Hi Fintech Architects,
It’s our 200th podcast episode! A huge thank you to all that continue to enjoy these podcasts as much as we enjoy making them!
In this episode, Lex chats with Marc Boiron — CEO of Polygon Labs. Marc shares his journey from law to blockchain, discussing the challenges of navigating crypto’s evolving legal landscape and the complexities of structuring compliant DeFi projects. He explains Polygon’s strategic pivot to focus on stablecoin payments, leveraging its proven blockchain and global partnerships.
Marc highlights Polygon’s real-world adoption, competitive edge, and vision to become the leading platform for on-chain payments. The episode offers insights into regulatory hurdles, industry trends, and Polygon’s mission to transform digital money movement.
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Thanks for your time and attention,
Matt & Lex 🙌
Key notable takeaways:
The Labs-Foundation Structure Is a Frankenstein - and Its Creator Knows It
Marc helped architect the legal frameworks behind major DeFi token launches but openly calls the outcome a “complete Frankenstein.” The arm’s-length separation between labs and foundations was necessary to survive regulatory hostility, but makes coherent execution nearly impossible. He argues projects still copying this structure today are doing so out of habit, not legal necessity.
Generalist Blockchains Are Dead - Polygon Is Betting Everything on Payments
As chain architectures converge, Boiron believes differentiation through speed and low fees is over. Polygon analysed its actual usage, found stablecoin payments was the standout vertical - $2.3 trillion already moved, fintechs across LatAm, Africa, and Southeast Asia already on-chain - and went all-in. The thesis is binary: if all money moves on-chain within a decade, even the 50th-best payments chain wins big.
Polygon’s Real Moat Is Enterprise Trust Built During the NFT Era
The 2022–23 enterprise NFT push looked like a dead end after FTX collapsed, but it left behind institutional due diligence and credibility. Fintechs evaluating payments chains find that Polygon has years of live production use, Fortune 500 relationships, and Stripe already defaulting to it - a trust advantage no newly launched chain can replicate.
Background
Marc Boiron holds a JD/MBA in Finance from Penn State Law and began his legal career at Richards, Layton & Finger in Delaware, advising major law firms on public company M&A - including Michael Dell's take-private deal. He moved to California to work with early-stage companies, and in early 2017 pivoted into crypto, becoming one of the first lawyers to specialise in DeFi.
He went on to serve as outside counsel to some of the sector's most prominent protocols, including Compound and Uniswap, shaping much of the legal architecture behind DeFi token launches. In 2021 he became Chief Legal Officer at dYdX, one of the largest decentralised derivatives exchanges, before joining Polygon Labs as CLO in August 2022.
👑Related coverage👑
Topics:
Polygon Labs, Polygon protocol, blockchain, crypto, decentralized finance, DeFi, legal frameworks, token launches, meme coins, stablecoins, payments, fintech, Ethereum, ICO boom, web3, NFT, Stripe, Circle
Timestamps
1’09: From Spreadsheets to Smart Contracts: The Accidental Lawyer Who Found His Edge in Emerging Companies
4’40: Selling Your Soul for Low-Risk Capital: The Case For and Against the JD MBA
9’41: Fake It Till You Make It: How the ICO Craze of 2017 Turned One Niche Bet Into a Crypto Legal Career
13’01: Read the Actual Law: Why Memorizing the Securities Act Beat 20 Years of Legal Precedent in Crypto
18’19: The Crypto Legal Frankenstein: How Regulatory Survival, Not Business Logic, Built the Foundation-Labs-Token Structure
25’16: From Stockholm Syndrome to Meme Coin Mania: The Disorienting Cost of Crypto's Regulatory 180
30’05: The Dichotomy of Success: How Polygon's Most Celebrated Moment Was Secretly Its Most Broken
36’49: All Money on Chain: Why Polygon Is Betting Its Future on Becoming the World's Payments Blockchain
48’29: The channels used to connect with Marc & learn more about Polygon Labs
Illustrated Transcript
Lex Sokolin:
Hi, everybody, and welcome to today's Fintech Blueprint conversation. We are thrilled to have with us today, Marc Boiron, who is the CEO of Polygon Labs, which is the labs company behind the Polygon protocol. I'm super excited to talk to Marc about his background in blockchain and law, and then increasingly in operating in the crypto space and the transformation of protocols, most recently towards much more commercial and focused use cases. So, with that mark, welcome to the conversation. Hey lots.
Marc Boiron:
Thanks for having me.
Lex Sokolin:
Let's go to the beginning and talk a little bit about your legal career. How did you enter the law, what brought you to it, what pulls you to it, and which areas of the law did you focus on first?
