Polygon NFT Lead interview | MATIC NFT Ecosystem

[Music] all right today we're going to dive into the nft world of polygon and what that might mean for the entire ecosystem and around how nfts are going to be involved in the metaverse and all kinds of things maybe you didn't expect my name is paul barron welcome back to techpath joining me today is mr charles adkins who is the vp of nfts over at polygon studios great to have you on charles thanks for stopping in yeah thanks so much for having me excellent charles tell me a little bit about your background i was looking at through your linkedin profile and learned a lot in terms of just some of the companies you've been involved with absolute rock stars tell me about where you've come from and where you are currently at polygon studios yeah i mean i'm originally kind of a web one guy started out brokering banner ads for yahoo in the late 90s which was really interesting which led me down the path to finding out about high growth companies and then doing a lot of fortune 500 marketing for nike red bull anheuser-busch and then got picked up by a mark cuban invested nft firm and from that point actually mark is the one that told me about polygon and matic and i got really interested in it and moved over here to polygon i absolutely love it i like it you know when we look at polygon we've done a couple of analysis on it i'm just still amazed at one the strength of the ecosystem but even more so in the infrastructure and the technology that's being deployed within polygon right now and i think that overall when you combine that with what the opportunity is in the nft world i think guys like yourself are really very critical in being able to kind of get the rest of the world to kind of come to understand it and how it can be utilized so that's going to be fun we're going to dive into some of those questions today i want to get into kind of the first scenario or topic and that is nfts just in general on polygon i was looking at your ecosystem absolute explosion happening talk to me about how you guys have been building that ecosystem and kind of partnering and putting the right players at the table yeah with us we're finding that a lot of people are coming to us for several different use cases everybody from just enjoying the fact that we're pretty much one-to-one contract basis with ethereum they can migrate over very simply their tech teams find it really easy the other is with large brands especially ones that have to report to shareholders their main focus and the reason they've been choosing polygon is yes the ease of build but when you have to answer to people asking how eco-friendly your brand is that's um it's becoming a big concern with a lot of them and then on the gaming side it's just the high transaction volume so i like to tell people polygon we're we're the home depot of blockchains if you want to do a diy project you're going to find a lot more than just a hammer over here yeah i like it that's a perfect explanation because in looking at just the ecosystem in general i'm still amazed and i study this i feel like 24 7 and i'm still amazed at just how flexible the polygon ecosystem truly is for developers but also for the ability to bring a lot of new innovation to what's happening in nfts and eventually i think what will eventually transpire in the metaverse so very cool why do you think polygon is likely to become one of the key backbones for the nft sector and more broadly the metaverse yeah i think it's kind of what we're talking about is we really aim to either build internally or buy companies and merge with companies that have the technology that help that scaling into the future we don't have a one-track mind so the ability to be agile and pivot when we see new things coming along has been you know massive for us and you know we see it in the gaming space we've seen in nfts you know with zed run that was one where um built on our platform and then you know the transaction volume got extremely high very quick so you know that was really good for them into the metaverse again we're talking about really high volume especially when we have general population on-ramp into a space like that um building on a layer one is going to be pretty tough um so i mean i think that we're perfectly positioned with security tools tools for speed and just flexibility that and that's what we've always tried to do from the beginning is give people everything that they need to succeed and see what crazy things are built i mean we yeah we really are set up for creators kind of how you know youtube is set up for great creators um netflix is on the other spectrum of that where the margins are low because they actually have to purchase the ip and that's how we feel the difference between a layer one and layer two solution may be yeah i think that's a good explanation too but one thing that is uh interesting to me is when you look at early innovation especially in blockchain it's a lot like the early stage of the internet even if you were around in the early days of when social media was really starting to transact and kind of explode and i look at blockchain in many cases very similar in terms of the companies that are involved in kind of their vision of going forward what this can mean i think there's a lot more at stake here in terms of blockchain because it is true web30 and i think the evolution is going to be just absolutely uh off the chain no pun but polygon always comes to the front when i'm doing my analysis and my constant deep dives and i think that what you guys have done is very intriguing in the sense of creating the rails which is very important especially from developers you