UNCHAINED: Polygon’s AggLayer Wants to Be a Hub for Ethereum Layer 2s. Can It Succeed?
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2024
⏱️ 68 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Polygon’s Agglayer aims to address the monolithic vs. modular blockchain debate with a decentralized protocol that allows chains to interact with one another.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.
Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron and co-founder Brendan Farmer discussed everything about the AggLayer, a decentralized protocol built by Polygon that enables fast, secure cross-chain interactions and allows different chains to use the same native bridge. This allows users to seamlessly move assets across chains in the AggLayer ecosystem.
The AggLayer aims to unify blockspace so that it feels like a single chain, improving user experience. Boiron and Farmer also discussed the potential for Layer 2 solutions to scale Ethereum, the benefits of zero-knowledge technology, and the future of Polygon's proof-of-stake chain.
Learn more: What Are Zero-Knowledge Proofs?
Show highlights:
- Background of Brendan and Marc and how they joined Polygon
- A brief description of what Polygon is overall
- What the AggLayer is and how it aims to enable the best of monolithic and modular blockchains
- How Brendan differentiates the AggLayer from its competitors, such as Optimism's Superchain or Cosmos and why he believes that zk-technology is such a game changer
- How the interoperability experience gets better in such a system, according to Marc and Brendan, and what will become possible that's not now
- Which chains can use the AggLayer and how it works to improve security across chains
- The tradeoffs between the various types of zkEVM provers
- How projects should decide their architecture and when it would make sense to tap the AggLayer
- Why projects should build on the AggLayer, including layer 1s, according to Marc
- How Layer 1s can still join the AggLayer and retain their own consensus and sovereignty
- Why Polygon believes that zk-technology is the future of blockchain architecture
- Why the Polgyon zkEVM suffered an outage on March 30
- Whether Layer 3s are needed to scale the Ethereum ecosystem
- Why Brendan believes that EigenLayer is not a good fit for rollups to use
- The transition of the Polygon PoS chain to become an Ethereum L2 using the AggLayer
- When EIP-4844/Dencun will go live on Polygon
Thank you to our sponsors! Polkadot
Guests:
Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs
Previous appearances on Unchained:
Gary Gensler vs. Crypto: What Will the SEC Attack Next?
The Chopping Block: The SEC Is Attacking Crypto – Will Gary Gensler Succeed?
Brendan Farmer, co-founder of Polygon and co-lead of Polygon Zero
Links
AggLayer
Polygon: Aggregated Blockchains: A New Thesis
More technical Agglayer explainer
CoinDesk:
Polygon Lands Astar Network as First User of New 'AggLayer’
Cosmos-Based Canto Blockchain Reverses Course on Polygon Layer-2 Plans, Unveils New Roadmap
Zaki on the comparisons with Cosmos
zk-Technology
Polygon: Upgrading Every EVM Chain to ZK: Introducing the Type 1 Prover
The different types of ZK-EVMs by Vitalik
Unchained: Why Zero-Knowledge Proofs Are Critical to Ethereum’s Future
Polygon zkEVM
Unchained: Polygon zkEVM Chain Goes Down for 10 Hours
Blockworks: Polygon unpacks zkEVM outage and ‘emergency’ upgrade
Layer 3s
Unchained: Layer 3s Only Exist to Take Value Away From Ethereum: Polygon Labs CEO
0xCygaar on L3s and L2s
Potuz on the benefit of L3s
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Unchained Podcast is Produced by Laura Shin Media, LLC. Distributed by CoinDesk. Senior Producer is Michele Musso and Executive Producer is Jared Schwartz.
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Transcript
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| 1:06.2 | What the AgLayer enables is it basically like quarantines each chain. And it says, okay, even if this |
| 1:13.4 | chain has an unsound prover, the security assumption reduces to the case that it's the only |
| 1:21.2 | chain in the ecosystem. So an attacker might be able to to rug users by exploiting a soundness bug in that Prover, which is |
| 1:31.6 | the exact same cases as though the chain were running on its own without the shared |
| 1:36.4 | deposit contract. But it fundamentally can't threaten funds that are locked in other chains |
| 1:42.8 | on the Aiglar. |
| 1:47.6 | Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained. You're no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, |
| 1:52.4 | Laura Shin, author of The Cryptopians. I started recovering crypto eight years ago, and as a senior |
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