Anna Rose (00:00:05):
Welcome to zero knowledge. I'm your host, Anna Rose. In this podcast, we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web, as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online.

Anna Rose (00:00:27):
This week, I dive into the Polygon ecosystem with Mihailo, one of the co-founders of this popular EVM compatible scaling solution. We learn about the Polygon history, the product suite they now maintain and their push into the ZK space. We talk about the interaction within the Polygon ZK ecosystem, chat about their connection to the Ethereum ecosystem, as well as what's next for the project. Now, before we start in, if you are looking to jump into the ZK space professionally, I wanna remind you to head over to the ZK jobs board. There, you can find job posts from some of the top teams working in ZK. I also encourage teams who are hiring to use this jobs board to find your next hire. We have teams like Polygon Hermez, EF and Protocol Labs they're already. Be sure to post your job on the ZK job board for the entire ZK community to see. We'll add the link to this in the show notes. I also wanna make sure that the upcoming ZK Hack mini is on your radar. Last fall. We did a seven week event with puzzle hacking and ZK tool workshops. Now we bring it back for a mini version of this event set to last two weeks. It starts on March 1st. So if you miss the first edition or we're at the first edition and wanna continue with the puzzle hacking slash workshop fun be sure to sign up for the newsletter and you can already sign up for our first event over on hopin. We'll add the link to this in the show notes. Now I'll let Tanya the podcast producer share a little bit more about this week's sponsor.

Tanya (00:01:47):
Today's episode is sponsored by Least Authority. Least Authority has been making advancements in the zero knowledge space since 2013, this year, they will release the Moonmath Manual, a beginner's guide to ZK Snarks. The manual is designed to enable an audience with all only minimal cryptography and programming experience to implement complex real world ZK building blocks. Least Authority has also published a white paper on zero knowledge access passes, otherwise known as ZKAPs. This privacy enhancing technology enables users to access services without revealing personal information to the service provider. They're implementing ZKAPs in PrivateStorage. They're soon to be released cloud storage service to learn more about Least Authority and the upcoming Moonmath Manual visit leaseauthority.com/moonmathmanual. That's leastauthority.com/moonmathmanual. So thank you again, Least Authority. Now here's Anna's interview with Mihailo from Polygon.

Anna Rose (00:02:49):
So today I'm chatting with Mihailo the co-founder of Polygon. Welcome to the show Mihailo.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:02:55):
Thanks, Anna, for having me. A pleasure to be here.

Anna Rose (00:02:58):
I'm really excited to have you on and talk about Polygon because Polygon is a project that's moved very heavily into the ZK space recently, and you'd have to be completely not paying attention, not to see Polygons kind of presence in the ZK ecosystem. So I really wanna find out though, like what was Polygon before all this? Where, or does Polygon start for you?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:03:21):
So ever since 2017, I guess I, I have been actively involved. That's where I, when I officially left, I guess, web2 world and the startup I was working on back in the days and officially full-time joined, joined crypto and started exploring Ethereum. I, I was drawn to this great idea of programmable blockchains and web3 and the, this grand promise of, of this internet of value that we are trying to build and permissionless global financial system for everyone. And all these transformative concepts, I guess, of, of governance are changing the way we as humans collaborate disrupting companies, disrupting governments, all of that went full, blown out the rabbit hole, I guess, and, and it became inevitable. I couldn't resist anymore simply so, so I just joined the industry full time and focused, I guess, on Ethereum fully. And, and it was already pretty evident that Ethereum layer 1 cannot scale and that's that's a feature, not the bug actually, and, and scaling solutions were slowly being introduced Plasma was the thing back in the days. And I guess I got pretty heavily or actively involved with the Plasma research and, or Plasma flavors that we have seen back in the days. And that's when I got drawn into this whole scaling debate and research and field in general in parallel with that, I think I got to understand, I mean, I still have that understanding or belief at least that we will see, and we will live in, in some sort of a multi-chain world. So this multi-chain concepts or frameworks also kind of inspired me, or I got very interested in them. And it was after some time that I, that I understood that actually these two concepts, Ethereum scaling and multi-chain systems as such are actually just two sides of the same coin basically. And it kind of that's when it kind of clicked for me. And, and, and that idea of Polygon was born soon after that. Maybe I, I guess it was some sometime in 2018, I cannot really recall exactly. And that's when I actually started exploring all these solutions. I also, I guess I got to understand that as I said, we have this grand promise of, of web3 and I, I strongly believe Ethereum is our, by far the best chance to actually build this web3. And, and it's like something that really inspires me every morning when I wake up or, or when I go to bed, this grand promise again of this network of value, this permissionless financial system that will allow anyone to, to participate in global economy for me. If, if you don't mind, maybe I'm, of course I'm maybe being too broad here, but I think it's maybe interesting to just answer your question and as many these details as possible.

Anna Rose (00:06:18):
Sure. no, no, go for it.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:06:19):
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, for me, that, that opportunity with, with internet, basically with the, establishing this internet infrastructure and internet becoming mainstream, we have established this network of information and that network of information democratized a access to knowledge globally. And that's something very, very powerful to me. So before the internet access to knowledge, wasn't democratized, it wasn't globally available. It was kind of a reserved for people who were either in some geographic locations like developed countries or had certain background or enough money to attend colleges, et cetera, internet democratized, all of that. So with, with the internet now, anyone in any remote village in Africa or whatever Latin America or anywhere basically can access more or less this global knowledge base and can learn English, learn to code, basically acquire skills in globally, I guess, democratized way. What is missing now in this setup that we have is that now these people still in many regions cannot monetize that knowledge. It's still not possible to actually monetize or, or benefit or improve their lives with that knowledge that can and acquire I've spent some time living in Africa and I've seen there, for example, in Tanzania, it is normal for people not to have IDs, which was, it was pretty strange to me, but people don't even have IDs

Anna Rose (00:07:51):
Like identification cards?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:07:52):
Yeah. There's no concept. I like half of the country basically doesn't have IDs not to mention bank accounts. So in some setup, it's really hard. How do you actually monetize your knowledge or any skill that you might have?with web3 that kind of changes everything. And that's what really, one of the things that really inspired me to actually join this whole effort is basically like that missing component. Okay. So people can now actually acquire skills globally. And now with web3, it's so simple, boom, you just create your wallet and you can actually get paid as an engineer or whatever, or content creator or whatever, really. And it's something that I'm really, really excited about. And that's what kind of keeps me going. That's one component. Second component is this, as I mentioned, this concept of, of collaboration and, and blockchain says human coordination machine, I guess, or computer and basically the, the potentially we have with all these concepts now to, to disrupt companies, to disrupt communities in general, potentially even governments or concept of nation states, ideally speaking of course, long term, but these two, I guess, major concepts are very, very transformative and can fundamentally change society we live in.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:09:11):
And that, again, that is really inspiring for me. Now, going back to engineering and technology, we are still in a very early phase. We are building some infrastructure for 1 billion plus people let's say, ideally, 2 billion, 3 billion people. Currently the architecture we have is far from enough is far from mature enough for robust enough or scalable enough centralized enough to support that scale. So I guess I, I came to understand while researching this scaling solutions and in general infrastructure, that it is indeed very early stage of, you know, development, innovation and everything. So I, I kind of came to understand that at, at this point it might be the best to actually just facilitate innovation. There is this famous misquote let 1000 flowers bloom. So I came to understand that there should be an, unopinionated platform, unopinionated project that will support innovation at this point, without betting on any specific technology.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:10:13):
So we have seen multiple projects, you know, come I, and going some of them even dying betting or trying to build some specific technology. And in, at this point where we are in this early phase of innovation, it's highly risky because a lot of these projects will not make it, actually. We are still brainstorming, experimenting with technology. So that's how the idea of Polygon was born as an unopinionated platform, basically that supports all major scaling approaches, infrastructure source. And yeah, that, that's kind of the origin of Polygon. I, I spent some time thinking about it and I set some kind of high level concepts and design, maybe some vision. And that's how the idea Polygon or first, I guess, concept was born. And that was already, I guess, 2019. Yeah.

