#3: How Blockchains Can Provide a Better Experience | with Brian Trunzo

Show Notes

Brian Trunzo, Metaverse Lead at Polygon Studios, joins the show to talk about Polygon and how blockchains can improve customer and brand experiences.

Find out more about the NYU Metaverse Collaborative here: https://www.sps.nyu.edu/homepage/metaverse.html

What is The Whole Metaverse?

In-depth discussions and explorations into the whole new world of web3 and the metaverse with leading thinkers and industry experts. Presented by the NYU Metaverse Collaborative.

The Whole Metaverse - Episode #3
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Pierre Gervois: Brian Trunzo thank you very much for, uh, being on the whole Metaverse podcast, the NYU podcast about the metaverse. Dr. Elizabeth Haas NYU professor and myself Pierre Gervois will be the host today. Brian, you are the Metaverse lead at Polygon Studio. And there are multiple blockchains and every blockchain is competing to be the best Blockchain for different companies, different application.

Explain us why a company or, or an organization or an artist should choose or polygon. Why are you better than Ethereum or Tezos or Solana

Brian Trunzo: Well, I don't, I don't think it's so much being better than anyone. I think it starts philosophically why we exist. so I'll start there and hopefully that explanation will make the case, uh, for itself. philosophically we believe in the layer two thesis, if you will. That's to say that. The most decentralized technology, uh, that enables smart contracts, Ethereum, uh, is the gift from heaven.

along with that gift, uh, comes some congestion and some throughput, restrictions. That's to say, a layer one blockchain cannot be each of decentralized, secure, and fast, and they can only optimize for two of those three things. So with that Ethereum, Optimized for decentralization and security not for speed.

So with that, uh, layer two solutions like Polygon come into existence to, speed up transaction throughput, of which Polygon has developed, uh, a suite of technologies to help. prove this layer two thesis. many people that we compete with, that are a part of the Ethereum virtual machine do one thing.

They, they do one layer two solution, whether it's an optimistic rollup, a zk rollup, a side chain, which some folks would not consider that a layer two that you start to get into sort of like nerdy, technical issues there. Uh, also enterprise solutions, which is to say private blockchains or permission blockchains built upon our technology, but we're the only folks out there that have a.

Of these, technologies that we provide in a modular way, uh, for folks to build upon. So I, I think that is one of the reasons why large IP holders, consumer brands, entertainment properties, games, folks that will help us bring about mainstream adoption of blockchain. Choose polygon.

Dr. Elizabeth Haas: You said level one can't do all three. Why is it they can't do all three?

Brian Trunzo: So I am a non-technical person, so I'm not gonna get too far into, the deep end of the pool on this. But, um, there is, uh, something called Zuku Triangle, and the cryptographic community has talked about this ad infin, the only way to increase. Transaction throughput at layer one is to, cut corners on decentralization or security.

that is, uh, a proven thesis. Um, that is something I'm not qualified to speak on beyond, above the tree line in that way. there's plenty of literature in the space that proves that point.

Pierre Gervois: Polygon was created in India, and correct me if I'm wrong by uh, Indian developers, explain us how the fact that it was created in such this large country has an impact on the way Polygon operates. It's very interesting to see a blockchain that was not created in Europe or in the United States, but in India, which is a huge country, very important economically, culturally.

So I think it's a, it's a great thing to see this big country who created, uh, these blockchains. So tell us what are the consequences of this?.

Brian Trunzo: the consequences are just proving that we live, uh, in a global society, and that, you know, when it comes to blockchain technology, there's no region that should be considered, a favorite to bring about mass adoption. obviously there are, governmental and policy and regulatory.