know psyche that they have to understand truly there are companies like polygon and missions like what you guys are doing that help kind of foster that when you look at other big players that are coming into the space obviously we had facebook aka meta just announced last week two weeks ago their move into the metaverse and kind of the impact on that literally we had a monster bowling ball that just came into a small pond what are your thoughts on how facebook's meta and their impact on the rest of the nft and in general metaverse is going to be over the next few years yeah this is something i talked about it at nft nyc as well as this question came up a lot and it you know i i looked at that i looked at all of their announcement i've read through all of their paperwork about changing the name to meta and i saw the word crypto once i saw the word nft once i did not see the word blockchain at all or decentralization at all so to me that that tells me their stock has been getting beaten up for quite a while and i mean on number one that gives them at least another five to eight years of excuses of quarters of saying now we're rebuilding something new give us a chance on the other side this is really a very quick play into where they see the future going but in a totally centralized data collection format which is a big concern for a lot of people yeah i would agree with that i think to at least some of the people we've had on the show to talk about this evolution is just down that line right there in the sense of closed ecosystems that essentially are not decentralized not really opened up to the blockchain universe which is essentially going to be i think the real framework that's going to allow platforms like polygon and others to really start to kind of uh create that rail track for it do you think a company like you know whether it's facebook or if you look at jack dorsey over twitter or just many of the big you know the fangs we'll call them in terms of the monster tech companies do you think any of them have the ability to truly innovate at the scale in which we're seeing blockchain innovation occur today are they ready for that or do you feel like there's too much inside their bubbles i think they will be eventually if speaking about it today they're absolutely not prepared for it we talk to a lot of those large brands every day and half the time when those phone calls are made they don't even know who to transfer the phone call to within their own organization is it you know a partnership director is it a cto is it a cio they don't even know where blockchain and crypto information may may fall within their own organization secondarily a lot of concerns about crypto custody especially again for those publicly traded companies some of them are just not allowed to take custody of crypto so they are out there looking for you know custody solutions prior to going down this road i think they will not have a choice whether to pivot or not they're just not ready for it today right and it's going to take them a while it's going to take them a while yeah i think my concern is is that right now we're seeing massive interest if anything facebook did kind of pull the curtain back and expose what was happening in the metaverse and nfts in general to the broader population for them to go kind of go wait a minute what's going on back here something's being built in the backside it's kind of like when you think about just the internet in 1996 or in 1998 people looked at it for the first time they saw what a search engine was with alta vista or something of that nature aging myself here but the point is is that they thought whoa we've just we've entered a new zone of information i think now it's the new zone of engagement especially around what's happening with metaverse you very close to what's happening with nft in general when you look at the landscape and kind of the roadmap that polygon has put out there are there any what what areas are you very excited about in terms of use case where nfts could fall how they could be utilized in the metaverse in the next few years yeah i mean i think to the point that you just touched on too just going back one second is i always use the analogy in fro between ftp protocol and http we had a 10-year gap and people are always saying that they're saying oh we're at the aol stage and i actually don't think we are we're we're at 1988. we're at 1987. uh there's there's no fully interoperable protocol between chains there's no search engine for contracts i mean right these are all coming down the road and in the future with where we see nfts especially is these are going to be used in in a very high volume way we're going to be surrounded by billions of sensors collecting trillions of pieces of blockchain information using you know ai and dynamically changing nfts based on real world data and inputs from whether it be decibel meters weather you know different weather technology um these things are going to be everywhere and it's going to turn the you know the universe into a very live organism in a way that we've never really seen before so it's it's exciting and i think that's where polygons really been set up is to think about we always tell ourselves what's happening in the year 2030 as much as we want to jump on a trend today what are we doing with all of this stuff in the year 2030 and we just think with that mindset as much as we can yeah i think that's a good uh a good framework for a lot of people that watch our show some of our audience is really you know they're you know our show is about more than just blockchain that we look at ai autonomy where kind of the next evolution of computing is going once