Marc Boiron:
For me, the legal background was pretty much accidental. I wanted to be an investment banker, which was kind of a strange thing to want to be. And, you know, my dad, at one point when I was going to go do an MBA, he was like, you should just get a law degree too, you know lawyers are well respected. You know, it'll set you up well. And I was like, sure, why don't I just throw in a law degree? And so, I decided to do like a joint JD, MBA and, you know, very thankful for that, because I spent a summer in New York on an investment bank, I just really did not enjoy it. Like I thought it would be a very different experience. I very much like pictured the partner and like investor side of of kind of like the investment banking but the relationship side of it very much to not picture the I'm going to sit in front of a spreadsheet and just make up numbers so that, you know, whatever I want to make happen will happen.
And so I pivoted from that and being more business oriented, my goal was how do I get into law in an area that is very close to finance in some way. And so I went to a law firm where I focused on just mergers and acquisitions of big public companies. The first three years of my career basically like taking Dell private when Michael Dell was doing the take-private deal, for example. And so that was kind of like the, the beginning of legal days. But the thing that I found really quickly was when you're working on these, these big deals that, like, are very high profile, you're not really actually having like any meaningful impact from my perspective. And so when I decided to move up to California, I decided to go to like a smaller firm where, you know, even as a young lawyer, I would have an ability to like, build up a book of business and kind of control my own kind of destiny. And so, I went to a firm.
I kept doing M&A work, but it allowed me to start working with like emerging companies, just early-stage companies, helping them raise capital. And that was, to me like a much more interesting path, because at that point, you kind of convert almost from being a lawyer in many ways to actually just being a salesperson. I often say that, you know, a partner at a law firm is just a glorified office person. And I wasn't as a partner as a, you know, fourth year associate doing that. But we very much had the opportunity to basically be engaged in sales all day long. And so that's kind of like where I, where I spent a lot of my time in like the relatively early days. Actually, being a lawyer.
Lex Sokolin:
I'm going to be a little bit self-indulgent and geek out here because I was also cursed with the JD MBA. I think when we did it, they still took four years and required two separate applications into the business and the law school, and we're generally pretty difficult to achieve. I still get questions about why should you do a JD, MBA, you know. And is it worth it? And I always say that it's like a horrible cost benefit analysis, but it is something that people often get just to like collect gold stars. And because they want the accomplishment. What do you say to people who ask whether that degree is something worth pursuing and why?
Marc Boiron:
Yeah, so I think I'm pretty like counter to the rest of the world on this, I think, which is that I think it's incredibly valuable for a set of people who want to be high earners with low risk. And that is that.
Lex Sokolin:
Which is why we're both in crypto. Right. That's definitely what it is.
Marc Boiron:
Exactly.
Lex Sokolin:
As tokens go to zero and everybody, you know gets deported.
Marc Boiron:
Yeah. So, I like the way that I looked at it at the time was here's a way that I could make more money than most people could imagine. And I'm going to sell my soul and life for it, but I am going to be able to do that and invest that capital, like, very successfully in a way that, like most people wouldn't.
And I have like no risk. So, I can take really low risk capital, aggressively invest that low-risk capital that is like a pretty significant amount. And that that to me was like a good trade. And, you know, knowing me like and how I actually am like was that actually to trade like. No, but there are a set of people. There's a lot of people who are very much unwilling to take a risk and being able to trade like four years of like, you know, really hard work for the potential to earn more money than they could probably earn doing almost anything else. Because these are not people who are going to go start companies. They're not people who are going to go to early-stage startups. You get equity. That is a really good path for that set of people. And so, I'm an advocate for that. Now. Do I want my kids doing that? No, because I want them to have a much higher risk profile. Be willing to take that risk at a young age, have lots of losses, but eventually be successful early. Learn a lot from it. But I do think there's a profile where we're definitely still makes a lot of sense.
Lex Sokolin:
How big was the JD MBA class for you?
Marc Boiron:
Yeah, it's relatively small. I was at Penn State. The overlap was probably about ten people. Yeah, it was about right.
Lex Sokolin:
So, at Columbia, it was for the four years of the overlap. It was like ten, 15 people. And there were two profiles of people. It was the lawyers who wanted the business stuff, and a lot of them went into kind of bankruptcy and, you know, like credit funds. But they wanted to have like that financial experience. Then there was actually the opposite profile, which was people who wanted to do high end financial services management. So, around this time, if I remember, like at least in my career, one of my mentors, who at one point was the CFO of Lehman Brothers, was a JD, MBA, and then the guy running Merrill Lynch during the financial crisis was a JD, MBA, and the the CEO of Goldman Sachs was a JD.
