According to Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of the Ethereum scaling platform Polygon, Web3 gaming will eventually become one of the main catalysts for widespread cryptocurrency adoption.
AMA session with Nailwal
During an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on May 25 in the r/India community on Reddit, Nailwal was asked about broad applications of blockchain beyond commerce and payments. Nailwal responded by stating that he sees gaming as one of the most promising “real life” use cases for crypto. He added the following:
In my opinion, gaming offers the greatest opportunities for crypto. In the next 6-18 months, some leading games will be launched in the Web3 ecosystem, and it will be very interesting to see if some of these games can crack the code of crypto. Last year alone, more than $2 billion in funding was raised for Web3 games.
Polygon combined with its ecosystem players like IMX (Immutable X) got the lion’s share in terms of those funded games.
In March, Polygon and Immutable X joined forces to create a scalable gaming blockchain leveraging Polygon’s EVM-compatible zk rollup technology. The network will be launched in the coming months and is expected to improve the speed of blockchain games, among other things.
During a question asked in the same context, Nailwal was also asked if crypto has become too speculative.
Rather than refute the claim, the Polygon co-founder explained that speculation is both a blessing and a curse for the crypto world.
“Boon cuz (because) it attracts the top talent to the industry, bane cuz obviously a large number of users and applications are speculative in nature,” he said, adding, “But you could argue that any potential major industry is early stage invites much speculation. It was the same with the gold rush area and it was the same with the Dotcom boom.
Nailwal was also questioned by another member about Polygon’s low Nakamoto coefficient rating, which serves as a measure of the degree of decentralization of a blockchain network.
In proof-of-stake chains, this coefficient is determined by the number of node operators collectively controlling more than one-third (33.33%) of all stakes on the network.
According to NakaFlow, Polygon has a rating of only 4 (stars), indicating that 4 node operators control about a third of the Polygon network.
Nailwal responded to the question explaining that Polygon is a multi-blockchain ecosystem that currently has two public blockchains live, namely Polygon POS and Polygon zkEVM. He noted that the Polygon POS chain’s Nakamoto coefficient is lower, but still higher than many other major blockchains.
“It is our ultimate goal for all public (non-app-specific) chains to have a high degree of decentralization, and we are working hard on some major releases in the coming days,” he added. “We aim to grow the Polygon ecosystem with thousands of validators.”