Anna Rose (00:11:05):
Yeah. So this is a question I have for you is when I'm trying to describe Polygon. I don't know if I can put it in the camp of like an L2 or a side chain, like, is it a roll up, is it bridged to the main chain? How do you conceptualize what it is today? Like the Polygon that people may have used if they're using OpenSea and using kind of the Polygon chain as the chain option? What is that right now?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:11:32):
Yes. great question. So Polygon POS chain is our widely adopted solution that 100 plus million of user wallets are already using. And that is just one chain in the Polygons multi chain. So we actually aim to transform Ethereum into multi-chain system with a multitude of chains of different architectures, basically Polygon POS is only one chain in the ecosystem that we envision, and it is special only in way that it is highly adopted at the moment. A apart from that it's technology is also quite interesting in a sense that it is some sort of hybrid of layer 2 and side chain. It has, I guess, combines components of, of bold. We can go technical, of course, if, if we want on this podcast, but generally it's interesting because it combines these two, these two concepts, and that's what we want to encourage. And we are constantly encouraging at Polygon. We see Ethereum scaling as a wide spectrum for us. Anything that scales Ethereum technology, Ethereum stack is also scaling Ethereum. So on one extreme one, let's say left side of that spectrum. We have kind of fully independent almost this side chain solutions or enterprise solutions that are using EVM. And for us, they're definitely adding to the network effects of Ethereum and scaling Ethereum technology scaling the idea at the end of the day of Ethereum. And that's one, one kind of extreme, or one side of the far left side of the, of the spectrum on the right side of the spectrum, we have this full blown layer 2s, how how we normally call them. So these are change that are, that derive to a large extent security from Ethereum. And in, in between, we again have multiple solutions solutions like Avail, for example. So with layer 2s, we normally assume that both data availability, so code, we can explain the concept if needed. I'm not sure all the listeners are aware of the concept.

Anna Rose (00:13:36):
We've covered this a number of times on the show, but I think it's great to redefine it for folks data availability. What is it?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:13:43):
Sure. So basically when you build these scaling solutions, you have two major, I guess, challenges. One is how do you ensure security or correctness of transactions? And the second one is how you are data availability. So correctness for security is obvious one, right? You want all the transactions in that scaling solution or in that side chain or whatever it is, or roll up products, also separate chains. That's important to understand. They just are secured by Ethereum. So in, in that particular solution, you want all the transactions to be correct, right? And you ensure that in ZK rollups ZK proofs or so-called validity proofs in optimistic, rollups you ensure that by fraud proofs. So this is how you kind of ensure security and you derive security from Ethereum in some way. Separate concept, or the second concept is data availability. So let's say you have a scaling solution that has one operator that is, that is kind of running that solution. And you say, okay, we have ZK proofs of transaction correctness. So this operator cannot do anything malicious, right? They cannot submit malicious transactions. We have ZK proofs that are proving them. So they cannot do anything malicious. But what if that operator decides to shut down its server and withholds all the data of all you users? So users cannot actually exit. If they want to go back to layer one, they need this data available. So they can actually submit proof of transaction inclusion, and they can actually exit to layer 1.

Anna Rose (00:15:24):
So data availability is the proof that data is available? That one could like, get it if they need it, is, would you say that's it?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:15:33):
Yes. For, for any purpose, either for exiting two layer 1 or to challenging what operator has done for these two, I guess, major purposes, you need data to be available. This transaction data. You simply need it. Otherwise, some, some bad, bad things can happen. You either cannot ensure security fully because maybe operator in case of optimistic rollups for example, so operator might be submitting these check points to, to Ethereum periodically, but you cannot challenge them, even though they did something malicious, because you cannot see the transactions themselves, you need to see them. You need to understand that something malicious can up there and then create a fraud proof based on that. So that's one thing, or if you want to exit, you also need data to be available. So for these two things, you just need all the transactions in, in that side chain, and that's a specific solution, or that layer 2 to be available. And these are, I guess, two major challenges you're facing when we are designing this, these solutions...

Anna Rose (00:16:36):
L2s and other side chains.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:16:38):
We generally prefer term scaling solutions, I guess. And we see Polygon as a scaling platform. We don't really want, because layer 2 is we see full blown layer 2, is only one part of that scaling spectrum. That that's how we see it. And as I said, now, in the middle, you have either hybrid solutions like Polygon POS chain, that combined, I guess, pieces of both for of, let's say side chains and layer 2, or you have layer 2s, which don't have data availability on Ethereum. So as I said, layer 2s normally derive both security from Ethereum and have data availability on Ethereum. You have solutions for example, called Validiums, which are deriving security from Ethereum but data stores, somewhere off chain, it's not

Anna Rose (00:17:25):
In the committee,

Mihalio Bjelic (00:17:26):
It can be on a committee. It can be on a permissionless network of storage nodes, whatever, or it can be on a specific fixed solutions. Like the one that we are working on in Polygon called Polygon Avail. So Polygon Avail is a specific data availability focused chain. So it's basically permissionless solution for storing and sequencing data. It's specifically being built for that. It's one of the project that we're experimenting at Polygon. But I want, what I wanted to say basically is we, we consider and take into account and try to work on this whole spectrum of solutions because we see use cases for practically each one of them. And we see interest because one of the, we are focused. Really. We have two major focuses now in Polygon. One is innovation and pushing the frontier of innovation, staying on the bleeding edge of technology always. And the second one is adoption, and we kind of already became known for adoption and our, I guess, relentless, some would say work on, on, on that front. And we really want to actually like for, for us technology that no one uses is, is unfortunately it's worthless, no matter how much work you put into it. So adoption is really important for us. And we like to talk with the projects and end users, and that's something we, I get kind of specialized in and we are really the reason I'm, this is not to brag it's because we are really seeing use cases for all these solutions across the spectrum. Basically, enterprise is one type of solution in general web3 natives, one different types of solutions, et cetera. So it's really, I think this spectrum is here kind of to stay and pretty much all the solutions from the spectrum have their place, I guess, in the ecosystem. So I guess that's how I see it.

Anna Rose (00:19:18):
I wanna kind of go back a bit to the early days cuz I had some questions you sort of, you started to describe that you were looking around at things like Plasma, would you say like the early iteration of Polygon was Plasma? Was it a Plasma type chain and maybe what, what is Plasma even? I mean, we covered it a long time ago on the show, but I could use a refresher.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:19:41):
Yeah. So I guess two major things we should mention there. One, to cover briefly Plasma is a layer 2 solution based on fraud, fraud proofs. It's very similar practically or essentially it is very similar to optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups are basically, I guess the next iteration of Plasma and they differ from plasma mainly in the way they approach data availability. So Plasma generally towards the notion of plasma idea of plasmas to store data somewhere online. That's where offline, sorry, that's when the actually data availability as a concept and as a challenge was actually identified during this early Plasma days. That's when it became obvious. Okay. We actually need the data. That's when the data availability problem kind of was identified in the first place and optimistic roll ups are actually normally up solving that by storing data on, on Ethereum itself. And that's practically the major difference between optimistic rollups and Plasma, I guess there's no other major difference.

Anna Rose (00:20:48):
So were you guys Plasma originally?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:20:50):
And yeah, that's the also important thing to understand. So as, as I said, I kind of formalized the general vision, I guess, in, in design and concept of Polygon. And I was about to start Polygon as a standalone project, but generally as I guess, is a person I I'm generally collaborative. And, and I like this period of collaboration that, that we see in Ethereum. It's really one of the things that are that I find very cool. And, and I'm kind of excited about. So I generally spoke briefly with a couple of projects that have significant amount, I guess, of tech all overlap. So there, these were, I guess Ethereum scaling projects, all of them. And there was significant overlap, as I said, between my vision of, of Polygon and what these teams were trying to build or achieve. And one of the projects was Matic. That's how it used to be called back in the days.

