Blockchain
Sandeep Nailwal, the co-founder of the Ethereum scaling platform, Polygon, believes Web3 gaming will eventually become one of the biggest drivers of mass crypto adoption.
In a May 25 Ask Me Anything (AMA) on the r/India community on Reddit, Nailwal was asked what he sees as some real “real life” use cases for blockchain other than commerce and payments.
In response, Nailwal stated, “I think gaming is the biggest opportunity for crypto, adding:
“There are some top games launching in Web3 in the next 6-18 months and it would be very interesting to see if some of them can crack the crypto code. Last year itself, there was $2 billion in funding for Web3 games.
“Polygon combined with its ecosystem players like IMX [Immutable X] got the lion’s share in terms of those funded games. Fingers crossed for some to go big!
Polygon and Immutable X teamed up in March to build a scalable gaming blockchain using Polygon’s EVM-compatible zk rollup technology. The network will launch in the coming months and is expected to speed up blockchain games, among other things.
In a question running on a similar theme, Nailwal was also asked if “crypto has become too speculative?”
The Polygon co-founder did not refute the claim, but explained that this speculation has been both a “blessing and a curse of crypto”.
Join @sandeepnailwal for an @Reddit AMA on Wednesday, May 24 at 8pm IST.
r/Indiahttps://t.co/z1IXBkaC9p pic.twitter.com/A0JPnE92OG
— Polygon (Labs) (@0xPolygonLabs) May 23, 2023
“Bean because [because] it attracts top talent to the industry as it is clear that a large number of users and applications are speculative in nature,” he said adding:
“But you could argue that any potential big industry invites a lot of speculation at an early stage. It was the same with the gold rush area and it was the same with the Dotcom boom.
Other r/India members also asked the Polygon co-founder about his thoughts on decentralization.
“Crypto is still in its infancy. I don’t believe any blockchain ecosystem other than Bitcoin and Ethereum is fully decentralized yet,” he said, adding that it’s not necessarily important for networks to be fully decentralized from the start.
“What we need is a gradual decentralization of protocols and applications as they become more and more significant,” he said.
Another member also questioned Nailwal about Polygon’s low Nakamoto coefficient rating, which essentially serves as a measure of how decentralized a blockchain network is.
In terms of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) chains, this metric is determined by the number of node operators who collectively control “more than a third (33.33%) of all stake on the network.
According to NakaFlow, Polygon has a rating of only four, suggesting that four node operators control about a third of the Polygon (PoS) chain.
Nailwal responded to the question explaining that “Polygon is a multi-blockchain ecosystem that currently has two public blockchains live, namely Polygon POS and Polygon zkEVM. Polygon POS chain has a lower Nakamoto coefficient, but is still larger than many fairly large blockchains.
“Ultimately, we expect all public (non-app-specific) chains to have major decentralization factors and we’re working on some really major releases in the coming days. The ultimate goal is for the Polygon ecosystem to have thousands of validators,” he added.