The Binance.US Angels hosted an AMA with Polygon cofounder & COO Sandeep Nailwal on Telegram.

The views and opinions expressed in this AMA are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Binance.US.

The Binance.US Angels hosted an AMA with Polygon cofounder & COO Sandeep Nailwal on Telegram. MATIC is available for one-time, weekly, bi-weekly and monthly buys on Binance.US. You can read the full transcript below:

Welcome to the AMA with Polygon! @sandeepnailwal Can you tell us a bit about yourself and why did you get into blockchain?

Of Course! Firstly, thank you for inviting me here today. It’s a pleasure to be able to connect with the Binance US community. My name is Sandeep Nailwal, Co-Founder & COO of Polygon. I have been involved with many tech businesses since my very early days. Scaling is my key focus, be it in businesses or blockchains, but I am an all-round business buff. I had my ‘lightbulb moment’ about the revolutionary nature of blockchain in 2016, found my calling in the scalability arena in 2017 and co-founded Polygon alongside Jaynti Kanani and Anurag Arjun.

As COO of Polygon, I am based out of India with our tech teams. My main responsibilities include spearheading the branding, marketing, adoption and operations at Polygon, and partnering with key stakeholders to push forward the vision of Polygon.

Can you give us a little history about Polygon and then, what problem does Polygon solve in the blockchain industry?

Polygon is a Layer 2 scaling solution that aims to provide a generalized Layer 2 platform, enabling Ethereum developers to scale their DApps for large-scale usage. For the initial phase, Polygon has launched its hybrid PoS+Plasma sidechains on top of Ethereum which is already gaining huge traction – making Polygon one of the fastest growing DApp platforms in the space.

Essentially, we are providing the infrastructure to overcome the traditional performance bottlenecks of the blockchain ecosystem, to allow DApps of all types to be able to handle large volumes of users.

The Polygon team has been making valuable contributions to the Ethereum ecosystem alongside some of Ethereum’s best developers long before our IEO on Binance in April 2019. This includes working on implementations of Plasma MVP, the WalletConnect protocol (which allows users to access DApps in a secure and user friendly way), and the widely-used Dagger event notification engine.

Now that we're learning more about the network, could you please tell us more about what role the MATIC token plays within the network?

MATIC is the utility token used on the Polygon blockchain. It has a range of purposes, the most important of that is  Polygon’s Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism (staking). The other important utility is paying for the gas fees for transactions on Polygon.

Due to a large community, MATIC has also been integrated into several external platforms as a payment method, and you can even use MATIC to secure P2P loans via Constant.

We expect to have more of that utility by integration into Defi ecosystem.

What are the advantages of holding the MATIC token over the long and short term?

For the short term, staking will be released to the public on June 29th, whereby MATIC token holders will be able to stake as a validator or delegator and receive staking rewards*. We’ve allocated 12% of the total MATIC supply (1.2B tokens) to the staking rewards fund, to ensure rewards for the first 5 years while the network is growing in size and transaction volume.

For the long term, we’re aiming for Polygon to become THE go-to scaling solution for developers and enterprises to scale their applications for large scale usage. With Polygon already being one of the most adopted blockchains in the space, this is already going great. That would generate a lot of transaction fees for the validators on Polygon to secure the network.

* Polygon is releasing their proof of staking but if/when if becomes available on Binance.US is undetermined at this time.

What projects are now using the Polygon stack? Tell us more about the projects currently building on Polygon.

As a general-purpose platform, Polygon is capable of housing a variety of DApp and games on its infrastructure. There are more than 50+ DApps building on Polygon as in currently either deployed on Testnet or our Beta mainnet and planning to move to Mainnet now that the mainnet is live.

DApps on Polygon encompass a variety of niches ranging from gaming like BlockLords, Light Trail Rush, Battleracers, social platforms like Sapien & Springrole etc along with notable projects including VR metaverse projects Decentraland, Somnium Space etc. The list goes on and is getting bigger as we speak 🙂

What are the future plans for Polygon? Do you have any exciting things down the pipeline that you can share?

In the short term, our staking launch at the end of this month is the next upcoming exciting development. Over the coming months, we’ll be onboarding our DApp ecosystem onto the mainnet and will continue our mainnet rollout strategy, adding features and making the network increasingly decentralized by adding more validators. This includes many top-tier industry validators who will be running Polygon validator node and offering staking services for MATIC token holders. We also wish to expand the footprint for the Defi ecosystem.

We have also ramped up our focus on large enterprises and the team is currently exploring potential areas of collaboration with various enterprises. This focus will continue to become stronger moving forward. We are exploring, creating POCs for for Governments and other large institutions.

We also recently had Infosys, Indian Tech Icon, join as an early Validator to the Polygon Ecosystem.

We wish to explore more such synergies with large scale services providers like Infosys to onboard more and more large institutions onto blockchain ecosystem.

As we know, every crypto project needs to be used for growth. So what are the plans for mass use in the future?

Polygon strongly believes in the power of it’s community. Due to one of the largest community in Crypto space, we help a lot of our Dapps/Games to communicate with our community and convince them to be their early users. Apart from that we do a lot of Promotional campaigns for our application partners like Dapps and Games which helps them to grow.

We are committed to not only have large number of Dapps in our ecosystem which is already happening, but also a large number of users on those dapps and we believe that we are in this together with our ecosystem partners. We are involved in many gaming communities and have close relations to the Dapp communities.

Moreover, on the enterprise side we are getting close partnerships with large institutions to take our solutions to Enteprises.

We are also about to launch a massive Developer community Campaign.

In summary we have a 360 Degree marketing strategy focussing on Dapps/Games, Enterprises, Developers and Crypto community to grow Polygon in a balanced way on all the fronts.