Anna Rose (00:21:48):
Matic. Yeah.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:21:50):
Yeah. Okay. And, and when I started talking, of course, I knew all these projects, these founders from, from before, and this is small community. We all know each other and all that. And I just started briefly talking with them. And as we started talking, things really started coming together really nicely and we really kind of clicked and we very quickly decided to start working together and, you know, starting work together with someone becoming co-founder with someone it's not a small decision, it's something you don't really decide lightly, but really all the kind of checkpoints with these guys got ticked. And they were very committed to what they were doing. Treasury was managed very well. They were really proactive. They already had very similar vision for let's say the future of Matic and a bunch of things kind of came together nicely. And we just said, okay, let's do this thing together. And that's how Polygon was then officially introduced as our collaboration actually. So I didn't start it as, as a sole founder, we started it together and that turned out to be I would say a really good decision and because of this all like exponential growth that we have all witnessed in the last year and that we are very excited and humbled by. So to just answer your question basically were working, what they had at the time was I, I believe the, the first or one of the first one doesn't even matter, Plasma implementation that we all in production live in production and being ready to use. And they also had this Polygon POS chain. And that's where we, I guess also learned one important lesson. So, so we had this POS chain that was up and running in production and it was fully EVM and compatible. And we had plasma at the same time that was also production ready, available for developers to use, but still 95% of projects, we were completely not biased. You know, when we were discussing with teams and onboarding them, we were actually recommending Plasma as a layer 2 solution because it derives security derived from, from Ethereum more than the POS chain to a certain extent. But developers actually turned out the, this EVM compatibility is really important thing and develop, especially willing to accept certain trade offs, maybe even in terms of kind of security or at least theoretical security to have this convenience of Ethereum development environment. So, so that's something we kind of learned, and then we accepted that, okay, whatever we build moving forward, we really need to try to make it EVM compatible, that is kind of our now one of our design principles for all the solutions that we are building at. So Polygon POS is fully EVM compatible, Polygon edge is fully EVM compatible as well, as our ZK solutions, Polygon Hermez, Polygon Miden and Polygon Zero, that we're very happy to support. So yeah, all of them pretty much have EVM compatibility on, on the roadmap.

Anna Rose (00:24:55):
That was actually one of my big questions was like, was it sort of a fork of geth, the POS chain? And what is the POS in the POS chain? Proof of stake?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:25:05):
Yes, exactly. So, so that's the kind of the, the hybrid of, as I said, the side chain that is operated by a proof of stake set of validators, which is now I don't even track the, the prices to be honest, but I don't know what is today's price, but let's say the total amount of stake in terms of US dollars is probably north of 3 billion on dollars, I guess, maybe even 4. I'm really not sure. So it's pretty significant amount in terms of this economic security that this proof of stake provides. And it's a decentralized validator set, proof of stake based. And we also on top of that and what is very interesting, it actually lives on Ethereum. So in that sense, for example, if, if Ethereum, hypothetically, if Ethereum stops working for whatever reason, POS chain also stops working because the whole validator logic and everything, and the, the bridge itself, everything lIves on Ethereum. So we're kind of like an execution, I guess, extension of Ethereum, maybe in some way.

Anna Rose (00:26:08):
Wow. I have some questions now about how this relates to like the ETH 2 split, because I'm, I'm sure you're paying attention very closely to this. Yes. Like if like, this is super interesting. So your POS you have your own validator set, you have your own locked security from like basically people who've staked their tokens to validators I'm assuming on the network. Yes. And yet there's a bridge. So there's a bridge from Polygon POS chain to Ethereum. And you're saying that there's something in the logic that tracks it, but are, is it sort of like time code, block height? Like what kind of thing? What, what is a track?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:26:44):
In terms of tracking the, the chain only monitors events on Ethereum mainly on the bridging side or validator logic side. So basically the, the whole chain is aware of these two, I guess, groups of contracts. So bridging contract and validator contract. So the chain is aware, what is the active validator set? What are the weights of, of every specific validator? And in terms of the bridge, the chain itself is aware of any message that is requested to be bridged to, to the Polygon POS chain or vice versa from the POS chain to the Ethereum layer 1. And the messages that are supported, there are general arbitrary. So you can even have not only simple token transfers, but you can have some, for example, you have applications like curve that have deployments on both Ethereum layer 1 and on Polygon POS chain. And then you have some governance decisions, for example, on layer 1. And the governance DAO makes a decision and they're able to execute on the POS side via the bridge in a basically trustless manner without any intermediary, because we support this arbitrary message passing that's I guess, one additional convenient feature that this chain supports. But again, just going back to, to the, the major point POS chain is just one concept, one specific implementation on that spectrum of Ethereum scaling solution that we see. And if we were just, I guess, fortunate that chain was up and running, it was fully EVM compatible, and it was available today.

Anna Rose (00:28:15):
Yeah

Mihalio Bjelic (00:28:16):
Last year, we were kind of in that situation where Ethereum gas fees were going crazy. People kind of started leaving the ecosystem to, to some, maybe other layer 1 chains, which are maybe not offering the best tradeoffs in terms of decentralization and whatnot. Of course, I've never, I never liked to talk negatively about any other project, of course, but I, I'm just saying that, I guess it's, it's it's a fact kind of, and I think Polygon was there ready to kind of meet this, that huge demand that, that we were seeing in the market. So the POS chain was very convenient in that regard, but we really now are heads down working, working around the clock really on more advanced this bleeding edge solutions that, that will we really believe push the frontier of innovation. One of them is for example, Polygon Hermez, we can go, if you want to cover more, ZK I guess, based efforts I would, of course, really love that. Definitely. And yeah, we're really excited about it.

Anna Rose (00:29:16):
I wanna do a rundown of all of the different kind of the product suite. I don't know if you'd call it that, but all the different sort of chains and ideas POS chain is this incredibly popular chain and used a lot. And it's very, very large. And like you, what you're saying, sort of like you were there at the right time, right place, you had the EVM compatibility that maybe other teams didn't realize was so incredibly valuable to be able to redeploy a solidity contract on

Mihalio Bjelic (00:29:42):
You learned, you learned that the hard way.

Anna Rose (00:29:44):
You learned it the hard way. I do have one last question about it, which is like, is it Geth or is it something else cuz it's POS? Like what's it based on?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:29:53):
So actually yeah essentially POS is indeed the fork of Geth, at least the execution layer when it comes to consensus, we actually, you using Cosmos ie Tendermint for, for, concensus and for this proof of stake overlay. So that's how it that's how it works for now. Currently we are working on version 3 of the POS chain that should introduce some, I guess, fundamental improvements of how the chain operates and simplify the architectural a little bit because currently it operates in two layers, one is called Hedda and the other one is called Bo, but we don't really, I guess, need to go into that right now, but it is indeed based on, on Geth at least for now.

Anna Rose (00:30:33):
Cool. So you, you mentioned that you have Tendermint and sort of something borrowed from the cosmos ecosystem at the same time. I see, kind of in everything you're saying you're extremely focused on Ethereum, have you considered bridging to Cosmos? Do you have any connection to that ecosystem or do you see yourselves as entirely pointed at Ethereum?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:30:54):
We are fully focused on Ethereum like 100%, but we of course support and encourage al other projects that are adding value to the, to the industry in general. And Cosmos is certainly, I would say one of them and they have made significant contributions to the industry so far already. So yeah. I really love the team and as well as some other teams in the industry, so yeah, wherever there is a meaningful way to collaborate are open for collaboration. But when it comes to our focus, we, we are definitely focused on Ethereum 100% and we are not exploring generally ourselves - integrations with other layer 1s and whatnot. But again, Polygon is a fully permissionless network and platform and we have indeed already the bridges deployed to deploy to some other layer 1s, but it's by third parties it's done by third parties. Like there is, I think now probably even, I would say even 10 bridges from Polygon POS to the Ethereum itself.

