Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, speaks with a clarity practiced which reflects its history as a lawyer. During our conversation, he describes Polygon’s strategy to position himself as the connective tissue in an increasingly congested blockchain ecosystem. While competition intensifies and market conditions fluctuate, Polygon bets on a new product called Aglayer to unify the fragmented world of blockchain – an ambitious vision, but not without its challenges.
The Boiron path to the leadership of the blockchain followed an unconventional route through legal corridors. Former partner of the law firm, he was legal director at Dydx before joining Polygon Labs on a similar basis, possibly by the CEO. He talked about the blockchain infrastructure, because the industry is faced with questions of interoperability, scalability and practical utility.
Boiron is a speaker at the this year’s consensus festival in Toronto from May 14 to 16.
Coindesk: Your experience is mainly in law rather than technology. Tell me about that?
Boiron: I am the CEO of Polygon Labs. I have been CEO for about two years now. Before that, I was the main legal director of Polygon Labs for about a year. I joined Polygon after being the main legal director at 0x for a while. I was frankly really excited to join a team that sought to evolve web3 like polygon.
Before being part of the Polygon legal team, I was a partner of various big law firms in the United States, advising on crypto since 2017.
Coindesk: Polygon describes itself as creating an “value Internet”. It is a convincing sentence, but what does it really mean in concrete terms?
Boiron: From Polygon’s point of view, we try to create an internet without confidence that makes it easily accessible to anyone to do what they want when they wish with their assets. The way it appears goes through a product that we develop called Aggayer. Agglayer is intended to be a form of regulation for each chain through the crypto in general.
The internet of value contrasts with today’s internet, which is mainly the Internet of information. The fundamental innovation of Web3 brings real value on the chain. The challenge we face is how to evolve this capacity on the entire digital ecosystem
Currently, the answer is many different blockchains that exist. But if you really want to have something that looks like the internet of information becoming the Internet of value, you need something that brings together all these channels so that you can get a massive amount of transactions that occur in all these channels, but in a transparent way that looks like the current Internet. Thus, the Internet of value is really returned by Aggayer.
Coindesk: Interoperability has been promised by many projects over the years. What technical approach adopts the polygon with an agglayer who, in your opinion, will succeed where others have had trouble?
Boiron: Aggayer is a product designed to unite all web3 on a single layer of settlement. Currently, what is missing in the ecosystem is a secure means of moving between different channels.
The only effective solution for secure and fast inter-chain movement is to use a layer of regulation as an agglayer. In practice, this means the ability to finalize transactions between two different channels in less than two seconds.
Our model differs from other transversal infrastructure in the way it manages asset transfers. We monitor all the active ingredients that come out of the channels. When someone initiates a transfer of assets in a chain, we use pessimistic proof to verify and confirm the existence of assets on this chain before authorizing the transfer.
Currently, this system works exclusively with CDK polygonal chains. However, we soon launch an update that will allow any EVM channel to connect to Aggayer. This expansion brings us closer to our vision of unification of all web3 by Aggayer.
Coindesk: active active worlds on blockchain have been discussed for years with a limited practical implementation. What is your perspective on RWAS, and how do they fit into the global approach of Polygon on the market?
Boiron: One of the main forces of Polygon has always been our relations with financial institutions, which is crucial for active world (RWA) and payments.
Regarding payments, polygon poses accommodates nearly 50 stablecoins. Each fintech main player that operates on other channels is also on the polygon, although many polygons-based companies operate exclusively on our platform.
For example, Lemon Cash in Argentina works exclusively on our platform. Other large payment companies such as Stripe treat most of their volume via Polygon Pos, while companies like Grab in Singapore use Polygon POs alongside other channels.
We have established 18 tokenized funds on Polygon POS, and our strategy focuses on the realization of these assets. Currently, most of the tokenized assets through the channels remain dormant after creation, offering little advantage over their traditional counterparts.
Our goal is to integrate these assets into DEFI, starting by allowing them as guaranteed in loan pools for loan purposes.
Coindesk: How does the polygon react to the recent market volatility and regulatory developments?
Boiron: From our point of view, we continue to build whatever the environment. We know what we want to build, and we continue to build ourselves.
Market reactions obviously have an impact on adoption. In the end, the economy ends up having an impact on adoption for everything in the world, and it is no different for the crypto. The only thing we can do is continue to move away, and as the market turns, be very well positioned with large products that users want to use.
Coindesk: Several new block channels have been launched with higher performance metric claims. How does the polygon position its original point of sale chain in this increasingly competitive landscape?
Boiron: I think Polygon POs is already very well positioned for this. There is a reason why we see the payments adopted at the POS – it is because it is actually already fast and at low cost.
The thing with everything we build, including Polygon Po is that we continue to adapt it. One of the exciting things is that we see innovations in space. People can see how innovated the POS POS and adopts some of these things. We can look at what others do and adopt some of their ideas and continue to seek and bring new ideas ourselves.
So I think what you will end up seeing on the pos is a chain that is just as fast or faster as all the new chains we are talking about here. The right thing is that it comes from years of very good safety and maintaining the low costs that currently exist on the channel.
