Gaming is the ‘largest scale opportunity’ for crypto: Polygon co-founder

Sandeep Nailwal, the co-founder of the Ethereum-scaling platform, Polygon, believes Web3 gaming will eventually become one of the biggest drivers of mass crypto adoption.

In a May 25 Ask Me Anything (AMA) on r/India community on Reddit, Nailwal was asked what he sees as some genuine at-scale “real life” use cases for blockchain other than trading and payments.

In response, Nailwal stated: “I think gaming is the largest scale opportunity for crypto, adding:

“There are some top games launching in Web3 in the next 6-18 months and it would be very interesting to see if some of them are able to crack the crypto code. Last year itself there was $2 billion in funding for Web3 games.”

“Polygon combined with its ecosystem players like IMX [Immutable X] got the lion’s share in terms of those funded games. Fingers crossed for some of them to go big!”

Polygon and Immutable X partnered in March to build a scalable gaming blockchain utilizing Polygon’s EVM-compatible zk-rollup tech. The network is slated to launch in the coming months and is expected to make blockchain games faster, among other things.

In a question running on a similar theme, Nailwal was also asked if “crypto has become too speculative?”

The Polygon co-founder didn’t refute the assertion, but explained that this speculation has been both a “boon and bane of crypto.”

Join @sandeepnailwal for a @Reddit AMA on Wednesday May 24 at 8PM IST.

r/Indiahttps://t.co/z1IXBkaC9p pic.twitter.com/A0JPnE92OG

— Polygon (Labs) (@0xPolygonLabs) May 23, 2023

“Boon cuz [because] it attracts top talent towards the industry, bane cuz obviously a large number of users and applications are speculative in nature,” he said adding:

“But one could argue that any potential big industry invites a lot of speculation early on. It was the same with the Gold rush area and it was also the same for the Dot com boom.”

Other r/India members also asked the Polygon co-founder about his thoughts on decentralization.

“Crypto is still in its nascent stage. I don’t believe that any blockchain ecosystem, except Bitcoin and Ethereum, is fully decentralized yet,” he said, adding that it’s not necessarily important that networks are fully decentralized from the get-go.

”What we need is progressive decentralization of protocols and applications as they achieve larger and larger significance,” he said.

Another member also questioned Nailwal about Polygon’s low Nakamoto Coefficient rating, which essentially serves as a measure of how decentralized a blockchain network is.

In terms of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) chains, this measure is defined by the number of node operators that together “control more than one-third (33.33%) of all stake on the network.

According to NakaFlow, Polygon has a rating of just four, which suggests that four node operators control around a third of Polygon’s (PoS) chain.

Providing an answer to the question, Nailwal explained that “Polygon is a multi-blockchain ecosystem which has currently two Public blockchains live, namely Polygon POS and Polygon zkEVM. Polygon POS chain does have a lower Nakamoto coefficient but it’s still bigger than many fairly large blockchains.”

“Eventually we expect all public (non app-specific) chains to have large decentralization factors and we are working on some really big releases in the coming days. The eventual goal is to take Polygon ecosystem to have 1000s of validators,” he added.

Source