Anna Rose (00:31:57):
Wow. Only just to Ethereum. Now that's funny.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:32:00):
Only one of them is kind of, kind of, you can say official, it's not even official. Yes, we have built it, but it's public infrastructure. Of course, of course it's not our property or anything, but there are third parties. I would, I know at least six bridges that are currently operational between Polygon POS and Ethereum and as well, some of them to other chains like BSC or whatever Solana or whatever these layer 1s are out there, but it's, these bridges are done by third parties because it's of course it's a fully permissionless platform and anyone can do pretty much whatever they want.

Anna Rose (00:32:37):
So I think it's a really good time now in the episode to do the kind of rundown of all of the different products, because you've mentioned them a few times, like you've sort of hinted at them the different types of rollups the different types of scaling solutions that you're working on. And maybe we can start with one you already mentioned, which may, I don't know if you'd exactly put it in the category, but this Avail - data availability, do it's a standalone rollup. What would you call it like a chain?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:33:05):
Yeah. It's, it's a chain it's similar to I'm not sure if I should talk about other projects. I guess why not?

Anna Rose (00:33:12):
I would say it sounds similar to Celestia.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:33:15):
Yes, exactly.

Anna Rose (00:33:17):
Okay.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:33:17):
Celestia is also so great. Great project they're tackling the same basically challenge, but we are a little bit more focused. We are actually fully focused on Ethereum. They're more involved with Cosmos as far as I can notice nowadays which is I guess, one difference, very, very Ethereum focused. And the second major difference is when it comes to technology. Basically I think Celestia to the best of my knowledge still, I haven't followed, haven't been following their work really closely lately, but I think that the way you ensure data availability is using fraud proofs on their side. And we use something called Q commitments and some interesting cryptographic and mathematical concepts to actually ensure this data availability. And it's more in line with the, I guess, data availability shards that are being currently researched and developed within the Ethereum 2 as part of Ethereum 2. So it's basically the same line of design that we follow Polygon Avail. And we want to kind of the idea with Avail is to maybe contribute in some way and push that whole effort over a little bit faster. We would like to collaborate more closely. We already have contacts and, and interactions with the Ethereum 2.0 team that's working on, on the sharding itself. And we would maybe like in way everything we do at Polygon we kind of do with the idea to also give back to Ethereum because pretty much all this adoption is we have to thank Ethereum for, for it. Okay. There was a lot of hard work on our side and all of that, that's all fine. But the way Ethereum community kind of embraced us and understood that we are actually adding value to Ethereum instead of just trying to extract value and all of that. And everything happened really nicely and we are very happy about it and we are always looking for ways to, to give value back to Ethereum and Avail also with it, we, we would like to, again, contribute to this Ethreum 2.0 data sharding research and, and in general, but yeah, Polygon Avail is a data availability focused solution. It is also a chain itself. Like Celestia - it is one of the chains in this Polygon ecosystem, this Polygon multi chain ecosystem that we envision and it serves this specific purpose. It, it should do it really well. It sequences data and it stores data. And the, the, I guess it's specific in way that very little over head is required to actually ensure that the data is available. So you can actually have a light client of that blockchain, which can do some small data sampling occasionally throughout time. And with very little overhead, basically for the light client itself, you can stay assured and have higher guarantees, mathematical guarantees that the data is actually is available. And that is kind of the, the nice thing about it. So yeah, it is not a smart contract chain. You cannot deploy apps on it or anything like that. It's literally stores data in a sequenced way, and you can easily ensure that the data is available by doing this sampling that is kind of yeah. Introduces lower overhead.

Anna Rose (00:36:36):
Do you also picture this being sort of the base chain of another ecosystem of rollups or do you see it more like holding data, but making data available for roll ups on Ethereum?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:36:47):
Yes. That's exactly the purpose.

Anna Rose (00:36:49):
So the second one?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:36:50):
Should, yes, yes, yes. So it gonna be the base layer, the base layer you always want as a base layer, something that is highly secure and that is normally Ethereum layer 1. So that should be the base layer for rollups we believe in general, but a roll up storing data on Ethereum layer 1, is simply not scalable. It isn't cheap. It is, expensive consumes, a lot of gas and it significantly, limits, or I would say dramatically limits the, the throughput of these solutions. So you need, we need to look for ways to store data, basically off chain and Avail is just one effort. One of the approach approaches that we are considering experimenting with currently. And yeah, we believe it might be an interesting option to actually keep the data for, for these rollups in moving forward. We also have other approaches and other efforts, as I said, like, we really now just want to facilitate innovation at Polygon. We're still in this early phase, let's just help as many great ideas, try to facilitate them, put some funds, put some resources, put our, I guess, maybe your network effects or whatever, any, or to help that we can provide. And let's see how they play out in the market. Not all of them will survive of course, but it's, I think very exciting and, and meaningful to have this innovation hub that we consider Polygon to be.

Anna Rose (00:38:14):
What about you had sort of mentioned this too. What is Polygon Edge? What is that?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:38:19):
Polygon Edge is another solution in our suite that actually enables anyone to build their own chains within, within this multi-chain Ethereum.

Anna Rose (00:38:29):
Oh, is it like an SDK kind of?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:38:32):
Sort of, yeah, it actually Polygon Edge was called Polygon SDK. Originally we recently rebranding to, to Polygon Edge because we got some feedback that people normally thought for some reason that it's some sort of developer toolkit for the POS chain itself and then

Anna Rose (00:38:50):
Ah, to build Dapps on top of it or something.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:38:53):
Yes, there was some confusion there constantly. We kind of discussed it briefly and decided to rebrand to Polygon Edge. Got it. And it's in some way, equivalent to Cosmos SDK, I guess lots of people have heard about it or substrate.

Anna Rose (00:39:05):
Or Substrate.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:39:05):
Yes, exactly. Yes. So it's kind of our alternative. Also again, you can guess Ethereum fully focused and we currently support these enterprises like standalone PON enterprise EVM chains. We support side chains. That's what we have for now. We recently introduced proof of stake overlay for that consensus. So it's basically a modular framework to build Ethereum compatible chains as we call them moving forward. We want to introduce more consensus algorithms. We want to introduce layer 2 support so people can even build their own layer 2s using Polygon Edge. So that's gonna be pretty cool. A lot of other cool stuff in the roadmap and basically Polygon Edge. As you said before POS chain is a fork of geth. Polygon Edge kind of implementation of the whole Ethereum stack that we use. That's what we use as foundation for Polygon Edge, but build from scratch, which is very interesting. So that was, I guess, one of the very few efforts, at least in recent years to rebuild the whole Ethereum stack. So normally people for geth. It's convenient geth is battle tested and all of that it's been in production for years, but there are, I guess, two, at least major downsides to that one is geth is of course, very monolithically based. There's a lot of interdependencies everywhere. You, you cannot change the things easily. You really want to have something is modular. We've wanted modular. We wanted modular run time. So you can actually with Polygon Edge, you can kind of plug in. You don't have to use EVM necessarily. You can plug in something like Awesome. You can maybe plug in some, not, maybe you can plug in something like, OVM, which is a virtual machine for optimistic rollups and stuff like that. We, we are even now experimenting internally. As a matter of fact, we are right now starting a proof of concept. We are gonna use the Polygon Edge framework. And instead of EVM, we are gonna use ZK EVM that is currently being built by Polygon Hermez team.

Anna Rose (00:41:12):
Yeah.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:41:12):
And we're gonna see how the system runs together and maybe we can significantly speed up the whole development time and maybe solve some of the relatively small challenge, the challenges that we're seeing on the Polygon Hermez side. So yeah, we really wanted something modular, which get definitely is not. So, and the second thing is,

Anna Rose (00:41:30):
It sounds so hard to do this by the way, cuz like you are, what are your reverse engineering geth in a way?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:41:38):
Reverse engineering, the architecture is known, but just building it on scratch is, is pretty challenging. It's, it's a pretty complex stack, you know? So, and we wanted it to be modular. One thing, the second thing is geth is a code base that has been built for years and evolved over time. And it kind of becomes a little bit messy, you know, some parts of the code base, maybe not working, especially, and things like that. There are always parts in this code bases that no one dares to touch.

