failure. Also, the crypto industry has changed from being research centric to user centric and Polygon needs to change accordingly. Institutional setups and board structures are great for stability, but they tend to produce average-case decisions — not the sharp, aggressive moves needed to deliver exponential outcomes.
Polygon is now back as a zero to one startup setup. With the support of an incredible team at Polygon Labs, and strong leadership including Marc @0xMarcB, Mudit Gupta @Mudit__Gupta (CTO), Ryan (COO) @web3RyanN and many others we are going to BRING IT.
Let’s play!
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I am excited about the convergence of AI, ZK tech, and mobile. 1. AI is transforming every industry. 2. ZK tech will secure the data and scale the trustless computation of business logic 3. Web3 builders can realize the applications on mobile devices that billions use
The @0xPolygon ecosystem has been charting the future of Polygon - We'll thrive at the intersection of AI, Zero Knowledge, and Mobile technology to empower future builders #onPolygon
Mobile is web3's biggest frontier to capture. Our builders are working on embedding blockchain:
From the core mobile OS to tools/middleware,
To empowering developers to ship mobile-native dApps,
To building dApp Stores for global distribution.
I am excited to announce the Nailwal Fellowship - a new program for any builder who wants to do something big in web3!
I'll be investing $500k of my personal capital into 10 individuals every year ($50k/fellow) to help them to commit to building in web3 full-time for 6months. 1/
Why am I starting the Nailwal Fellowship? I am at a point in my career where I want to foresee the kind of impact my work will have on the world. I feel extremely fortunate to be in such a place.
That impact is clear to me - I want to bring as many founders into web3 as possible
The only way to do that is by getting the best builders to start experimenting with all that web3 has to offer. The Nailwal Fellowship has been designed to get the best founder talent to join the web3.
My journey to committing to web3 & co-founding @0xPolygon was not an easy one
So, IMX is considered one of the Top 2 Gaming ecosystems alongside @0xPolygon. Let's look at the below exhibit once.
Last year there was roughly $2-3 bn in funding in AA/AAA games.Polygon and Immutable combined had nearly $2B USD, or nearly half of all web3 gaming funding.😇 2/n
Now imagine when IMX builds exclusively on Polygon to create a massive ecosystem living entirely on @0xPolygon
Some of the largest of the largest gaming studios are building on @Immutable. They all will end up using @0xPolygon (MATIC) validators run & secured chains.
3/n
I am no economics scholar but I have some basic understanding. People liked my last tweet so here’s one more of my layman's take on the FOMC meeting that happened today and how it can pave the way to markets going back to normal.
Read on and forgive any noob takes 🙏 . 1/
Right now the biggest issue is the "uncertainty" in the minds of institutions as to how much rate hike is going to happen. It makes it harder to price assets. So they all have been “risk off” meaning sell everything and just stay out of the markets. 2/
Now Today FOMC hiked benchmark rate by 75bps, thats fine but the important part is members' commentary. 3/
I rarely talk about markets but here is my take on all this chaos.
*Not financial advise*
1. This downturn has more to do with “macro” than any fundamental weaknesses in Web3. Long term Web3 remains mega-mega bullish, so newbies keep learning and builders keep building!
1/7
2. The bear should be long but if FED does anything which removes any of this uncertainty, there is a lot of dry powder sitting on the sidelines to bring in aggressive bull rallies. Though possibility of that looks low considering sticky inflation & fears of stagflation
2/7
3. In private markets, A lot of VC funds have raised a LOT of capital, even though they will be careful in selecting their bets, and acceptable valuations would be much lower but I expect the thesis based VCs to keep deploying. Most of them will also play in liquid markets.
3/7
Have been in discussions with @VitalikButerin on how to accelerate relief efforts in India. And we have come up with a solution, we will moving $100mn USDC back to Vitalik, a non-Indian, to do fast deployment in high risk/reward projects.
Why? A thread
Since inception, @CryptoRelief_ , has been extra cautious to be in full compliance of Indian jurisdiction, even though Cryptorelief entity is based out of India.
Considering fund's foreign origin and laws of the India, Crypto Relief followed a systematic, controlled & robust approach in disbursing funds mandated to be utilised for India. But being an Indian citizen(NRI), I have to be extra cautious in any of the projects being donated to.