Deri Protocol x Polygon zkEVM AMA
On December 28th, Deri Protocol & Polygon zkEVM jointly launched an AMA. Let’s watch the detailed & complete AMA recap below:
The AMA Entrance: https://bit.ly/DeriDiscord
Deri Protocol: Hi everyone, I’m your host for today’s AMA session. Thrilled to have you all here!
We’ll be kicking off in 15 minutes. Our special guest today is Jackmelnick, who will be answering your questions about Polygon zkEVM.
Here’s how it’ll work:
I’ll start by asking some pre-submitted questions.
Feel free to drop your questions in the chat throughout the session.
jackmelnick will answer as many as possible.
Remember to keep your questions clear and concise for better responses.
Let’s make this a great and informative session.
gm Jack welcome to the Deri Protocol dc!
Polygon zkEVM: gmgm!
Deri Protocol: Alright, let’s start with our first question.
Could you start by introducing yourself and giving us a brief overview of what Polygon zkEVM is, especially highlighting how it differs from other blockchain scaling solutions?
Polygon zkEVM: Polygon zkEVM is an Ethereum Layer 2 Rollup, powered by zk-technology. The vast majority of existing smart contracts, developer tools and wallets work seamlessly out of the box, making it easy for cross-chain projects to launch existing infrastructure and get the benefits of the Polygon ecosystem!
Deri Protocol: Awesome, and what makes Polgyon zkEVM special among the zk roll-ups?
Polygon zkEVM: zkEVM has close-to-perfect EVM equivalency, with the Plonky2 prover that many teams in the space use having been built by the Polygon team lead by Brendan Farmer. With them working on Plonky 3 as well, you can expect new improvements in efficiency soon!
On top of that, the Polygon 2.0 roadmap is entirely built around zk-technology and Layer 2 chains. Deploying on a Polygon zk-L2 means connectivity into the entire Polygon ecosystem through the Interop Layer, a shared liquidity layer that allows for native and permissionsless message passing (/asset bridging) onto any connected chain!
Deri Protocol: wow! new improvements in efficiency, looking forward for them.
and wonder what specific advantages of Polygon zkEVM for advanced DeFi platforms, like Deri Protocol.
Polygon zkEVM: Polygon zkEVM is targeting DeFi specifically. So, platforms like Deri protocol that use tokenized NFTs will have the option to integrate those collateral positions into a variety of different DeFi use-cases on zkEVM.
From a chain perspective, the fast block times and throughput (with even faster throughput coming in the next ~2 months) mean that settlement on trades is easy and fast.
Finally, with the interop layer down the line, you will be able to draw in users from any other Polygon chain — like PoS (soon a zk-L2 as well), and CDK chains like OKX (X1), Manta, and many, many more.
Deri Protocol: DeFi lego game and innovations; fast block time and throughtput; and whole polygon ecosystem; amazing!
And how does Polygon zkEVM address the complexity and high gas costs of derivatives trading, particularly compared to Optimistic Rollups such as Arbitrum and Optimism?
Polygon zkEVM: So, gas on zk-rollups will always be higher than optimistic rollups, as you’re actually proving the chain, which is what creates the fast finality on the native bridges vs. the 7 day window on an optimistic rollup bridge.
For gas-sensitive users, Polygon PoS is always an excellent option, as even after it transitions to a Validium, it will remain fast and cheap, but with added security.
There’s a lot on the horizon that will meaningfully further lower gas costs and speed for derivatives trading. New upgrades to data compression and EIP-4844 will help drop the data availability costs, which make up the primary portion of fees, and upgrades to proving and compression in the near future will help on the scalability and bottlenecking of the prover.
Deri Protocol: Perfect!
Now from your perspective, what are the most significant challenges facing the DeFi ecosystem today, and how is Polygon zkEVM positioned to address these issues?
Polygon zkEVM: I’d say the most significant challenge for the past 9 months was the infrastructure overhead of a launching a new chain. When you deploy a platform day one, it doesn’t have any of the infrastructure that DeFi platforms need:
1.The Graph
2.Safe
3.Chainlink/Oracle Providers
4.Seaport Contracts for transfering NFTs easily
While it’s fun to immediately spin up a DEX with a token and try to grow TVL, we took a lot of time to make sure the ground work was set, and ensured that the move to zkEVM would be as easy and possible for developers.
Remember that optimistic rollups have been around for 2.5 years! That’s a lot of time to build out a robust ecosystem with a lot of infrastructure. Getting as close to parity over nine months was a ton of work, and we’re now excited to really get to work on DeFi building early next month with the campaign that’s kicking off.
Deri Protocol: Jack has mentioned several great update in the coming weeks, could you detailed explain what can we expect from Polygon zkEVM in terms of development? Are there any major updates or milestones on the horizon that we should be aware of? Specially for the “DeFi building early next month”.