Anna Rose (00:42:09):
Because they don't know what's it's gonna do?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:42:11):
Don't touch that part basically. Yeah. So we just wanted to rewrite the whole stack in a more, you know, organized well structured manner. And I think we have achieved that. It was really challenging actually. And now we are working with multiple partners. We are gonna have several very big announcements on that side, both on the enterprise side and some big names are already using it. I cannot share more details right now, but it's gonna be public very soon. We are seeing it kind of in testing environment, running very successfully now with any major issues. So I think we maybe have even made it so yeah, that that's Polygon Edge basically like a modular framework for building all sorts of Ethereum compatible chains, basically, ideally, almost everything from that Ethereum scaling spectrum that we mentioned.

Anna Rose (00:42:58):
Do you have any other products or like in your suite, maybe some other scaling solutions that aren't ZK? Because I want, I also wanna soon move over to the ZK side of things, but yeah. Is there anything else maybe on the non ZK that we should know about?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:43:12):
Yeah, we, we are of course supporting or all the solutions or meaningful efforts to scale Ethereum. We are still actively experimenting with optimistic or fraud proof based systems. Okay. But we don't have formal efforts there. I'm not saying we won't have them, but currently we don't have anything that is formalized and official from that side. So I get speak and dive into the ZK part of the...

Anna Rose (00:43:40):
Yay. Okay. So like I had an interview with Jordi and David about when was this? It was last year, spring. And at the time I think at, it was like at the moment that they were actually like joining Polygon and we even had to record a little add on at the end because the announcement happened between the recording and the actual release of the show. And I, it wasn't actually that much about Hermez that was about ZK EVM. So we had gone into the initial plans of ZK EVM, but Hermez itself was also sort of brought over to the Polygon world and I'm wondering like it has its own way of writing itself to chain and creating the SNARKs and creating the proofs. But do you see that like, has it evolved since being incorporated into Polygon or does it still run the same way?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:44:35):
Yeah. Great question. Thanks for that. So Hermez, when, when we started talking to them first, let me just give a very quick kind of preface. So as I said, we support all the solutions or scaling solutions from the spectrum, of course. But having explored extensively all the solutions from the spectrum, we are a little bit biased toward ZK based solutions. We believe taking every, taking everything into account ZK based solutions probably offer the best set of tradeoffs and can actually be the, the, I don't say the holy grail, but can actually be the technology that can help us mitigate almost all these major challenges that we have, including including privacy, which is very important by the way. And it's coming one day now we are all super occupied with scaling and that's like the pressing issue. But once we manage to actually scale privacy is gonna become a very hot and important topic because currently we're just basically our wallets and everything is open to everyone in the world to, to see it and monitor our transaction transactions. And that's not really reliable. And I take, I guess ZK based solutions are very opposition to, to mitigate, I guess all these major challenges that we are facing right now as an industry, I guess. Yeah, and we kind of formalized, I guess, that bias in, by publishing our ZK thesis sometime last year, I guess, maybe in June, something like that where we actually explained what I said now, and we committed $1 billion dollars from our treasury to support ZK based efforts, be it R&D or projects or acquisitions or talent acquiring, grants, anything basically that can help the industry move forward. And that's how we start that's when we started actually establishing this Polygon ZK based or ZK team, if you want our ecosystem or call it whatever. Yeah. And Hermez is the, the first project that we, that we officially introduced and we are super excited to work with the, with the team team is spearheaded by Jordi. Who's a kind of living legend of Ethereum and they already had the...

Anna Rose (00:46:53):
And the living and legend of ZK.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:46:55):
Yes, yes. Jordi and the team, they, they built the only for now decentralized ZK rollup, this is very interesting. So this is even today, the only decentralized ZK rollup, it doesn't have a centralized operator centralized sequencer, all the rollups out there, actually not only ZK, but ZK and optimistic, all of them have a centralized operator, all of them apart from Hermez. So Hermez by design has decentralized operator and some interesting model for picking the operator based on auctions and whatnot. And it is live on mainnet, but it is limited to mainly payment use cases, you know, token and transfers and things like that. So that brings us again, back to, to this Ethereum compatibility thing and how, how needed it is basically for any scaling solution to be widely adopted and Hermez team understood that.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:47:47):
And we start started talking and we really kind of clicked on multiple levels. And yeah, we really liked that there started work on ZK EVM. We recognize of course the importance of that. We, after some period of negotiations, we decided to, to join hands and yes, so far the, again that proves to be so far, very good decision, I believe. And we are heading towards Testnet. I'm really happy to say that. I think we can even mark the day today, but let's say in three months from today, it's, it's always tricky to give this...

Anna Rose (00:48:25):
You're putting pressure on Jordi and the team right now. Huh? Yes.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:48:27):
But I, I spent the couple of days now with Jordi and the team, we spent a couple of days together now went over everything that has been worked on lately. And we are of course constantly in touch very closely. We are all very confident to say that in three months we will have a Tesnet of ZK EVM, and that's gonna be to the best of my knowledge again, the first implementation of Ethereum virtual machine in, in a ZK friendly manner. And we are of course, super excited about it. And we started this effort of establishing Polygon ZK team or, or ecosystem if you will. And one of the teams that we a lot of respect for was definitely Hermez and we started discussing with them. And after a series of discussions, we recognized identified a lot of synergies, mainly the, the upcoming Hermez 2.0, how we still call it kind of internally. And to answer your question, basically, what's new on the Hermez side. So yes, they, they have already built this decentralized roll up, which is live on the mainnet now, but it supports generally only payments, dock and transfers and things like that. And as we previously said, like we learned the hard way the EVM comfortability is very important, I guess. So it was great to recognize synergies there and they're also starting this ZK EVM effort, and now we are well on our way to actually deliver that. So along the way, we agreed how we can start join hands, start working together. And basically Polygon Hermez was announced in that I guess, interesting acquisition merger basically, which is to the best of my knowledge, the first, the first example of one network absorbing another one, I guess, cause Polygon token absorbed kind of Hermez token. And that was also kind of a pretty cool, I guess, experiment. And, but going back to the technology itself Hermez the whole team is now fully focused on delivering ZK EVM, which is going to be, we believe to the best of our, our knowledge, the first basically EVM fully EVM compatible ZK rollup out there. We are very optimistic about, about delivering. And I think I can share basically that in three months from now, from this day today, we can expect actually ZK EVM on the, on the Testnet, which is really, really cool. And we are, again, it's we are always careful with this timelines, of course, but I'm constantly in touch with Hermez team. We are, we are constantly updating each other. We are working together and we are very confident that within three months from now, we can have this on, on the Testnet, which, which is gonna be very, very exciting.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:51:17):
In parallel, we are starting some accelerate efforts there in terms of mainly harder acceleration, which is going to be almost necessary, I guess at least in this first iterations of ZK based solutions. So I, I'm not sure if many of your listeners know, but harder acceleration is basically something that can significantly improve the throughput itself or computational efficiency of the ZK proofs and related operations. So we are also working there very actively to establish a strong team on that side and ideally further accelerate the ZK EVM once we have it out there on, on the mainnet, ideally within six months or so that that's our target for now.

Anna Rose (00:51:59):
Like I said, just before there is an entire episode, all about the ZK EVM. If someone wants to go a little deeper into what that looks like I'll add the link to that, the show notes as well, if someone wants to hear it.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:52:10):
Yeah. Excellent. Yeah, highly recommended. It's a great episode and very interesting thing that Jordi came up with these micro VMs and in general, very, very interesting technology.