And so it felt like this is the thing you get, you know, if you want to deal with complicated social systems and you want exposure to financial services, like this is the degree you get. I wonder what it's like for people today, whether it's still the same respect for it or not.
Marc Boiron:
Yeah, I'm actually curious about that. And I remember when I looked at like making this decision at the time, I think it was somewhere between 30 and 40% of all public company like fortune 500 CEOs were lawyers. And that was like really interesting to me. And something that was actually, like relevant to me being like, okay. Yeah, like this makes sense to go get a JD if I'm a business guy. And I think a lot of that has to do with like the the regulatory moat that you benefit from as many businesses and that that's, I think, much truer 15 years ago than it than it is today. And I think like having that background was probably helpful. But but it's also like, I think for those who can escape the paranoia of lawyers and actually take the benefits of, you know, the way you break down information and analyze things and put that together with a risk profile as necessary to run a company? I think you can do that really well, and probably better than many others who don't have that back range.
Lex Sokolin:
Yeah, because you end up with a legal skill set of so much intellectual firepower, but it's all aimed at like shutting things down instead of growing that you do end up with kind of very few people who can turn it around into, you know, as you said, sales and so on. So if we shift to you starting to kind of be on the partner track at the smaller firm, looking at emerging tech companies, orient us a little bit, sort of with the first blockchain or crypto focused work that you started to encounter. When was that and what kind of things were on the docket?
Marc Boiron:
Yeah, so this was in early 2017, and it was very intentional. Like in late 2016, I had been out of law school for just over four years. And I said, okay, I am doing the same kind of work as, you know, at least a million other lawyers in the world. And that is not how you are successful. You should find a niche that you can land in and then go expand it.
And so, I went and kind of thought about it. What are the areas that have a significant amount of potential that I have some interest in and that I think is going to grow in a very meaningful way. And at that time, there's two things that came up. There was 3D printing and it was, you know, blockchains and, you know, 3D printing was the thing that had the most massive potential at the time is how everybody looked at it, you know, from an industrial perspective. It was growing super fast. But, you know, I had somebody make a presentation at her law firm about how you successfully like and run a law practice. And he was very focused on doing the thing that you love. And he was an automotive guy, and he would hang out at like, garages and like racetracks all weekend, and he would just become friends with these people, mostly because it was the thing he wanted to do it, who he wanted to hang out with. And he ended up just having all his friends call him.
And that is who you know. His like $5 million book of business was based off of just his friends calling him from, you know, the car track and the garage. And at first, I thought that was like BS because I'm like a very big believer in like, you know, work hard and you'll be successful. But I thought about it and I'm like; I've been reading about this Ethereum thing that I'm obsessed with for the last year. Why don't I go look at whether the blockchain thing really is something that has potential. So, this was early 2017 a little bit before like ICOs started blowing up there starting to be some like meetups around the idea of like of crypto. And right as I kind of started getting into it is when the ICO craze kind of started taking off. And, you know, I was just happy to be hanging out with all of these people who were really interested in blockchains at the time. All of the crazy ideas that you heard that, like, now are coming back around and I'm actually, like, viable.
You know, I'd be just talking about those. And, you know, everyone wanted to really quickly start launching a token. And, you know, I still remember the first project and the founders, somebody I still know what he laughs about, how much I faked it until I made it. I was, you know, a fourth-year associate who was like, hey, I get I can run this ICO for you from this, you know, small law firm when you know it's all these major law firms that are actually the ones helping people out. And so, yeah, the first one was really, you know, helping somebody out who wanted to launch a token. And, you know, it was, you know, I think the typical thing to start out with at the time.
Lex Sokolin:
What were the legal issues that clients were reaching out to you about? Like what were the problems that you were starting to see?
Marc Boiron:
Yeah, it's really based on two key things were the, you know, SEC issues around, you know, tokens being securities or not. You know, very quickly, like there was the ether delta guidance from the SEC around the, you know ether delta as a DEX and how that would be regulated. And then the associated tokens and then it was money transmitter. She said FinCEN had been very early into crypto and so had had guidance on that. And I, I, whether fortunate or unfortunate, had a very different young legal background when I Graduated law school. I did my M&A practice in Delaware. this firm that nobody in the world knows. Except for lawyers. And if you ask a lawyer about the firm, they will all tell you it is the best firm in the US, or maybe the world, because all this firm does is it advises other law firms. So, what would happen is you'd be on an ideal and you'd have every major law firm in the world from the stands to the late firms and so on, that would call you and say, hey, what do we do about this issue? And what you were expected to do was know the law like the back of your hand.
