Marc Bairon, CEO of Polygon Labs, speaks with a clarity practiced that reflects his background as a lawyer. In the course of our conversation, it describes Polygon’s strategy to position itself as connective tissue in a blockchain ecosystem increasingly full of people. As the competition intensifies and the market conditions fluctu, Polygon is betting on a new product called Agglayer to unify the fragmented world of blockchain, an ambitious vision, although not without its challenges.
Booton’s road to Blockchain leadership followed an unconventional route through legal corridors. A former partner of the law firm, served as legal director of DYDX before joining Polygon Labs in a similar capacity, which finally amounted to the CEO. He talked about Blockchain infrastructure, while the industry faces interoperability, scalability and practical utility issues.
Booton is a speaker at this year’s consensus festival in Toronto from May 14 to 16.
COINDESK: Your experience is mainly by law instead of technology. Tell me about that?
BOIRON: I am the CEO of Polygon Labs. I have been the CEO for about two years. Before that, I was the legal director of Polygon Labs for about a year. I joined Polygon after being the legal director of Dydx for a while. Frankly, I was really excited to join a team that sought to climb web3 in the way Polygon is.
Before being in Polygon’s legal team, I was a member of several large law firms in the US, advising Crypto since 2017.
COINDESK: Polygon describes himself how to build a ‘value of value’. That is a convincing phrase, but what does it really mean in concrete terms?
BOIRON: From Polygon’s perspective, we are trying to build an internet without trust that is easily accessible to anyone to do whatever they want with their assets. The way it appears is through a product that we are developing called Agglayer. Aglayer is intended to be a form of settlement for each chain through cryptography in general.
The Internet of the value contrasts with today’s Internet, which is mainly the Internet of information. Web3’s fundamental innovation provides real value in the chain. The challenge we face is how to climb this capacity throughout the digital ecosystem
At this time, the answer is many different blockchains that exist. But if you really want to have something that feels like the Internet of the information that becomes on the Internet of the value, it needs something that gathers all those chains so that it can obtain a large number of transactions in all these chains, but in a perfect way that feels like the current Internet. Therefore, the internet of value really gives life through Agglayer.
COINDESK: Interoperability has been promised by many projects over the years. What technical approach is taking Polygon with Agglayer who believes that it will succeed where others have had problems?
BOIRON: Agglayer is a product designed to join all web3 in a single settlement layer. Currently, what is missing in the ecosystem is a safe way to move between different chains.
The only effective solution for safe and fast cross chain movement is to use a settlement layer as an aglayer. In practice, this means the ability to finish transactions between two different chains in less than two seconds.
Our model differs from another cross -chain infrastructure in how to handle asset transfers. We monitor all the assets that enter and leave the chains. When someone starts a transfer of assets outside a chain, we use pessimistic tests to verify and confirm the existence of assets in that chain before allowing transfer.
Currently, this system works exclusively with Polygon CDK chains. However, we will soon launch an update that allows any EVM chain to connect to Agglayer. This expansion brings us closer to our vision of unifying all web3 through Agglayer.
COINDESK: real world assets in Blockchain have been discussed for years with limited practical implementation. What is your perspective on RWAS and how do they fit into Polygon’s general approach to the market?
BOIRON: One of Polygon’s central strengths has always been our relations with financial institutions, which is crucial for both real world assets (RWA) and for payments.
When it comes to payments, Polygon Pos houses almost 50 stablecoins. All the main Fintech players that operate in other chains are also in Polygon, although many polygon -based companies operate exclusively on our platform.
For example, Lemon Cash in Argentina operates exclusively on our platform. Other important payment companies such as Stripe Process most of its volume through Polygon Post, while companies such as Singapore use Polygon Post along with other chains.
We have established 18 tokenized funds in Polygon Pos, and our strategy focuses on making these assets really functional. Currently, most tokenized assets in all chains remain inactive after creation, offering little advantage over their traditional counterparts.
Our approach is to integrate these assets in Defi, starting with enabling them as collateral in loan groups for loan purposes.
COINDESK: How does Polygon respond to the recent market volatility and regulatory developments?
BOIRON: From our perspective, we continue to build independently of whatever the environment. We know what we want to build, and we continue to build it.
Market reactions obviously affect adoption. Ultimately, the economy ends up impacting the adoption of everything in the world, and is not different for cryptography. All we can do is continue building and, as the market becomes, being very well positioned with excellent products that users want to use.
COINDESK: Several new blockchains have been launched with claims of higher performance metrics. How does the polygon place its original post chain in this increasingly competitive landscape?
BOIRON: I think Polygon Pos is already very well positioned for that. There is a reason why we see that payments are adopted in Post, because in reality it is already fast and low cost.
The thing with everything we build, including Polygon Pos, is that we continue to adapt it. One of the exciting things is that we can see innovations throughout the space. People can see how Polygon Pos is innovated and adopts some of those things. We can see what others are doing and adopting some of their ideas, as well as continuing to investigate and bring new ideas ourselves.
So I think that what you will finish seeing in Pos is a chain that is so fast or faster than all the new chains we are talking about here. The good thing is that it comes with years of very good security and even maintaining the low costs that currently exist in the chain.