Anna Rose (00:52:20):
Totally. Although interestingly, after that aired - I did learn about two other ZK EVM projects. There's definitely something brewing in the EF around this. Yeah. And so there, there is like quite a few, I mean, I think the idea of that, like as an EVM kind of secured by a ZK rollup or yeah. A ZK, a zero knowledge proof somewhere along the stack. I think in the case of the ZK EVM that Jordi does, there's actually two, I think it's a really exciting, challenging kind of goal. I think a lot of people are gonna wanna do it. I'm excited to see how different people approach it actually.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:52:53):
Absolutely. Absolutely. And we are of course, very collaborative and Jordi indeed and we are working with EF people mainly with Barry. Barry's leading that effort to best again from the side and we are having Jordi and him are also collaborating very well. And there's another project I think, called Scroll that yes. I think something like, yeah, if I'm not mistaken, they're trying to reimplement also or to implement ZK EVM, I think based main, mainly on this EF based effort, that varies that's that's my understanding at least I think you were doing something in that regard. I'm not sure. Yeah. They were experimenting also with something like that...

Anna Rose (00:53:37):
Who were?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:53:37):
Loopring

New Speaker (00:53:37):
Oh, oh, I didn't know about that. Oh, that's cool.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:53:39):
I think I heard that. I think I heard not quite sure, but I think I've heard that they also of working with EF in, in some way, some way, which is super cool for us, of course. Like let's all push the frontier of innovation together.

Anna Rose (00:53:54):
Totally. What else in the ZK stack do we have to look forward to, or can already play with I'm thinking maybe we can hear a bit about like Nightfall?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:54:03):
Yeah. Let let's briefly cover I as the three remaining efforts on our side. So as I said, Polygon Hermez at least the upcoming version currently is a payment focused rollup. Upcoming ZK EVM is full blown EVM ZK secured implementation. We are very excited about it. As I, as I already explained, we have Polygon Miden, Polygon Zero and Polygon Nightfall left to cover. So Polygon Nightfall is unique in this ZK solutions ecosystem in a sense that at least in Polygon, because it's the only one that is privacy focused, it is privacy first solution. It's not focused on scalability. It's focused on privacy. Yeah, so it, basical was started by the great team from the EY basically lead by Paul Brody, who is what I guess the more prominent people from the enterprise ecosystem in our industry. And they started this, this first of all, they built this Nightfall library that is providing privacy features for mainly for enterprises on Ethereum mainnet. They realize it is very kind of geth heavy, like all, I guess, ZK operations on, on mainnet. And they started exploring these off chain solutions and having this kind of separate chain or rollup whatever. And that's people were in touch already and working on some things together and said, okay, let's do it together. And that's how Polygon Nightfall was, was born and announced. And basically it's a again interesting hybrid of optimistic rollup and ZK rollup. And again, going back to what I said in the beginning, this ecosystem is very broad, very interesting, and we can see all sorts of hybrids. There are all sorts of solutions. So I wouldn't, I, I don't like the hellbent, you know, this is layer 2, or this is not layer 2. Let's just allow this whole ecosystem to kind of try and develop and let's see what we can come up with. So it's sort of combines components of, of, of optimistic rollups and ZK tech to actually provide this privacy first solution. So you can even kind of think of it as a Tornado. A lot of people know Tornado from the Ethereum mainnet, and you can kind of think of it to a certain extent as Tornado, but more scalable, more affordable because it's on its own scaling solution, not on the Ethereum mainnet. So it is generally focused on enterprises, but we really have a clear understanding of the EY team that is going to be a part of the public infrastructure and available to anyone. And we are also, we already have this public interface being built right now and things like that. So, so it's pretty interesting. We are also adding, working on adding additional features, programability exploring the next version of the, of the solution itself. Yeah. And we are making very good progress. I think towards the, the mainnet should hit the mainnet really soon. I believe it's already on Testnet so yeah.

Anna Rose (00:57:04):
The next one I know you already mentioned was Miden and we actually did a full episode on Miden as well. The thing is, I love doing this with you. I almost feel like we should have done this product suite episode before, because there's so many projects in the suite that I wanna actually have on for full episodes to explore what they're doing. So if anyone wants to hear about Miden been the stark-focused solution there is a full episode on that, but I think it's worth mentioning at least briefly what it is and how that fits in?

Mihalio Bjelic (00:57:34):
Absolutely. Yes. And I think it's fine that you're doing this now. At least now we have all these solutions, at least publicly out there. And when we announced Polygon, it was still mainly about POS chain. And we really, really trying to communicate that idea of Polygon being an unopinionated, multi-chain platform or solution with multiple solutions basically supported and in the works. And, but there's still a lot of narratives in this industry and a lot of, let's say empty promises. So it was, was kind of also important to really put something out there to really prove actually that we're not just talking, that we're actually working and, and building actual tech and putting it there. So now we have all these efforts, public and, and very much in the works. So...

Anna Rose (00:58:21):
I wanna mention something for our audience that like, I actually, we've been trying to interview for like at least four or five months, I think. Right.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:58:30):
I'm really embarrassed.

Anna Rose (00:58:33):
Can we kept getting pushed off? Cause it was like something's coming.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:58:37):
Yeah. Yeah. Because I told you that like really for us, it was really important to kind of prove ourselves to the community and to actually show we have the capacity that we have formal efforts capable expert teams working on them just to basically prove that it's what we're saying, actually we are, we are also putting to work. Yes. So now we can discuss it, of these solutions separately and openly. Totally.

Anna Rose (00:59:05):
So yeah, Miden, let's yeah,

Mihalio Bjelic (00:59:07):
Really sorry for, for the delay and you also, we're constantly like super busy, so of course, thank you for understanding.

Anna Rose (00:59:14):
No problem. No problem. I don't mean to bring you on and then shame you or something. I'm just happy that we finally got to do it.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:59:21):
But I deserve it. OK.

Anna Rose (00:59:23):
Anyway, tell us, tell us a little bit about Miden. I think it's important.

Mihalio Bjelic (00:59:27):
Okay. Cool. Of course. Yeah. Miden is a stark-based effort. It's a scaling focused effort. It's a ZK rollup stark only exclusively based on stark. It is in that regard, you can think of it as somewhat comparable to, I guess what starkware is doing because it's also stark based stark only based scaling solution. But difference is that Miden is fully open source. We really believe in Polygon. We really believe in open source technology and everything, absolutely everything we build. And we that we ever built in the Polygon ecosystem will be open source. We want to follow this ethos of web 3. And everything that Miden is working is fully open source, of course. And there are then some deeper differences when it comes to architecture. So both projects have their respectable virtual machines, which are stark-based Miden has Miden VM, stark has stark VM, I believe. And yeah, the architectures are kind of different and whoever wants to understand the differences, I guess better is to, to listen to the, to the Miden episode itself, Bobbin explains that in more detail, I can maybe cover it briefly, or it's not required right now, but there are some architectural differences. And yes. And another thing that we are focusing on very much, I guess, is that Ethereum compatibility, as I said, so the, the Miden VM have, has its own native assembly, but we are actually actively thinking in line of compiling solid to that assembly. And that is already set as one of the design goals for the VM itself and the assembly alongside with it. And that's something also very important, I guess, to mention. Cool. When it comes to this solution. The solution is spearheaded by, by Bobbin, Bobbin is prominent ZK researcher. He was ZK lead, Facebook's Novi for quite some time, he built Winterfell. Winterfell is very interesting decentralized stark prover that was built in as part of Facebook Novi and Bobbin left Novi and started basically Miden with us. Miden is kind end of successor of of Distaff VM. Distaff was Bobby's project. That's how I actually met Bobin. We met in ETH research. Bobbin published Distaff as his first effort to build stark base stark base virtual machines sometime ago, I think maybe two and a half years ago, I guess, roughly. And that's how we met basically on Eth Research and started talking and I really liked his ideas and I kind of invited him, started talking to him and eventually we also decided to, to join hence, and that's how Polygon Miden was introduced. And we might go now to Polygon Zero, if you want to cover...

