Max

I really appreciate both @sandeepnailwal's personal contributions and @0xPolygon's immensely valuable role in the ethereum ecosystem. To recap: * Polygon hosts @Polymarket, which is probably the single most successful example of a "not just boring finance" app that has actually been successful and provided value. * Polygon has also hosted plenty of other applications that have needed high levels of scalability. * Polygon put a lot of resources into ZK-EVM proving early on, both by bringing in Jordi Baylina's team and through other efforts, and greatly helped in moving the space forward. * Polygon has built infrastructure for proof aggregation (AggLayer) and many other things And also: * Sandeep put a lot of his personal effort into @CryptoRelief_, which has made large contributions to biomedical infrastructure and research inside India. * He voluntarily returned $190M of proceeds from the SHIB tokens that I donated to me, which has made the whole Balvi open source anti-airborne-disease biotech program possible, and possibly accelerated our understanding of important anti-pandemic topics like clean indoor air by years. @cz_binance also recently donated $10M in BNB to me to help continue the program, and I've recently added ~$20M of my own funds (no, not from selling ETH 😛) Big appreciation to both for this. Most whales passively think that things like this are cool, but are not willing to get off their butts and personally contribute, unless it's in the form of a company that keeps everything proprietary to become yet another vehicle for personal profit. @sandeepnailwal (and CZ) are special here. On the ZK issue (after all, you do need a proof system to get the full security guarantees that L2s are meant to provide), I can see Polygon's difficult bind: they supported Jordi's team putting their heart and souls into the tech at a time when that tech was still too early for production, and so they contributed to the early and most difficult part of the learning curve, but at that part of the learning curve it was difficult for them themselves to directly benefit from the fruits of their labor. Since then, the market structure has split into L2 teams and ZK teams (eg. @SuccinctLabs, @RiscZero, more recently @brevis_zk, many others) being separate entities, which I think makes more sense than the previous approach of every L2 doing (OP or ZK) proof systems in-house: it's very difficult to be both the best L2 and the best ZK team, the two are very different skill sets. Personally, I hope that at some point soon @0xPolygon can just pick up off the shelf ZK tech that has now gotten quite good and apply it to the PoS chain to get full stage 1 and later stage 2 guarantees from the ethereum L1. Many don't realize just how much ZK tech has improved; proving costs are around $0.0001/tx, and many L2s I talk to are very surprised when I tell them the recent numbers, they're still stuck in the mindset that ZK is maybe ok for ethereum L1-scale chains but unviable for anything hyperscale. The latest ZK-EVMs, and live projects like @Lighter_xyz, show that this is false.