PODCAST: DeFi & Polygon / Ethereum, with Polygon’s Hamzah Khan

Polygon is the eleventh biggest cryptocurrency in the world – it really needs no introduction. Considered by many as the flagship Layer 2, it helps solve a pretty big problem – that Ethereum is a tough cryptocurrency to use.

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

I hosted Hamzah Khan, Head of Defi and Labs at Polygon, to chat all things DeFi and Polygon. We bounced around a lot, but covered on great topics.

We started out technical, for any of you nerds out there. Hamzah chats about zkEVM, or zero-knowledge roll-up technology, which Polygon announced last week had gone live in testnet form, exciting many around the industry.

It was also tough to avoid the Reddit Polygon craze this has been ongoing since the weekend, with the massive NFT collection soaring to reach over three million users on the social media site. Hamzah talks of the behind-the-scenes chat with Reddit, as the company launched the NFTs on Polygon, of course.

We jumped around all of DeFi, really. We discussed how the TVL has come down so much, how Hamzah refers to TVL as “temporary value locked” given its transience, and how the reputation of the industry took a hit this past year as CeFi went under – despite DeFi trucking along so smoothly.

I got my favourite line in there as always – that Ethereum is “a blockchain of the elite” – quizzing Hamzah on what he thought about gas fees, and whether it will ever be solved. And if so, what does a future look like for Polygon?

I hosted @Polygon‘s Head of DeFi, @_khanhamzah, on the @CoinJournal podcast this week
We chatted DeFi, the new zkEVM, Reddit NFTs, scalability, the future of Ethereum as a settlement layer, Vitalik’s comments on centralisation and more⬇️$MATIChttps://t.co/zYIEfqnAr6
— Dan Ashmore (@DanniiAshmore) October 27, 2022

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

We dance around these and many more topics, but this is at its heart a 30-minute discussion on DeFi and Polygon, and what role Polygon could play in the future.

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