we start to see things in the quantum realm and i think that all of that's going to be applied to blockchain in the near future as we start to see those advancements kind of come okay so we've got ethereum which has been kind of the gatekeeper of the nft ecosystem and obviously they're related gas fees which are a big deal if especially if you've been trying to do something whether it's on unit swap or anywhere else out there in terms of acquiring any kind of nft or even start to move into any kind of investment from a metaverse side of things you guys have really taken a big stance on this in the sense of trying to go down with low or no gas fees obviously we see this as a short-term thing with ethereum talking about the strategy and how this might move forward and kind of set the framework for no gas fees in the future yeah i mean it's really just the the difference of proof of work versus proof of stake right and that's where we kind of came into the line but then we layered on those additional security protocols later on um so you know there are times when the polygon gas fee can get up there but it's typically in a very high secure like fully proof of work transaction and we just kind of give those tools to people where they can utilize that whenever they want the reason that you know everyone's talking about the eth2 and it's you know sharding to 64 layers it's gonna speed things up right and that is true and that's actually where polygon wins even more because now our transaction volume is exponentiated just by that much more um running on you know layer two with easy ethereum on and off ramp it's it's where we're gonna win and especially in the metaverse i mean we're talking each person eventually we're going to be having hundreds if not thousands of transactions happen daily of digital ownership and writing things to the blockchain whether it's you know identity verification or just wearing a really awesome you know skin or a jacket in a game that we want to go hang out in so we just really want to be prepared for anything that the future has to hold and that's what we're building out all of our scaling solutions to take on right now i was looking at your let me kind of show it up here on screen just your ecosystem and just on nft gaming on the nft and gaming side here's the nft ecosystem from both generation to marketplace tools and then collectibles are there any specific projects or areas that you feel are really starting to excel on the nft side of where polygons ecosystem resides yeah i mean avogadro's been taking off lately zed runs obviously been one of our big ones for a while decentraland we're working with a lot of big game studios right now as well um that we can't quite talk about yet but a lot of these major aaa studios they're one of their big concerns is with the token economics i know we've seen some of the gameplay change within some of the most well-known play-to-earn games and it's specifically because those tokenomics are extremely complicated it's it's the first time in gaming that these developers have had to take into account speculators right so even though a lot of the aaa studios they're they're building right now they are building web 3 games it's taking them months upon months to figure out the economic side of it and it's it's going to take a while so q2 q3 is where you know a lot of them are going to be out there so the games that we have right now you don't see a lot of really deep complexity to these games yet because these were the easiest to get out to the marketplace without kind of rugging themselves on their own economics so i mean we're excited about all the games we have but they're all building they're all building quickly yeah do you think obviously we see esports is going to be a massive move in this space we're going to see a lot more of those true first player type scenarios but yet at the same time you've got you know projects like axi and and those types that have already made big moves mainly because they were really kind of a first mover but i was looking back at your uh ecosystem here game publisher still fairly i mean this seems like a brand new area where we're going to see a lot more players come into that i mean you've got anna mccoy brands atari there and then of course um i think it's played app yeah played out games yeah yeah so do you think that area is going to be one of the areas to really watch for in terms of flourishing and really kind of exploding that's going to be the next exploding marketplace right there is the the game publishers the aaa studios they're working on it it's you know i i would kind of say just from my personal standpoint it's going to take them till q2 to q3 of next year to have any kind of real traction on this um and then moving past to 2023 and beyond it's starting to turn into the governments and the supply chains and you know the bigger issues but right now we're heavily heavily focused on these game publishers we talk to them all the time we're trying to walk them through the process of of on-boarding and figuring out their their tokenomics in these games what are your thoughts about because we've been tracking a ton of different gaming projects across the entire ecosystem of blockchain in general but what are your thoughts about the smaller houses that are starting to really kind of break out and kind of prove that they can build both in most cases these are game developers that are trying to make that leap to web 3.0 do you think that that's where the growth is going to come from or do you think it's going to be more of the absolute startups that are building blockchain from you know ground zero i think a lot of it's going to be the