Is the CEO of Polygon Labs.
Please welcome Mark Boyon.
They are, of course, blockchain infrastructure company behind Polygon.
Mark, grateful for your time.
Always like our conversation.
So let's start with the news because I know Polygon is very busy in terms of newly announced integrations and can't miss partnerships.
Mastercard, joining Visa, Meta and Cash App on Polygon.
What does it mean?
Why does it matter?
Yeah, thanks for having me again, JD.
Very excited to be here.
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, look, blockchains were meant to be able to scale to the kind of scale to the size of what payments infrastructure does today.
And the only way to know that we're capable of doing that is actually having that payments infrastructure live on Polygon.
So, when you see a company like Visa that is able to settle on, on Polygon, when you see, you know, modern Treasury going live as well.
Well, Same thing with Cash App, um, same thing with Meta.
What this really tells you is that institutions are looking at blockchains and saying we can actually have confidence in settlement, uh, on, on the infrastructure, and, you know, being able to do that at, you know, 5000 transactions per second, probably 2X in terms of like payments per second, uh, really shows that blockchain infrastructure is finally here for payments in the way that we currently use that infrastructure.
Mark, why do you think so many of these companies are not only making the bets that they are making, but making them on Polygon?
Yeah, a lot of it really comes down to the scaling, right?
Polygon's been around for, you know, over 6 years now, and, you know, we've processed over $2.6 trillion of payments.
And so when you do that, and you do it at the scale at which we're doing it, at hundreds of TPS uh transactions per second with the ability to go to 5000 transactions per second, as an institution, you actually have confidence that you can do this at scale.
When you think back to a few years. or, or many other blockchains, what ends up happening is that you go live, and then your transactions start increasing in, in price, or start getting slowed down due to bottlenecks, and when we're actually able to provably show that we can execute at that speed and scale, institutions can come and have confidence that the user experience that currently exists, and the confidence that they'll have in the finality of the transactions will still exist on chain as well.
Mark, I wonder what you're seeing in terms of stable coins right now.
The current conversation, where you think it goes from here and, and the backdrop of stablecoins really having a very strong moment right now.
Yeah, so obviously there's not a single boardroom that isn't talking about how they leverage stablecoins in one way or another to either make, you know, their money movement more efficient or their customers' money movement more efficient.
And the simple reason is when you can, you know, take the time for cross-border transactions down from, you know, 5 days at sometimes even sometimes 7 days, you know, down to a few seconds, or in some cases a few hours, um, there's, there's a lot of savings there.
Whether that's, you know, trapped capital, or whether it's just transparency for your customers and confidence they can have.
And so, you know, when you get to that point where you see that, you, you start being, you know, discovering that, that you can leverage it.
And, you know, in, in our case, what we see is that if you can actually make that easy to do, then it's something that we're going to see more adoption of, and that's something that like we've been very focused on when we go from, you know, 8 to 10 different solutions that historically have needed.
To be integrated in a blockchain, um, setting to be able to go live with stablecoins, and we can take that down to 1 in the way we have with the open money stack.
What that means is that instead of taking you 12 to 18 months to go live with a stablecoin solution, you can go live in like 4 to 6 weeks.
And going live in 4 to 6 weeks actually means that, you know, instead of 2 to 400% increases in stablecoin adoption a year, you can suddenly see that taking off at multiples more than that, which is exactly what we're seeing in the market right now.
Mark Boyron, the only bad part about this interview is sadly it has to come to an end.
Very grateful for your time, CEO of Polygon Labs.
Come back anytime.