Regimes throughout the world that would make it more difficult for a particular region to launch, a successful blockchain protocol at the layer one or layer two level, or even at the, the application level. this has become a global game. and I think that Polygon having been, uh, founded in, India is, is proof of that, that being said, Polygons journey began in 2017, and it wasn't until early 2021, when Polygon rebranded to Polygon it was formally called Matic, where, things started to take shape and. the blockchain started to resemble what it looks like today. one of the reasons why philosophically Polygon has been a place, that I've enjoyed working at and I was a super user of the protocol before I began working there a year ago, is that Polygon has always shown an ability to pivot into new technologies, that are being created open source globally working with the large Ethereum, uh, community to develop, uh, scaling solutions together. And around 2021 when Polygon, rebranded. Into, into Polygon Matic. and this had been taking place throughout 2020. polygon moved from, uh, at that time what was called plasma, which was supposed to be the scaling solution that a lot of people were betting on from 2018 through 2020, people were betting on this plasma solution, uh, pivoting into sidechains, pivoting into ZK roll-ups, and really showing an ability to address, you know, new technologies and, show an ability to pivot for mainstream adoption. So, uh, hopefully that painted a picture that's, worth jumping into the next.

question

Dr. Elizabeth Haas: It sounds like that the Ethereum research, um, foundation was really critical to polygons understanding of this, are they still kind of providing key information to Polygon?

Brian Trunzo: Seeing that it's a, yeah, it's a global, open, permissionless community. Um, a lot of it starts with the Ethereum Foundation, but also, a lot of it starts outside the foundation. Uh, and the foundation will, and the core developers, you know, will take cues from outside of their own. Four walls, and implement, technologies or, or research, discrete topics, that arise elsewhere.

So I think it's a global effort. A lot of it happens in forums. A lot of it happens in GitHub, repos, discords, you know, people are talking everywhere these days. So, I don't think it's one directional.

Pierre Gervois: We have seen the first application for blockchain. The art industry in the gaming industry for consumer goods industry, and I think that the blockchain can be used also to promote democracy and can be used to improve public services to improve the relation between, citizens and an administration in a democratic country.

I see that Polygon has been, adapted by, a police department in an Indian city to improve the relation between, citizens and their police force. And how do you see Polygon being used by government or for public services in the future..

Brian Trunzo: The beauty of, polygon and open permissionless, decentralized blockchains is just that, that it's open and permissionless and general purpose. So, I think we're only scratching the surface in terms of what blockchains can do. when it comes to governments specifically, I think the, the wide polygon ecosystem of developers who are developing, uh, decentralized applications, they, they'll be the ones to, to break new ground and, and work with governments, on what proofs of concepts that they should stand up and then what they should explore thereafter.

one thing that that comes to mind that's pretty easy to understand is voting. Um, the fact that, voting is still a manual process, where, identity, And physical location are, are so important. and there are hot issues that go into identity and physical location. Uh, how much identity is needed, how much do we need a physical location to conduct this sort of behavior?

The fact that on chain voting exists that we can do it, and that it's. Pretty instantaneously. It's, it's not instant, um, you know, need to wait for blocks to be produced on chain. but we can solve this now. We can do this today. also thinking about the way, payments are made, at the municipal level, polygon is working with the city of Logan's Plan B, which is meant to, uh, socialize and intergrate blockchain technology into the city, where one can pay his or her taxes, and a stablecoin, where merchants are given, uh, incentives to accept cryptocurrencies, and where cryptocurrencies are integrated throughout municipal governance. you know, I feel like it's somewhat of a cop out answer to say our imaginations are the only thing that's preventing us from going further.

but in many ways I think that that's actually true.

Dr. Elizabeth Haas: on the clients you're working with, can you, you know, talk about a couple of the cutting edge things you're seeing? What are. innovative players doing.

Brian Trunzo: two areas that are very interesting to me. And, and we've had a lot of traction at Polygon and, because of some big commercial deals that we've been able to produce, we've had a lot of traction and wind at our sales. And winning these verticals is loyalty, rewards, and figitals. that's to say, digital products that are linked to physical products.