Anna Rose (01:02:24):
Sure, although I wanna keep the Polygon Zero brief because actually in the next week or two, I have a schedule to actually have a full episode to look into what that is. Another team I'd been trying to have on for a while is Mir. It was a request from the audience and they also were like, just wait, just wait, just wait. And now finally it was announced that there had been something happening between your two organizations and it all made sense. But yeah, what is maybe just briefly what is Polygon Zero, and maybe you can give people a bit of a taste for what we're gonna talk about next time when I bring them on for a full episode.

Mihalio Bjelic (01:03:01):
Okay, cool. Maybe you can tell me how secretive I should be now.

Anna Rose (01:03:05):
Ah, just be vague.

Mihalio Bjelic (01:03:08):
Okay. Deal. So as some of your listeners might already know recently we announced this Mir acquisition. Mir is a less known ZK startup in, in my humble opinion, one of the most underappreciated ZK teams out there, they have a very, very strong team with some very cool technology in, in works and already out there. The, the main piece of the technology for now at least is Plonky 2. So Plonky 2, is the world's fastest recursive ZK prover out there. It is a significant breakthrough in terms of engineering on that front. And it is, I guess at least two orders of magnitude. Again, it's not up to me to compare. And Brendan and Daniel, the founders of Polygon Zero, which is which used to be Mir can cover it in more depth in the, in the episode itself. But basically it is by far the fastest, if you will, ZK scaling technology available today, and the whole team has done a great deal of optimizations and they, they build this really great piece of technology and we are super excited to have them also as part of the Polygon family and working on, on Polygon Zero. So Polygon Zero is also ZK rollup, in a sense, similar to Mir, similar, sorry to, to Polygon Miden but the difference is it is based on, on plonky 2, as the core piece of the infrastructure and the whole virtual machine will be based on that it on the technology and in a similar manner, basically we want to see solidity compatibility by transpiling from solidity to the native assembly of the virtual machine. That Zero is, is building. So these things are kind of similar, but the technology and the team are, are different. So yeah, the, the backstory is that I also know Daniel the founder of one of the two founders of Polygon Zero also from ETH research. So back in the days, we also had some. Yeah, that was,

Anna Rose (01:05:17):
And when you say ETH research, you mean the, like the forum, the board where people post things,

Mihalio Bjelic (01:05:23):
Sorry. Yeah. Assume people know it, but I dunno why I'm assuming the, I meant...

Anna Rose (01:05:27):
Most people probably do know it. The ones who listen

Mihalio Bjelic (01:05:29):
Yeah. It's, it's popular Ethereum research forums where I don't know, like Ethereum geeks are hanging out and yeah. Getting to know each other, I guess. And that's where I met also Daniel, we kind of became friends and also during our effort to establish this ZK team or ecosystem, we decided to join hands and also super excited and humbled to have this guys on board, super strong team and yeah. Excited to see what will come from their side. And just to give just to kind of wrap it up now, a lot of people are asking us, okay, you have three scaling-focused, ZK efforts. Why are you doing that? Like, what's, what's wrong with you. Basically. We, we keep, we keep hearing that. And again, I keep going to, to original point or premise that this is very early phase of innovation still. And we want that, as I said, to let 1000 flowers bloom let's support multiple efforts, let encourage innovation. And what we are very, very happy about is that these teams are working together really, really well. So there's very close collaboration between these teams and great, great energy. We have regular weekly calls. We have of course, a synchronous communication on kind of a daily level teams are updating each other, collaborating with each other. We even kind of said the incentives in a sense that we have, of course, financial arrangements, we, you to these teams. And some of the parts of the arrangement is tied to the actual adoption of the solution. We set incentives in a way that if only one of the teams kind of make it in terms of adoption, adoption bonuses are being unlocked for all the teams. Cool. So no one is, they're kind of incentivized to work together. There's no incentive against each other, but that being said, these people are already great guys and highly ethical, and they don't even need these incentives to be honest, but even the incentives are, I guess, kind of there. And it's like really amazing if you remember, Anna I invited you, maybe you can come one time to this weekly calls that we have with our ZK teams. So the energy just to attend this one call and here and feel the energy there, it's like super exciting. And every time on this call every week, basically I'm being humbled over and over again. And, and really proud that, you know, I can call myself a co-founder of a project that has such a great team. It's like, it's really amazing. Yeah. And just to kind of finalize my, my thought. So this is the current situation and these projects are indeed separate now and each of the teams are pursuing their dreams and we want to enable and facilitate that at Polygon, but none of the teams or us as Polygon co-founders are excluding the possibility that some of these projects feel converged somewhere along the way.

Mihalio Bjelic (01:08:26):
You know, like

Anna Rose (01:08:27):
This is exciting

Mihalio Bjelic (01:08:28):
Someone drawing hands, maybe not like we really don't want to put any sort of pressure or influence any sort of decisions there. We just want to be a facilitator. We just want to be that positive force in the ecosystem, not some big evil, you know, project that now has a lot of money in the treasury and goes left and right. And buys projects and tells them what to do, whatever

Anna Rose (01:08:52):
I can actually already imagine. One part. So ZK EVM, which uses something from Starks technology. And SNARKs, I would love to see if there's any kind of collaborative points there. I can already picture like Bobbin and Jordi potentially sharing some info there.

Mihalio Bjelic (01:09:09):
Absolutely. We already have now scheduled in real life, IRL like basically meeting in, in Denver now as, so all the teams are gathering there. We will all be there. We'll spend several days again, working together, brainstorming, as I said, it's really a great, great atmosphere among all these teams. Yes. So we're super, super happy about that. And we'll see how that will actually what will be the appeal, I guess, of that collaboration. We just want to let it happen organically, basically.

Anna Rose (01:09:41):
Cool, cool. I actually, I wanna mention something cuz you know, we're talking a lot about this group and how they're, they're sort of the, the ideas are being formed and they're sharing and all of this, we actually Mihailo like Polygon and myself actually have a, a fun collaboration coming up around the ZK hack. So the ZK Hack Polygon is actually the building partner for the ZK Hack Mini, which starts on March 1st. I think I have it actually in the ad of this episode as well and Polygon as the building partner, we're actually gonna get to hear from a lot of these projects and the workshops that we're hosting, every week we're doing a workshop, it will actually be a bunch of these Polygon teams. So I'm very, very excited to also share some of this even further with the audience. So anyone who would love to get a little taste of this should definitely check it out.

Mihalio Bjelic (01:10:27):
Yeah. Super exciting. Please check it out and thanks Anna for inviting us to, to collaborate.

Anna Rose (01:10:32):
Totally. So we had Circom at ZK Hack 1, but we didn't have anything from Polygon universe really. And so I, we thought it would make sense for us to feature you.

Mihalio Bjelic (01:10:42):
Yeah, definitely. Thanks again for, for inviting us. We need to be definitely, we are very much aware that we need to be more out there. It just, things are happening very fast on our side and yeah. We, we going to be technology first. We want to focus on great tech and facilitate processes on that side. And then we want to of course, step up the, the communication side of things and marketing and basically speak with the community more and engage ourselves with the efforts. Like the one you mentioned now that's, this was really important, but, but for us it was more important to establish the processes, establish roadmaps, establish teams, allocate resources, et cetera. All of that happened basically in the past four months or so with, for all these four teams. So it was quite a run. Yeah. But I guess we'll be out there more now.

Anna Rose (01:11:39):
I wanna ask you a little bit of like, what's next and maybe another, even more pointed question, like everything right now is very, very focused on being, being EVM compatible. But do you even see like an evolution of what that means ever? Or would you stick purely to what exists now? Because I know there's other kind of EVM compatible chains that are thinking of like adding things that EVM like the current EVM on Ethereum doesn't I love saying that the current Ethereum virtual machine on Ethereum anyway, the current EVM, like the, the known Ethereum L1 EVM doesn't have so like actually adding new features, is this anything you're ever thinking of?