migrating games so the ones that have had success in traditional gaming web 2 gaming even mobile gaming um kind of adding those blockchain layers in there because they already have some of their structure built out the ones that are just extremely crypto native from the ground up it's harder for them to actually put out some really long-standing game play than it is right then you know the blockchain portion of it because they are thinking of it from a standpoint of we're building this on the blockchain instead of thinking about it from how do we keep these users here we keep low churn the traditional publishers that is their main thing is addiction to the game so once they already have that in place and then they add the blockchain layer to it that's when things get super interesting i think you just hit on something right there that a lot of people miss and that is that and we're seeing this in other aspects not only the gaming community but but the gaming community it seems to be a little bit easier to understand and and you just hit on it is that most of the web 2o or web one even in some cases have so much lineage there in terms of just their expertise their experience in understanding user pla skill gamepl into blockchain i feel like once you make the blockchain leap if you've got all those things buttoned up you are really destined for some pretty fun things at least in uh in what we'll see in the metaverse in terms of gaming so i think that's a good example of of how that might really play out if you look at nft generation tools um and kind of the tool platforms within what you guys are doing is there anything that you really think hey this could be one that we really want to keep an eye on i mean for us we're keeping an eye on most of the partners that we work with obviously you know we have the sovereign protocol anybody can build on so a lot of times we don't even know when a lot of these projects are built on our platform until after it's already finished uh clinique was an interesting one clint cosmetics brand they launched their nfts and we found out about it the next day so that was very interesting obviously we work with a lot of these agencies that are kind of the in-between that just create on our platform and then launch um you know one that we're very close with was our partnership with draftkings we obviously always keep an eye on what they're doing and eventually you know we hope that they'll actually use some right now it's just their marketplace of course but eventually we hope that they use a lot of the real-time data tools to make dynamic nfts and maybe have those collectibles change every time players reach different milestones it would be just really fun to do not talks yet but it would be it would be fun to do i think that yeah when you get into you know scenarios where you've got kind of somewhat digital native companies that have started to one embrace what's happening here within blockchain and nfts it just starts to open things up pretty dramatically which is one of the things i tell in our our researchers and just teams we're constantly looking for is who are the digitally native companies that have yet to really move into this space because they're most likely going to be the next players that are at the table either trying to select a protocol getting their developer cues in order starting to partnership you know create those partnerships to you know kind of build that kind of element we just did a video that talked about some of the real worlds i mean i think there was uh there was some dng the clinic the clinic theo was in it there were several in there obviously nike and what they've been able to do with it and kind of where their direction is going if you look at sports in general you would think this is a natural for all the sports evolution i mean we've already seen it seen it with uh sorer with the soccer side we've seen at the wearable side are do you feel like we're going to see some pretty pretty big moves by major league sports in this direction soon yeah i completely see all the major league sports heading there again as you can imagine with the size of these leagues companies and teams the legal complexities a lot of these rules are not even written into their legal handbooks yet so that's what we've seen with a lot of the the major teams and even just the leagues in general is they don't even know how to write this stuff out they don't know what this actually means and then even on the ticketing side i mean i know you know mark cube in there with the mavericks he's turning all of his season tickets into nfts and then the longer you hold a season ticket they dynamically change over time super cool thing to do um on the sporting side i think the fans are going to be asking for it faster than these leagues can even get it in place um the other thing is a lot of them are treating this as another big ip deal so they're they're coming to the blockchains asking for a ton of money just for the privilege to you know create their nfts which is a pretty interesting area to be in because they really are just cold calling and seeing who the highest bidder is there's a handful out there that actually do care about where they're building but a lot of them just want the highest bidder and that's a shame well that's interesting you bring that up because my my thesis on this is that the metaverse is going to yield a whole new crop of uh native brands that will be built on and within the metaverse through these kind of partnerships that kind of run on those rails to move into that metaverse whether it's 2025 2030 with that being the case because we could see a whole new evolution of brands including