Polygon zkEVM: We have about 30+ dApps that are all gearing up to launch in January of 2024, as we really shift focus from building infrastructure to deploying applications. That should really kickstart the growth cycle on zkEVM and give a lot more to play around with from a DeFi perspective. We’d love to have Deri deploy as part of this!
Deri Protocol: Thrilled to be the one-stop derivative shop on Polygon zkEVM and keep building!
Next, let’s talk about user adoption. What strategies is Polygon zkEVM employing to attract and onboard more users, ensuring a wider and more active user base?
Polygon zkEVM: There’s a lot of different parts to this.
I think my general feeling is that mind share = market share. If you do a good job of attracting the best application developers, that draws in the power users. If you do a good job of drawing in power users, then others usually follow!
That said, there’s a lot of other pieces that you have to put together to make this journey as appealing as possible: getting bridges into place with L2<->L2 support, quests, AMAs and marketing, onboarding through centralized exchanges and wallets, applications getting added to the BOS Gateway: https://bos.quickswap.exchange/ helps abstract away some of the difficulty bringing users onto the chain.
Then once on the chain, we have a very DeFi-native team that understands what a robust ecosystem should look like. As a result, we have a big focus on ensuring a wide breadth of different applications, which in turn means that as a user or a builder you have a ton of different integrations and solutions to play with. So, while Deri may be on multiple chains, our goal is for the version of zkEVM to be different than what you can experience anywhere else.
Deri Protocol: Thank you, Jack for the insightful answers!
Next, I’m going to open the floor to the community to ask some questions.
Feel free to ask any burning questions you have for Jack and Polygon zkEVM.
Q: I’d like to inquire about what contributions can be made to Deri. Will there be any collaborations similar to Linea Voyage?
A: Sure, I’ll answer this and the questions below at the same time.
If Deri is able to launch in January, we’ll be running a campaign with Layer3, very similar to Linea Voyage, that we’d love to have Deri participate in. This will also come with a lot of co-marketing and general marketing around all of the new launches on zkEVM for the month, as that’s a big focus.
re: Mainnet, this is a ‘Beta’, but the network has been running for about nine months now. Any zk-chain is experimental tech, so we are calling it a Beta as we continue to iron out bugs and ship upgrades.
Q: With the growing popularity of Ordinals, is there a shift in focus towards Polygon Ordinals over DeFi?
A: Ha — Polygon POS has handled something like 160m inscriptions already to date- at one point running at 250 tps for the better part of a day, and tx fees only spi,ed up to 10c. We’ve got it covered, so staying on DeFi.
Q: In terms of trading capabilities, how does Polygon stand out against other options like BASE? Could you provide reasons for choosing Polygon over BASE?
A: I’d say that on Base, you have a more mature ecosystem, but one that hasn’t shown a ton of sticking power on the DeFi side in my eyes quite yet.
The appeal with zkEVM would be getting in to a more robust tech stack (zk technology) in the early days, with a chance to grow alongside the chain. Additionally, it would make your deployment onto CDK chains built on the polygon stack, like OKX’s chain, very easy down the line!
A: Interop layer? What’s this?
Q: The interop layer is a shared liquidity layer built using zk-proofs that is a part of the Polygon 2.0 roadmap. It allows for shared fees for proving across all Polygon/CDK chains, and also faciliates cross-chain message passing & (by extension of the lx-ly bridge) mint-and-burn asset bridging !
https://polygon.technology/blog/polygon-2-0-protocol-vision-and-architecture
A: Could you outline the roadmap for Polygon zkEVM in 2024?
Q: I’d read through the blog I’ve linked above with the protocol architecture as a high level on the technical side.
Beyond that you can expect things like:
1.Polygon Miden (Polygon Miden is a general purpose execution layer with its own STARK-based virtual machine (VM))
2.Plonky3
3.EIP-4844 upgrades
4.Better data compression, which leads to meaningfully lower fees
5.Upgrades to throughputs
6.Interop deployment
7.Aiming to hit 100!! CDK chains built on the Polygon stack by the end of 2024. We’re already at ~15.
Deri Protocol: Thank you, Jack , for all these sharing, and thanks to everyone for participating. Super thrilled that the community has gained a better understanding of Layer 2 and Polygon zkEVM through today’s session. Really fantastic AMA, with tons of insightful information!
About Deri Protocol
Deri, your option, your future!
Deri is the DeFi way to trade derivatives: to hedge, to speculate, to arbitrage, all on chain. With Deri Protocol, trades are executed under AMM paradigm and positions are tokenized as NFTs, highly composable with other DeFi projects. Having provided an on-chain mechanism to exchange risk exposures precisely and capital-efficiently, Deri Protocol has minted one of the most important blocks of the DeFi infrastructure.