Starting with the ladder with figitals, you know, understanding how one can be incentivized to do things IRL to receive, digital benefits. So that's dynamic NFTs, that change in appearance or in metadata, uh, based off of actions that are taken in the real world. so folks like S Labs, 90 cc IYK these are, these are, folks who are building critical infrastructure and decentralized applications that do just this sort of thing. so imagine a world where, uh, a musician who is selling merch, is having a concert, uh, can incentivize you to go to the concert where the garment have it scanned through an NFC chip and have the corresponding NFT level Up over time, those sorts of technologies are really interesting because I feel like there's a narrative in Metaverse, um, that we're all going to be, you know, 450 pounds, with all sorts of health defects and, you know, not taking care of our physical vessels because we're stuck in this digital, uh, missed reality, I guess.

and I feel like there's a way to connect, uh, our physical and digital selves. These sorts of technologies and products. so the digital space is super interesting for me. related there too is the loyalty and reward space. our, our partnership with Starbucks has really blazed the, the path here and, and a lot of folks are, are learning and iterating against this and it's gonna become a really exciting space.

and that's to say, to turn passive consumption into like really gamified immersion on the brand level. You know, as, as someone who has worked in marketing and on the brand side of, creative over the years, that's really interesting to me, particularly, uh, as we move into this, privacy focused first party data world where, cookies may be deprecated at some point.

and the old web two, uh, tricks, selling and acquiring data to target consumers, uh, that playbook is going to be, maybe not dumped on its head, but definitely new chapters will be added there too. So, there was a narrative before the N f T boom, that folks would be, More guarded of their personal data and that they would sell their data.

and, and that is true, but when you double click on it, one's data is worth a few pennies a month, right? So the idea that you and I will, will sell our data for a few pennies a month, that that narrative doesn't really hold however, When you're selling your data, you're really, you're selling your attention, to folks who are rewarding you with NFTs, which are meant to be loyalty and reward incentives for particular brands or, whoever is actually issuing these NFTs. You start to enter a, an interesting space, right? So you're selling your attention for NFTs NFTs become a new marketer's trick. It be, it sort of like adds to the, the web two playbook of retargeting. and to me, this N F T commerce, , that will arise there from is really, really interesting for brand.

Dr. Elizabeth Haas: from what you said, I mean, part of the attention merchants or whatever you wanna call them in the Web two world, is if I bought a Starbucks, I get six ads from Dunking Donuts what I'm seeing in the Web three world is if I buy a Starbucks, I'm more tied to Starbucks as opposed to the competitor having access to me.

there's a subtle difference there because I'm picking the merchant and it's tying me tighter, but I may be off. I just wanna kind of check that.

Brian Trunzo: That's a good example to, to highlight what I was saying. And I, and I think to take it a step further to see how like an API less affiliate marketing partnership world emerges. I'll give another example. if a particular business can read my on chain history and, and I give up my on chain history, right?

I, I allow them to see my on chain history, So I'll give an example for myself, right? As, as a native New Yorker who went to NYU 20 some odd years ago, who has owned small businesses in New York and has lived here his entire life. I would love to like, have a New York history on chain where businesses can target me, businesses that I want to be more loyal to.

It could be a restaurant, it could be a retailer, where I give up that data and I can get a better brand experience, digitally and physically. Uh, I, I think of how difficult it is to get a reservation at the Polo Bar or Carbón. I, I don't. Go online six weeks in advance at 9:00 AM to try to get a reservation.

If there was a way for me to be a part of a super club because of my New York on chain history, right, that will turn me into even more of a fan and, and support those brands even more. I will become, in a way, a billboard for those brands because I, to be honest, I wouldn't shut up about it. I would be talking about how great the Polo bar is.

and that's just, Half of a percent of where this can go, right? Like this is just scratching the surface on the affiliate marketing programs and the retargeting and sort of like N F T rewards what that could look like. But I feel like that adds, a layer to the discussion worth exploring.

Pierre Gervois: I, I have not seen a lot of fine art project on Polygon. I, I might be wrong, but most of the art project I hear are either on Ethereum or on Tezos.

What is the reason, or maybe I, I'm wrong about that.

Brian Trunzo: no, I, I mean, I would say 95 plus percent, and I wouldn't just say this is empirical. You can check the data. 95 plus percent of the liquidity in fine art is on Ethereum. And I think that's because, the most, uh, um, Like importance, resources, legitimacy.

