Scaling #DeFi - (Chris Coney & Juan Villaverde) WCSS:022

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Chris (00:00):
Record. And it's off. Okay. There we go then. Hi there guys and welcome to this week's edition of the Weiss crypto Sunday Special with me, your host Chris Coney. Guest analyst today is Juan. Juan, welcome back to the Sunday Special once again sir.
Juan (00:18):
Good to be here, Chris.
Chris (00:19):
Excellent to have you, mate. So today, we're going to do a follow up on the very first episode of the Weiss Crypto Sunday Special. In the first episode, we discussed Layer-2 scaling of blockchains and some of the concepts we spoke about back then. In the episode, we're going to be revisiting, redefining, nuancifying if that's even a word. So that's what we're going to do today, okay? Okay, great. So let's get down to it.
Juan (00:42):
Yeah.
Chris (00:42):
So you and I, we're pretty much in consensus about this, pardon the pun but our current favorite scaling solution is Polygon, right? Would you agree with that.
Juan (00:50):
I would agree with that, yes.
Chris (00:51):
Okay, good. And why do we love Polygon as investors and traders?
Juan (00:56):
As investors, it's quite easy to invest in this Layer-2.
Chris (00:59):
You can invest in it itself, can't you?
Juan (01:01):
You can buy it. I think I made that point last time. We made the same point that you can invest into this thing. So you don't normally get to invest, it's like buying Lightning Network on Bitcoin for example.
Chris (01:15):
Exactly. You just buy Bitcoin.
Juan (01:15):
Exactly, you just buy Bitcoin.
Chris (01:15):
Cool.
Juan (01:16):
And since we made the first video, Arbitrum has launched. That's an Optimistic Rollup solution. I believe that Optimism is just around the corner, you can fact check me on that. I don't know if it's fully launched yet.
Chris (01:33):
It's in beta.
Juan (01:33):
But it will come soon.
Chris (01:34):
Did you see the post in the group today that Uniswap now allows you to switch to Optimism version of it.
Juan (01:39):
I know this and I'm basing my comment off of that. I guess it's around then. I haven't heard a lot of buzz about it around it yet. So I'm guessing it hasn't fully launched yet but Arbitrum has. And so we can compare the two better and like you said, last debate was not I don't think we were nuanced enough because I came away with the impression after listening to it that I thought we gave too strong an impression that Polygon is simply superior on all levels period and there's nothing to these Optimistic Rollup solutions. When I say Optimistic Rollup by the way, I want to distinguish between Optimistic Rollups and Optimism the network. They use the same technology but Arbitrum is another.
Chris (02:29):
They call it Optimistic Ethereum, that's what they've started referring to themselves as, optimistic Ethereum.
Juan (02:35):
Really?
Chris (02:36):
Yeah.
Juan (02:37):
Well, that's funny.
Chris (02:38):
It's like Ethereum classic.
Juan (02:40):
Yeah.
Chris (02:40):
Let's not going there though.
Juan (02:43):
So you get to invest in those. When Arbitrum went live, I actually have some Ethereum on Arbitrum. I tried it out, I tried out the fees, I tried out the speed of transactions, I just tried out some stuff. Pretty cool. It uses Ethereum. You even get to invest in it, there's no MATIC equivalent. MATIC being the token.
Chris (02:59):
You buy Ethereum, right?
Juan (02:59):
You can buy Ethereum, for sure.
Chris (03:01):
But that means Arbitrum is adding value to the ETH token as well.
Juan (03:05):
It does certainly and that's a very good point. It does add value to the Ethereum token itself, you buy Ethereum but it's on a pure play on Layer-2. You could argue Polygon is a pure play on Layer-2, so that's one advantage. I guess the main distinction between the two is trust required to operate in these two environments. When you're on Polygon, you're basically on a separate blockchain and the issue with being on a separate blockchain is you're implicitly trusting an entirely new set of validators. You're not trusting the Ethereum miners with your money or with your funds, you're trusting the Polygon validators. Now since Polygon is more than a side chain, it's what they call a commit chain, there are some advantages to operating on Polygon versus something like an Ethereum copycat like Binance Smart Chain which lives in its entirely own separate universe. The Polygon network is a bit different, the validator set lives on Ethereum. So these are registered on a smart contract on Ethereum. If you want to stake your MATIC, you have to be on Layer-1.
Chris (04:14):
So Ethereum knows about these validators, right?