hottakes

crypto

Always been a huge supporter of Polygon. They paved the way for so much in our industry, inclusive of front-running ZK to viability about 5yrs before its time.

However, their new proposal is shocking. For anyone unaware, they're looking to essentially use all the stables on the polygon bridge ($1.3b), put it into yield farms, and then use the yield earned to fund polygon projects of their choosing.

For those of you who have been around a while: yes, exactly what caused FTX.

However, even if we were to assume good faith behaviour, the risks are absolutely systemic. All it'd take is one pool getting drained, and then you've got a bank rush on a completely synthetic asset ("loaned" stables) trying to get out of the bridge.

Protocols like Aave (50% of the TVL on Polygon) are also rekt, because they were lending out that same synthetic asset.

The idea of moving away from banks to self-custody, only to have a chain lend out my assets is just alien to me.

Forming my opinion purely on their insane marketing tactics between 2020-2024, Polygon always felt like a grift-chain to me.

Reorgs in blocks every week, pretending to be decentralized with 2 nodes, obfuscafing the differences between Polygon POS and zkEVM depending on the marketing angle, paying ETH influencers to position Polygon as decentralized, launching new coin after the first one dried out, copying other L1s' offering and presenting it as "innovation"...

Not saying they've done zero contribution but marketing gimmick list just doesn't end with those guys.

https://chainleft.art

Dad, data scientist, blockchain native artist.

Power consolidation=evil.

Bitcoin has a reorg every 2-3 days or so.

I've been using Polygon since Decentraland migrated assets to it in 2020 and worked there in the security team (mostly on zkevm stuff) from October 2022-February 2024. I never understood the critic's obsession with finality.

Seems like a weird Cosmos meme, since they'd rather halt than reorg 🤷  IMO optimizing for liveness makes more sense, and is in direct opposition to finality.