DeFi & Polygon/Ethereum, with Hamzah Khan

Polygon is the 11th largest cryptocurrency in the world – it really needs no introduction. Considered by many to be Layer 2’s flagship product, it helps solve a pretty big problem: Ethereum is a difficult cryptocurrency to use.

Even Vitalik has said that the future is a deployment economy, with Ethereum as Layer 1, with projects like Polygon right there so that ordinary people can, you know, actually use it – without taking out a mortgage to pay for gas.

I hosted Hamzah Khan, head of Defi and Labs at Polygon, to talk about all things DeFi and Polygon. We bounced around a lot, but covered some great topics.

We start with technology, for all you geeks. Hamzah talks about zkEVM, or zero-knowledge deployment technology, which JeuxServer announced last week had launched as a test network, exciting many in the industry.

It was also hard to avoid the Reddit Polygon craze that has been going on since the weekend, with the massive collection of NFTs reaching over three million users on the social media site. Hamzah talks about the behind-the-scenes conversation with Reddit when the company launched the NFTs on Polygon, of course.

We talked about the whole DeFi thing, actually. We talk about how LST has fallen so far, how Hamzah calls LST a “temporarily locked-in stock” given its transience, and how the industry’s reputation took a hit last year when CeFi tanked, even though DeFi’s path was so smooth.

As always, I had my favorite line – that Ethereum is “an elite blockchain” – and I asked Hamzah what he thought of the gas fees, and whether this will ever be resolved. And if so, what will the future of Polygon look like?

I also asked Hamzah about the centralization of DeFi. With so much space running centralized stablecoins (even Vitalik recently said that Tether, Circle and other providers could influence the direction of future Ethereum forks), is one of the pillars of DeFi compromised? And more interestingly, does it have to be or is there an alternative?

We dance around these topics and more, but at its core is a 30-minute discussion about DeFi and Polygon, and the role Polygon might play in the future.

As always, I’m open to comments here or on Twitter – and links to listen are below.