Animoca’s Open Metaverse Podcast Interviews Sandeep, CEO of Polygon

Episode 6 of the Open Metaverse Podcast hosted by Animoca featured Sandeep, the CEO of Polygon. Animoca’s tokenomics team, led by Mohomad Ezeldin, joined to discuss Polygon’s solutions for scalability issues on Ethereum as well as some general updates and insights. 

With Bitcoin Ordinals being the talk of the town, one of the highlights of the conversations was on Polygon NFTs. Sandeep feels Polygon will be one of the top three players in terms of platforms after adoption takes hold. With PFP NFTs, Sandeep personally never believed in the purely speculative nature of them. He understood they had a market but he always felt the trend would shift into utility NFTs. On looking back he realized he was wrong and they turned out to have a strong product market fit. Sandeep has decided he needs to work and focus more on the PFP community. These creators, misfits, and world changers are the first adopters of new technology, and he intends to pay attention to them in the future. 

Mohomed asked Sandeep to expound on his favorite dApp or project being built right now. Timeswap is building a fully permissionless lending protocol without oracles and Sandeep chose to mention this one first. Sometimes oracles are congested and you can’t do liquidations according to Sandeep. Timeswap works differently and the features caught his attention. Nike swoosh launched an NFT on Polygon, and he is very optimistic that they will end up cracking the code. “Some people have said Polygon is paying to have these big brands build on us,” Sandeep said amused.  Sandeep said it’s the biggest irony because he doesn’t even have a connection to Nike nor did he know they were building on Polygon in advance. What Starbucks is trying to do is also very interesting to him. He’d like to see Polygon specifically focused on the larger culture outside of Web3 and these bigger brands are making that happen. 

The Polygon business development strategy for getting brands to adopt the network is always evolving. While he didn’t need to attract Nike, they do have a strategy for reaching out and building connections with other large brands.  Polygon has a professional team. They all want to see mainstream adoption and that is a huge part of their strategy. His team has one foot in the wild west of crypto but they all also come from the larger institutions from the Web2 world. This helps the team speak to both sides of the aisle. That is where they excel and it helps Web2 brands feel connected to Polygon. Around 60% of games are currently building on Polygon according to Sandeep. Their platform is leading the way with a deep entrenchment in the community. 

Mohamed always ends his interviews with rapid fire questions and one of interest was the last thing Sandeep googled. Sandeep said, “ChatGPT” without hesitation.  He went beyond to say that he is not even googling anymore but rather asking ChatGpt. One more interesting question of note, Sandeep said he would prefer the network effect before better tech. This highlights a common theme with Animoca’s Mocaverse project as they try to extend and connect the Web3 community together to help it grow.

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