everything from style to functionality to use case scenarios that could start to circumvent even the modern day brands that are in place today what are your thoughts on how that might transpire in the metaverse in the next 10 years yeah i mean hopefully that is the case i mean that's what i think we're seeing with a lot of these brands right now as they're starting to see themselves crumble and decouple as these large conglomerates and they're having to spin off these smaller divisions because you know these little challenger brands are not so little anymore especially when it comes to these metaverse and crypto native brands they're taking market share at a pace of you know when jc penney's went down and macy's went down from the retail space it wasn't because another giant retailer came in and took them out it was because 50 people on instagram were getting three to five million a year in revenue and you add that up that's that's taking a piece of the market share and that's the same thing that's happening right now so to your point like from you know avatar stylization to you know different power boost companies i mean there's going to be some extremely innovative companies that these larger brands are just not able to pivot fast enough to take on that challenge so i completely agree and hopefully we'll see it sooner rather than later yeah charles what are your thoughts when you look at just i mean i'm sure this these are the kind of things that you're you guys are challenged with on a day in day out basis but you look at the ecosystem within the metaverse and you know i come from a computer science background i've ran developers and understanding kind of the ecosystem of building products one thing that always challenged me was when you started to develop a product that was big enough you started to see the uh the influx of all these additional bolt-ons or other assets that would come to the ecosystem and eventually become very use case oriented and very important to the ecosystem and my question to you is when you when you look at polygon and just see all of the potentials here for these additional services that are going to reside to kind of support the ecosystem in general let's just say for instance i'm in the metaverse in five years i'm doing whatever it is maybe it's ar and whatever that experience level is and i might be doing game play but i need data storage and data storage would be a good example of something that could live in there as opposed when i say in there being metaverse as opposed to setting over on on aws so what are the potentials for those kinds of companies that are doing those kind of support mechanisms that kind of run the whole ecosystem of web 2.0 today yeah i think you're you nailed it correctly it's those companies will absolutely exist they're not just going to be a centralized hub they are going to be decentralized storage which is going to be a big deal on like you just said the defy apps the ability to use whatever quote-unquote financial institution you would like to use and just have interoperable protocols between everything it's just going to be a very level and quick flowing playing field it's going to be really difficult even 10 to 20 years from now to point out unless these big brands can really figure it out it's going to be a handful of tool sets that me you and any individual in the metaverse want to use that works for our particular use case and the majority of them are going to be decentralized yeah you've had a chance to work for some pre-forward-thinking individuals obviously with mark cuban and some of those kind of people it seems as though we're starting to see a little bit of a separation in the thought leaders of business today where many of them are starting to move and they won they see the writing on the wall they see the innovation happening they see web30 and the rails that are being built who are the players that you're watching as a studio to really kind of keep an eye on obviously you look at cuban but there's many other thought leaders out there anybody that you think that these people are really kind of moving in the right direction yeah i mean we're definitely keeping an eye on ea sports um is a big one activision super evil just on the gaming side those are people that are you know they want to get into the space and they're just trying to figure it out right now um there's some very large auto manufacturers that are getting into the space right now that i can't quite name yet but again they're trying to figure out you know how many basically what it's coming down to is how many employees do we need to run this department and how many millions of dollars is that going to cost right but they know they need to be there i think the payment systems with visa and mastercard paypal shopify these are other big brands like we're watching they're getting there a lot of these brands you'll see they're putting out the headline but i think it's up to all of us that are already in this industry to really hold them to task of is it a headline are you actually building this because there's a lot of people putting the headline out but let's see who can actually get the job done those are some brands what nike we watch a lot i know early in the early days nike was having some back and forth about the sec regulations and that's where a lot of these rules are actually still gray they're just not even written in in many cases um a lot of the big brands want to go there it's just it's our job to make sure they do it yeah well i think the the thing you just hit on is that you a lot of times they do lead with those press releases and in many cases maybe there's not a lot of substance