Right? And, Ethereum has proven itself to be the settlement layer for value. Uh, and that is where the art market, emerged from the, this NFT art market emerged from, the, the art world. Makes outsize noise for its size based on the zeitgeist, and also based on being early adopters. so, you know, in d during the depth of covid, particularly in the beginning, when folks were inside, uh, you know, clubhouses and Twitter spaces talking about NFTs, a lot of it was around collectibles and fine art, and it was all on Ethereum.

for good reason, so there's some sort of historical relevance here that gives Ethereum legitimacy, when it comes to collectibles, when it comes to fine art. but that is just, a very, very, very, very small use case. For NFTs, um, you know, it, it's almost, zeroing in as NFTs as an asset class, as a, a hyper financialized product as opposed to a usable product, as opposed to a composable product.

so as Ethereum becomes more of a settlement layer for the world's value and layer twos emerge as execution environments, Those who are buying Ethereum block space will be other blockchains, will be layer twos, roll-ups, enterprise solutions. that's not to say that art projects will move, that's not to say that collectibles will move to other blockchains.

Maybe they too will buy block space from Ethereum. But block space being a finite resource, know, I, I'm of the mindset that. Most of these projects will move, to layer twos over time. So, I think a reason for the liquidity and, and the amount of attention that a art has drawn on, Ethereum has to do with legitimacy, which also is a byproduct of time and place.

so yeah, I, that, that's my opinion on that one.

Pierre Gervois: And do, do, do you think that universal blockchain that can address, can solve solutions for any type of industry. Or do you think that we will see in the future certain industries, certain type of application being more on, uh, Solana or Polygon or Tezos or Enthereum? What's your opinion?

Do you see blockchain getting you specialized at some.

Brian Trunzo: I don't think blockchains should be specialized. I think that defeats the purpose of a blockchain. And I feel like when you see a blockchain, whether it's run by a foundation or a nonprofit or a for-profit enterprise that is trying to position a blockchain as the blockchain for X thing, That's a sign of weakness in the blockchain, looking to, uh, find a use case, a single use case, because, maybe, uh, they have a few people, working on the BD teams that have expertise in those things. blockchains that are turning complete, general computation, environments to execute transactions.

Uh, there should be no limitation to what they do. And if you are to have, uh, whether it's a layer two or monolithic layer one, if you were to have a general purpose blockchain, you would want composability across all sorts of decentralized applications. one can make the argument. Um, that why, why would you want to have, A blockchain for art.

If, uh, there are no, sort of like money legos on the defi side to provide for liquidity, why would you wanna have, uh, a metaverse blockchain? if you can't composable have, artworks live inside those blockchains? Why would you wanna have a loyalty of rewards blockchain that cannot interact with the metaverse or, physical products?

Uh, and it's not so much, cannot it, it's more, um, the marketing message behind those blockchains. the main point I'm trying to make is that blockchains are turning complete general computation, execution environments and, to position one's blockchain as a blockchain for X thing.

That kind of kneecaps the blockchain itself. Uh, and I feel like that's indicative of a blockchain looking for, a vertical to win because it's not having success elsewhere. So it's almost like a, a, a forced business decision for something that's meant to be decentralized and permissionless.

Dr. Elizabeth Haas: With everything happening in the crypto world today, , I love your kind of thoughts on, you know, this industry that became 2 billion in 10 years and where you think it's headed now.

Brian Trunzo: if I'm reading you correctly, About the events of the last six months from 3 Arrows capital to Terra Luna, to ftx. It's, it's really a shame that, the tools that emerge to prevent this from happening, let's say decentralized finance, where there's a public ledger, uh, where one cannot steal customer deposits, where one cannot actually commit fraud without, everyone seeing it.

The, the fact that those tools were not used and that, the crypto industry. Took a hit on the chin, like a champ to be honest, but took a, a massive hit on the chin and some people have lost their entire life savings, and it's a very sad, uh, moment, for the crypto industry. The fact that this happened because there were bad actors working in, uh, centralized environments, is really sort of a shame, because the mainstream media, I feel as though, are either incapable of or unwilling to understand that and report it accurately.

the events of the last six months have been painted as though, uh, this is crypto's fault. it's a few bad people's faults. sometimes you gotta trim the trees to let them grow, and I, for one, am happy to see bad actors removed from the system. I'm here for a long time. I've been here for six years already and I plan on going nowhere.