Mihalio Bjelic (01:12:22):
Of course. So, so to answer your first question, what is next? So I believe for this year, our goal is mainly kind of consolidation. So Polygon and the last year grew exponentially. And of course, when that happens, you have these growing pains and the internal organization is I don't tend to see a little bit chaotic, but it is at times, it just kind of, I guess, unavoidable when you grow exponentially. And we are kind of trying to, to establish this organization to, to become more streamlined and everything again, without centralizing the project too much. So it's delicate kind of balance that we will try to really establish this year that's important for us. And just to further facilitate and continue with these efforts that we have, we don't foresee introducing too many efforts on the new efforts on the tech side. I think we covered all of our major interests pretty well for now. We just need to focus on the existing products and help them build as good and as fast as possible on the adoption side and business side. I think we are very focused on that my co-founder Sandeep, leading that, that side of things. And he's that extremely well. We are focusing on this major mega I guess, niches NFTs games and DeFi and enterprise division that is currently being established pretty much. And we have also some great projects there lined up. So that's about it for us, I guess. And

Anna Rose (01:13:56):
I love that. Like, that's about it. That's... All only these like,

Mihalio Bjelic (01:14:03):
Yeah, there's, there's another, another, I guess major effort is this upcoming token redesign. It's something that we really need to do and we are working on it already. The effort started, I guess like one month ago slowly.

Anna Rose (01:14:17):
What does that mean? What is a token redesign? Like are you talking the mechanics or the,

Mihalio Bjelic (01:14:22):
Yeah, yeah. So Polygon was, as I said in the beginning of the, of the episode. So at some point I decided to join hands with Matic and our token is still called Matic. Yeah. And it's end of the, maybe the last, I guess maybe legacy of Matic itself. And it was designed to power the, the architecture that was introduced back in the days with, with Matic. Polygon is a kind of new paradigm of this multi-chain system built around or on top of Ethereum. And the token that we envision should power and secure this whole multi-chain paradigm. Oh yeah. It's not going to be a mandatory, like, it's really important to say, we don't want to force anybody. We don't, we just want this token to actually enable security. We don't want it to be a mandatory token that everyone you have to buy use or stake or anything, it should be stay under the hood for majority of the users. But we see a lot of potential in uh introducing some, some changes to the token design itself, the mechanics and how it is utilized within this ecosystem. And that's where we are probably gonna change the ticker also. So for us, the announcement of Polygon, it wasn't just a mere rebranding for us. It was the announcement of fundamental, you know, shift in, in vision and, and some new chapter for, for the project itself. So also that's why we decided, okay, let's just leave the token for now as it is. And once we actually change the ticker to something Polygon probably like polar, whatever doesn't even matter for now, we're gonna decide on it later when that happens. We want that to be also signed that we have put a lot of thinking into this token and actually, and how it brings value, how it takes value to the ecosystem, how it is utilized across the ecosystem. And when we actually have clarity or clear vision on that, that's when that also event is going to happen. So I would like that to happen this year. It'll take quite a lot of work. I'm not sure we already have a lot of our plate. I hope we can do it this year.

Anna Rose (01:16:31):
Would you have to redesign this somehow to like work across all of the different networks as well? Or would it still live on the POS chain?

Mihalio Bjelic (01:16:41):
No, no, absolutely. It's going to be used in Hermez, in Miden. Zero. It's just, we have very clear kind of principles already or, or high level and core ideas. It just needs lot of analytics simulations to become kind of confident about ideas that you have.

Anna Rose (01:17:01):
Is there any influence, is there any other token influence, like I'm trying to pick, is there any other token that actually natively lives on multiple chains? Can it, like, it's always wrapped versions as far as I know.

Mihalio Bjelic (01:17:13):
Yeah. It can be wrapped version. It can live on Ethereum, but it facilitates or secures these other, these other chains in these other projects. It, there are multiple ways how it can be utilized, but maybe mainly to provide security or to pick operators or validators or introduce introduce rewards because when you're bootstrapping, for example, some new network, let's say we want to have the ideally want to have Hermez 2.0 and ZK EVM is a decentralized rollup. We wouldn't want to have it centralized in the long run. So you want to bootstrap that network. So ideally if you, a token that's providing rewards in a similar manner, like other POS chains or Polygon POS chain that should help bootstrap this network of, of operators compared to when you don't have any token there. So you have, I guess, to rely only on transaction fees and then it becomes this chicken and egg problem, typical for any marketplace, you know, you don't have enough fees, you don't have enough validators.

Mihalio Bjelic (01:18:12):
And then you enter that. I guess we should circle at some point or things like that. So definitely we have, I would say very interesting ideas. We just need to formalize them more, test them do a bunch of simulations. We want to involve some prominent people from the industry who are experts in the field. I don't want to, I guess, name names now, but pretty, pretty known pretty prominent in the industry to help us with that effort. And yeah, I guess these two things are main focus is mainly for us in this year, apart from all the work that we are already doing, like these products. And then the adoption side,

Anna Rose (01:18:53):
I have to go back to the question that I first asked. Cause I realized we forgot to get back to it, which is the EVM EVM itself. Like the like yeah. Is, do you actually imagine in a ZK EVM, does the EVM eventually evolve too?

Mihalio Bjelic (01:19:08):
Yes. I, I wanted to get back to that now. So EVM is kind of defacto the, the standard right now in the industry. And we just, for the sake of adoption, we are acknowledging that and we are acting accordingly. Okay. So, but we are not being EVM maximalists in any way. We want technology to move forward. We never want to consider any technology perfect, every technology is far from perfect, of course, especially in these early phases and we are open for all the alternatives and all alternative approaches. And that's where for example, these alternative virtual machines, like the one being built by Polygon Zero for example, or Polygon Miden are interesting in a sense that these virtual machines you can think of them as a or their instruction set as a super set of EVM instruction set. And that practically means that it is possible to for these virtual machines to be Ethereum compatible or Solidity compatible, but they're, they have more potential or wider potential, so they can actually be targeted by some other programming languages.

Mihalio Bjelic (01:20:16):
For example, Bobbin, who's spearheading Polygon mIDEN is really interested, interested recently in Move the, the programming languages, programming language built at Facebook's Novi. And you can also have deterministic subsets of rust or whatever, any other popular mainstream programming language targeting these virtual machines. So I don't think we are gonna have EVM, you know, in use forever, maybe it'll happen, but I doubt technology involves technology moves forward, especially again, like for the 10th time, we are still in very early phase with Web3 in general. But I think if we replace EVM one day, it's gonna be by some sort of soft work. As we say in blockchain, it's not like something that will completely disrupt EVM. It's gonna be rather something that is kind of compatible EVM, for example, like Polygon Zero. Yeah. But it has broader instruction set or can support other high level languages or something like that. And then you can kind of gradually replace EVM. That's the most likely scenario we see for replacing EVM, I guess, in the long run.

Anna Rose (01:21:32):
Cool. Mihailo, I wanna say a big thank you for coming on the show and sharing with us this amazing kind of product suite, all of the different solutions that you've been building or investing in, or kind of gathering together under the Polygon umbrella. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing this with us.

Mihalio Bjelic (01:21:51):
Thank you so much, Anna for inviting me, it was really a pleasure and I hope your listeners will like the episode. And I hope this was somewhat clear, right? I know we have a lot of going on on the product side and it might not be very easy to digest initially, I guess what is important is that we at least have clarity or we believe we have clarity of vision. What are these components used for in the long term. And yeah, it's definitely gonna be exciting year or years to come.

Anna Rose (01:22:23):
It's very ambitious and I obviously wish you luck. And actually, as I mentioned earlier, in this episode, we do have one of those projects, Polygon Zero, who will be on the show either next week or the week after. So very soon. So we can continue to explore even more of this ecosystem. Thanks again.

Mihalio Bjelic (01:22:40):
Thank you so much, Anna.

Anna Rose (01:22:41):
I wanna say big thank you to the podcast producer, Tanya, the podcast editor Henrik and to our listeners. Thanks for listening.