Gaming is the ‘largest scale opportunity’ for crypto: Polygon co-founder
Web3 gaming, according to Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of the Ethereum scaling platform Polygon, will eventually become one of the most important drivers of broad crypto adoption.
In a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) on May 25, Nailwal was asked what he views as actual at-scale “real life” business cases for blockchain other than trading and payments.
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“I think gaming is the largest scale opportunity for crypto,” Nailwal responded, adding:
“There are some top games coming out in Web3 in the next 6-18 months, and it will be very interesting to see if any of them can crack the crypto code.” Web3 games received about $2 billion in funding last year.”
“Polygon, along with its ecosystem players like IMX (Immutable X), received the lion’s share of those funded games.” Fingers crossed that some of them succeed!”
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Polygon and Immutable X collaborated in March to create a scalable gaming blockchain based on Polygon’s EVM-compatible zk-rollup technology. The network is set to go live in the next months and is anticipated to speed up blockchain gaming, among other things.
In a related question, Nailwal was also asked if “crypto has become too speculative?”
The Polygon co-founder did not deny the claim, but stated that speculation has been both a “boon and a bane of crypto.”
“Boon because it attracts top talent to the industry, bane because a large number of users and applications are obviously speculative in nature,” he explained, adding:
“However, one could argue that any potential large industry invites a lot of speculation in the early stages.” It was the same in the gold rush area, and it was also true in the dot-com boom.”
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Other members of r/India also questioned the Polygon co-founder on his thoughts on decentralization.
“Crypto is still in its infancy. “I don’t believe any blockchain ecosystem, with the exception of Bitcoin and Ethereum, is fully decentralized yet,” he said, adding that it’s not always necessary for networks to be fully decentralized from the start.
“What we need is progressive decentralization of protocols and applications as their significance grows,” he says.
Another user also questioned Nailwal about Polygon’s low Nakamoto Coefficient rating, which is used to determine how decentralized a blockchain network is.
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This statistic is defined in terms of proof-of-stake chains by the number of node operators who hold more than one-third (33.33%) of all stakes on the network.
Polygon has a rating of four on NakaFlow, suggesting that four node operators control roughly one-third of Polygon’s chain.
In response to the inquiry, Nailwal stated, “Polygon is a multi-blockchain ecosystem with two public blockchains currently live, namely Polygon POS and Polygon zkEVM.” Although the Polygon POS chain has a smaller Nakamoto coefficient, it is still larger than many rather large blockchains.”
“Eventually, we anticipate that all public (non-app-specific) chains will have significant decentralization factors, and we are working on some really big releases in the coming days.” “The ultimate goal is to have 1000s of validators in the Polygon ecosystem,” he continued.