So, at Polygon we say the bear market is for builders. so you know, the folks that we see innovating right now, We will see the fruits of their labor next year and the year after and the years to come. in every bear market that we've had, whether it was because there was fraudulent behavior or some sort of spectacular blow up, like Mt. Gox, for instance, a few years back, or the ICO bubble that popped in 2018.

We've always seen something emerge there from, you know, after Mount GOs smart contracts came about. Ethereum came about, uh, after the 2018 ICO bubble popped, we got def. And NFTs. you know, the question is, where do we go from here? What, what sort of innovation is going to emerge from here? Because the, the folks who are building right now, the developers who are working on decentralized applications and applications of blockchains right now, those are the ones who are going to create tomorrow.

Dr. Elizabeth Haas: A And do you have a sense of what the lessons are that they can build on? I mean, is is there something. like the consumer, whatever certification that can say yes it's decentralized or, you know, it's, visible. It's accountable. Is there some kind of, lesson like that that should be happening or that, you know, investors need to be active board members?

Any of that?

Brian Trunzo: Yeah, it's unfortunate that my answer is there's a level of caveat emptor here. not your keys, not your coins. That message is very true. folks who left their, crypto assets on FTX as an exchange. To They were defrauded. Right? Like that is very clear. Uh, so not to blame them, but this is a lesson in crypto hygiene.

This is a lesson in decentralization. So, I don't wanna sound too crypto anarchic and say it's all on us, and self-agency is the only way out of this because, there are things that protocols and and DAPs should be doing to help the users, uh, adopt the technology. Cuz without a frictionless environment, we'll never get across the chasm, right?

but it really does start with taking agency over yourself. Self custody's hard. You know, o being your own bank is a hard thing, you know, and there's a reason why, uh, centralized third parties have emerged with regulation around It's a profitable business to be in as a centralized party. folks are willing to pay, the coordination fees to not be their own banks.

So, I think it starts with the user. It starts with. Yourself. but I do believe that, those who are building on Web three rails, particularly consumer brands entertainment, those who are using NFTs as a technology layer, they need to abstract away some of the frictions and pain points while installing.

and instilling trust and confidence into the system. So, I think one of the ways we get there too is stop obsessing over terminology. Stop obsessing over web three, blockchain NFTs, you know, the moment we stopped obsessing over the information superhighway and going online like it was when we achieved minimal viable online.

I think we all. , going online and announcing to the people in your home that you're going online so that they don't pick up the phone. we don't do that anymore. Right. I, I wouldn't make this announcement right now that Elizabeth and and Pierre were all online right now.

Right. It's just, it's baked in. We don't have to talk about it. And I think a part of adoption will be when there's an education on the consumer level, but also brands and IP holders are providing a frictionless experience whereby NFTs, fungible tokens, blockchain is baked into the process. most of it is trustless, but where trust needs to exist, it can exist reasonably, and we stop obsessing over it. So, I think it's a, a mix of all of those things.

Dr. Elizabeth Haas: As Ethereum became sustainable and switched its, um, method of, proof, being on top of it, what did you observe as the number two chain and how did it impact you? Was there a pause or was there too much other noise to really decipher

Brian Trunzo: Yeah. You know, the, the merge went off without a hitch. Um, there was no change to our protocol only change that we experienced is that, You know, the, the most amount of, energy consumption that Polygon used when Ethereum was on proof of work was our bridge. A anytime someone used our bridge to move currency, fungible tokens from Ethereum to Polygon and vice versa.

There's a hash on the Ethereum blockchain and on proof of work that used energy, and also the fact that we checkpoint our ledger to the Ethereum ledger every 45 minutes or. you know, those transactions became way more energy efficient. So, the only thing that we saw was that our bridge and our checkpointing, uh, which uses the bridge as well, that those transactions became less energy intensive.