behind those i think that's the key that a lot of people if you're watching our show you're already doing your due diligence to understand whether those brands are really getting it done or if they've got the infrastructure to even start to attack it which is a big question mark i think in general charles you you've been around this space for some time now and one thing that i look at just from the side of innovation when you have this breakout evolution like what we've seen with blockchain in general with it comes some pretty big challenges and one of the things i'm always looking to is the layer of developers that it's going to take to build this new evolution because we really have to kind of migrate over from web20 to web3 and also bring up the new developers into kind of the right protocols to be able to expand on these are you guys seeing any kind of shortages in terms of techs you know tech leads and etc around these ecosystems because that i feel like is the one weak point the industry has right now what are your thoughts that's probably the biggest challenge that everybody we've talked to is running into is development talent is extremely hard to come by um if you're a developer out there it's it's to the point where you're also in that situation where let me take some bids on this because the shortage is it's difficult um yeah so a lot of these projects that's another reason that they're taking a while to get into the ecosystem is you know the development the development talent is just not quite there yet i mean we saw this in web one and web two as well it took a while to get there um and it's just learning the different the different languages and making sure that people understand how to deploy these contracts correctly and especially i think it's important to know that now because once these contracts are out there it's if not impossible going to be extremely difficult to bring them back and make any adjustments to them yeah i think that's right you've got kind of a one-hit shot at these uh so the the development architecture and the team is going to be absolutely critical i hope some of the universities and even outside just some of the general learning systems could be developed in such a way that we could start to really allow these emerging countries because there's a lot of talent that's being built overseas across i mean just on our own research we have a ton of researchers that are around the world and i find a lot of researchers that we are finding right now are in countries that you would have never looked for talent just three years ago and these people are exploding in understanding what's happening on the blockchain mainly because it's kind of like for them it's the new internet so they see it as that kind of future i just hope that that becomes kind of a factor in there for your for your job day in day out what's the big challenge for you right now of what you're facing yeah i mean the challenge for me is is really keeping up with just the amount of projects and the amount of companies coming into the space a lot of people i'm kind of the first contact for a lot of these large brands and so for me it's just multiplying my time i think with all of us in this industry right now it's how much time can we find in a day to do this and still keep ourselves sane it's just it's just the amount of projects that are coming into the marketplace has been a very very high volume to handle yeah yeah hey listen it's like the dot bom is all over again you have you have tens of thousands of companies barreling down this highway that there's only one toll way to get through and eventually you're going to have the ones that break through and make it and then a lot of companies that fall to the wayside so but that's hey that's how innovation works it's the strong survive and the weak die unfortunately that's the truth unfortunately hey charles it's been great having you on the show today thank you so much for stopping i know you guys are super busy so it's been great hearing from you guys over at polygon studios we want to keep a close watch on what you guys are doing so uh keep in touch thanks for stopping in yeah thank you paul thank you for having me excellent all right you guys are tuned in over on the podcast right now thank you so much for all the subs over there spotify has been exploding for us but guess what the number one place you can check techpath out is over here on youtube here on the paul barron network it's the place we're going to get these interviews and a lot of this insider baseball kind of stuff that you don't necessarily get a chance to see visually from the podcast so jump over here to the youtube channel and also make sure and jump into the diamond circle it's where we do a lot of drops on just a lot of our research but also we'll do things like giveaways for nfts and a ton of digital assets easy to join free to you just jump in with the link below and of course if you want to reach me hit me up on twitter at paul barron we'll catch you next time right here on techpath [Music]

Channel: Paul Barron Network

Views: 97,067

Keywords: polygon, polygon nfts, polygon studios, polygon matic, polygon crypto, polygon price prediction, matic polygon, matic price prediction, matic coin, nft ecosystem, nft games economy, zed run, aavegotchi, polygon ecosystem, polygon ecosystem, polygon ecosystem coins, polygon ecosystem projects, polygon ecosystem map, polygon ecosystem index, polygon ecosystem games, polygon ecosystem token, polygon ecosystem list, polygon projects, altcoins to watch, polygon interview

Id: 0wx-Czjl-Mk

Length: 33min 23sec (2003 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 08 2021