Could you share what is currently the main focus of the Polygon team, and what the tech team is working on right now?

The current focus of Polygon community is Staking and Decentralization of the Network. We set out with a vision to have a decentralized Layer2 platform which offers scalability and is secure. So our complete focus is enable full blown staking in multiple stages and completely decentralized the network. For further expansion we are also looking to build more and more Layer2 execution environments for Dapps/Games to have more options to choose from for their scaling needs which includes based on their data availability needs, security, and withdrawability to Ethereum mainchain.

What's the story behind Polygon and what was the main reason for providing layer 2 solutions?

Our team comes from a hardcore Ethereum community contribution background. Our team built the first ever Plasma MVP implementation. We were the team which rolled out the first working version of WalletConnect, an Ethereum Foundation funded project. Our product Dagger is still used by many Dapp teams for their products.

Coming from that background we wanted to create a solution which solves the scalability needs of the Ethereum ecosystem.

We chose to build Layer2 because:

1. We are very strong believers in Ethereum Ecosystem and believe that it has all the ingredients to act as a global settlement layer for programmable decentralized execution aka smart contracts.

2. We also believe that no matter which consensus mechanism Layer1 uses , if it has to be be secured and decentralized enough it can’t have infinite amount of scalability, meaning that with large enough adoption, the layer1’s will ultimately tend towards being settlement layer and business activity will move onto Layer2.

Could you explain the main competitive advantages of Polygon as there are many layer-2 projects working on scalability issues?

Yes, That’s a great question.

We believe that the biggest advantage of Polygon which is helping it to get great traction is it’s Developer Experience. We always say if you are an Ethereum developer you are already a Polygon Developer i.e its extremely easy for the devs to use the tools which they already know on Ethereum, the libraries, documentation, everything works out of the box

The other important thing is Polygon's relentless focus on User ecosystem. Our consistent efforts on getting user experience advancements by having more and more user friend wallets, meta transactions and UX design for Dapps is a testimony to that.

Now, Due to a large Polygon community, Polygon’s is building a very strong moat to attract Dapps and games towards it’s Layer2.

Will the Polygon blockchain be flexible and how compatible will it be with other blockchains? Is it planned to further reduce the emission of MATIC tokens after launching its own blockchain?

Yes, architecturally Polygon is technically feasible to attach to any layer1 but we are a strong believer in Ethereum and its potential to be the defacto blockchain for programmable money and decentralized applications. So for now we are focussed on Ethereum, but we have our eyes open for any other blockchains that might have the proven record to be a viable Layer1

For emmissions, Polygon tokens have a fixed supply. 12% of it’s supply has been kept for staking rewards which is disbursed more in the first year but reduces slowly over time. Apart from there are no emissions of Polygon tokens to the token supply.

Why should an investor or person put their own hard earned money into Polygon vs. other cryptos?

To clarify, Polygon is a utility token and is not an investment asset. The token is meant to provide access to the Polygon blockchain applications. However if your question is about utility value of a single Polygon token growing over time, I believe that Polygon is aptly primed for consistent growth because of proven third party adoption adoption, large community, a solid tech vision and a relentless focus on developer community. These are the things not many projects can boast of.

What are you doing to solve the liquidity issues for trading of the token?

Well, Polygon is one of the highest traded assets on most of the exchanges it is listed on including Binance, Poloniex, Biki, Bitmax, Zebpay to name a few. We are exploring more and more exchanges in various geographies, many to come shortly. Polygon’s listing in US is also a step in that direction to be available in US. Morevoer, we are looking to do some innovative campaigns to improve our Dex-liquidity, which is not so great currently.

If they entered in the gaming world what exactly would they do to attract users? How Scalable would it be, and what kind of games would be allowed?

Ohh Polygon is winning Big time in the gaming space. Many of the top games in the space including VR spaces like Decentraland, Somnium space, games like Blocklords, Light Trail Rush, 0xUniverse, Blockchain cuties to name a few.

Polygon chains are extremely scalable. A single sidechain can easily accomodate upto 4-10k TPS. We have experienced even 17k tps in some isolated environments.

For games, we are seeing all sorts of games like RPGs, Indie Games, Racing and so on.

Can you tell us more about your partners and the positives changes these partnerships have brought for the Polygon project?

We are partner first organization. Our ecosystem grows with our partners, like Biconomy & GSN for meta transactions, Torus, Portis, Fortmatic(now magic) Arkane Wallet for wallet services, there are many more. Most of the great developer experience we have been able to create wouldn’t have been possible without our partners. Also , we being an infrastructure company, dint know much about gaming but we are learning very fast courtesy our gaming partners.

What is the structure of the company, is it a decentralized, open sourced protocol where everybody can contribute? If so, how does the governance plan on being handled?

Yes, Polygon was built with a vision to create a decentralized and secure layer 2. All the validators on Polygon are going to be public, permissionless validators meaning anybody can become a validator by staking requisite Polygon tokens. For our code, currently most of the development is done by Polygon team itself but we slowly will move towards an onchain governance based protocol where the community will decide the changes to be made to the protocol.

The main purpose of Polygon is increasing scalability to make possible for blockchains managing mass adoption. Would you easily explain what is scalability and how can Polygon increase it?

In simple words, Ethereum currently can have 13 Transactions per second. Since the number of transactions available for applications are so low, the fees of the transactions goes higher an higher. Polygon's goal is to provide 1000s of txns per second with extremely low gas fees yet maintaining the security and decentralization of the network.

Also when i say user experience, I mean that users currently have to setup wallets to interact with Dapps, load ethereum in them for gas fees by buying it from the exchanges and so on. It creates a lot of friction and any non crypto ppl who wanna use a decentralized application.

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