So, uh, we're always going to be an order of magnitude less energy intensive than Ethereum. the merge kind of went off without a hitch and we weren't all that much.

affected

Dr. Elizabeth Haas: and you didn't see

a bunch of new customers come in all of a sudden too, because now it was a more acceptable. Currency.

Brian Trunzo: The, uh, the energy efficiency and e s g message of proof of stake blockchains, you know, we, we benefited, from that narrative and not saying narrative as in that's fake or it's not real. I'm just saying that's, you know, a headline, right? we benefited from that narrative and from that macro trend, let's say, up until the Ethereum merge.

at which point Ethereum became, carbon neutral and, that, competitive advantage over Ethereum if, if one is to measure Polygon against Ethereum, which I think is wrong because, uh, we're here to scale Ethereum, so we work together. so that that narrative and that macro trend kind of, kind of went away.

Large corporates, whether they're consumer brands, entertainment properties, games, you know, their, their board wants to double click on e S G. They, they wanna know our policies, they wanna know our views, they wanna know our statistics. So we still have these conversations, when we're doing BD with, with large corporates.

but we have kind of like a playbook for that. And, we turn over documents to folks so they could get comfortable with the technology and, and with the energy efficiency.

Dr. Elizabeth Haas: Brian, you and I have been talking back and forth for a couple months now on what we can do together and how to make this partnership really work. I'd love to hear kind of your sense. I know you have a loyalty to NYU. We'd love to figure out how to make it a partnership.

Brian Trunzo: I'll start with, um, the story that I, that I told you a few months ago. you know, I graduated NYU in oh six at our commencement we were given, as our present, as our parting present from the university, we were given access to our NYU account, which is now on Gmail Of course. in perpetuity.

Up until that point, you know, e email was still a funny thing and you know, Gmail wasn't what it is today. And, the significance of it in that moment, it didn't hit me. I was like, oh, okay, cool. Like I could use an NYU e. Why would I want that? but over time like that has become a seminal moment in my life that I look back on.

A really important technological point in my life and, and my fellow alumni's lives. So with that, you know, we were talking about domains and, and we were talking about decentralized identity and how cool would it be if, NYU was able to. Create a decentralized identity for the students. And then maybe that's a way to start the education process of owning something, right?

You own your decentralized identity in a way that you don't own your email. if Google wanted to take your email away from you tomorrow, they can. Uh, and there's very little redress that you would have on that, but no one can take away a decentralized identity from you. So, so that was one of the first things we discussed.

And from there, you know, we started discussing, study abroad campuses in the Metaverse and, if there are, grant programs or alumni associations that could be, you know, uh, structured as a dao, there's many opportunities for us to explore.

It's just a matter. setting in motion, one or two, getting a couple wins, and then showing the rest of the university and, keep, keep on going from.

Dr. Elizabeth Haas: So if we wanna

do this decentralized identity, At this year's graduation, let's just say in the month of January, you and I create a half hour course on what, what is decentralized identity and we get it recorded, um, and then we start sending it out. What do you say about that

Brian Trunzo: Oh man, you're putting the screws to me on, on the podcast. I for one, would love. , uh, and, you know, we have partners, um, that you have had, conversations with. I don't know if it's appropriate to name folks, you know, NDAs and stuff like that. Um, but we have some amazing partners, that we can do that with.

so I, for one, love the idea because it was a very important moment in my life to receive my NYU gmail at graduation. By the way, BMT two 17 nyu edu, um, had that for almost 20 years now.

Dr. Elizabeth Haas: Fantastic.

Let's, let's, let's make a commitment. , we're gonna do it.

Pierre Gervois: Thank you. Thank you so much, Brian. I mean, we learned really a lot. I, I really love your, your perspective. That was really very, very interesting. So thank you so much for being on the. On the whole Metaverse, NYU podcast, and I wish you good luck with the polygon and all your, uh, metaverse related projects.

Thank you so much.

Brian Trunzo: Pierre, thank you so much and thank you for putting up with me for, for people listening, I was a bit of an administrative nightmare to get on the calendar. I just had things popping up left and right. So thank you for sticking with me and, uh, thank you for being able to cram this in at year end and to be

the last podcast of the year for you.