Unconfirmed: Polygon: The Layer 2 Solution Doing 8 Times as Many Transactions a Day as Ethereum

**Laura Shin** (0:00)
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Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unconfirmed, the show that reveals how the market names in crypto are reacting to the week's top headlines, and gets the inside skip on what they see on the horizon. I'm your host, Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. I started covering crypto six years ago, and as a senior editor at Forbes, was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the June 18th episode of Unconfirmed.
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Today's guest is Jaynti Kanani, co-founder and CEO of Polygon. Welcome, Jaynti.

**Jaynti Kanani** (1:47)
Thank you, Laura, for having me.

**Laura Shin** (1:49)
Polygon has had quite a few months, especially considering that the overall market has been in a bit of the doldrums. Can you tell me from your perspective, the story of how Polygon has taken off these last few months?

**Jaynti Kanani** (2:06)
Definitely.
We have been working on Polygon since 2017 and launched our main network last year, May. And since then, we are working with the dApps to onboard them on Polygon.
And we had 100, 200 dApp applications at the time before three months ago. And then the NFT boom came, and DeFi was there, DeFi boom was there. And everyone was trying to send a transaction to Ethereum. And at the time, Ethereum gas fees went 100 kW or something. And people were spending a lot of USD, a lot of ETH on Ethereum as a gas fees. And at the same time, Aave deployed on Polygon. And we created a pool, an incentive pool for the Aave liquidity.
And it brought a huge liquidity to the Polygon. At the same time, Sushishvap and multiple other DeFi came and started doing the same. And it kind of blew the whole DeFi boom on Polygon from Ethereum. And it just got crazy and crazy. Currently, we have 500-plus applications, DeFi, NFTs, every kind of different applications. And in the latest, a few days ago, it crashed. And the Matic was the only one who was sustaining its value.
We were seeing huge investor interest in Polygon. Institution investors, retailers, and what we did is kind of creating the path for Layer 2 If you see the Layer 2 ecosystem, there were no other Layer 2 solutions ready for the production as we are. And that's what happened in the last few days and weeks that Polygon paved the path for the Layer 2 And so that on Ethereum, you can scale right away. You don't have to wait for any other applications. You can just go and deploy your application on Polygon and you could scale right now. And that's, I think, was a major part of the success of Polygon.

**Laura Shin** (4:36)
So as I'm sure most of our listeners are aware, there are multiple ways to scale. And a lot of Layer 2 scaling solutions on Ethereum are taking one specific approach.
How has Polygon decided to scale?

**Jaynti Kanani** (4:50)
Yeah, so we started with Plasma. So in late 2017, I was doing research on scalability and Plasma specifically. And then we started with Plasma, but in Plasma, we didn't want to do UTXO based Plasma. So what we did is account based Plasma, which is similar to Ethereum. And for that, we took the EVM approach. What we thought like, let's take the EVM and change it to make the Plasma compatible. And by doing that, what happens is that any developer can just move their applications from Ethereum chain to Plasma Polygon chain in a few minutes.
But in Plasma, currently, we are supporting only transfers, not any arbitrary state changes. And if you want to support any arbitrary state transfers, state changes, you need to create the predicates contract on the Ethereum chain.