So, a lot of legal practices have intuition. You learn things, you draft things. In Delaware, it was you are going to remember these like 300 pages of the law and every single case that has ever come out of the Delaware courts. And when a partner from a major law firm calls you, you're going to be able to tell them the answer to their question immediately. And when you review an agreement, you're going to be able to like advise on that. And so, what I learned was learn the law. Don't just learn how people have done things historically, which is how most lawyers learn things. And so, when I got interested in this, the first thing that I did, weirdly enough, was I actually opened up the Securities Act and the Exchange Act, like the actual laws. And I looked straight up to script and I read them like multiple times. And these are like hundreds of pages. I then read every bit of FinCEN guidance that touched crypto in any way whatsoever. And that's kind of how I like faked it till I made it was I just understood the actual law itself.
![SEC Crypto Regulation Advancements and Updates [2026]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!iHi7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Feb1f9280-5f73-4703-9fc6-401602e50e24_1000x600.jpeg "SEC Crypto Regulation Advancements and Updates [2026]")
And this was really meaningful for crypto because there was no like, guidance. There was nothing, no clarity. The best thing you could do was understand the law and advise based off of the law. It was not about, you know, how people historically done this because there were no people of historic that done this. And so that was kind of like how I, how I got into to, to really advise me crypto was just understand the law like deeply. As a fourth-year associate in a way, frankly, that I think most partners never understood because they never actually fully read the Securities Act or the Exchange Act in their 20 years of practice because they didn't need to.
Lex Sokolin:
One of the things that we have in this industry, I think, are because of the early rhetorical positions or, you know, regulation by enforcement positions of the various agencies and a lack of harmony between the agencies is some really creative legal work to structure around the lack of that clarity. I find the legal structure of the crypto industry to be completely psychotic.
Extremely unaligned with, you know, outcomes. So, for example, we've come to accept that protocols have to have a foundation, and the foundation is a non-profit. And then on profit, you know, courts grant that are not investment grants but are sort of like just giving money away grants to various ecosystem projects like that. Direction has spawned a whole cottage industry of things around protocols as this like non-profit entity, you know, and then the separation of the labs entity. And of course, that'll take us to Polygon, but like the separation of like the commercial labs entity from the token, it just pulls apart all of these incentives in ways that, again, I think, don't do the right work, you know, or alternately, if we look at token launches, token launches have these ideas of vesting for investors, four year vests with cliffs and so on, which are kind of anchored by this idea of progressive decentralization, but also sort of anchored by the idea of market control and in part inspired by the equity markets.
But, you know, then the practical outcome is complete nonsense. Like it's just a non-workable situation. And I feel like so much of our market structure has come out of needing to dance around the formation moment and needing to sidestep the regulatory authorities, who had almost no give for this industry at start. Does that framing resonate with you? Am I getting it wrong? How would you respond to that thinking, especially given that you were sort of seeing it early on as some of these legal primitives for the industry developed?
Marc Boiron:
I strongly agree with you. And this has come from somebody who I think shaped a lot of that. So, a lot of the work that I did in, you know, starting in 2019, I was probably the first lawyer who spent his time in DeFi. So, you know the all the major DeFi names from the Compounds to the Uniswaps. Those were all clients who I advise them on, frankly, everything that they were doing from a legal perspective for hundreds of pages on memos and to help them launch their tokens and help them conform to everything that they did.
And you know, the evolution of how DeFi based token launches happen. And were mostly my creation. Obviously, others were doing it as well. But in the context of DeFi, pretty much nobody was like everyone sent clients over to me because they said I want to do what Uniswap did, or I want to do what Compound did. You know, I'd want to do what XYZ did? And you know that I look at it as a complete Frankenstein and I hate it. And I think you nailed it in what you described, even though I drove so much of that because I didn't drive it from a business perspective. It was not a good business outcome. It was necessary from a legal perspective. If you did not do that, then there is a good likelihood that you would have been sued out of existence and therefore you had to. And so, the strategy was always twofold. One was how do you look like a good actor? Right. I didn't do things in a way where if we are wrong on the law, it doesn't look like you intentionally were trying to violate the law.
I think that's like one very important, like approach. And I believe that to be true all the time. Like, you don't want to look like somebody who doesn't care about the law and ignores it. And then the second one was, how do you when you do get attacked by the regulators, which you will right back then, then how do you put yourself in a position where you can at least defend yourself, and you can either disincentivize the regulators from coming after you? You can put yourself in a good enough position that they don't want to continue to come after you, or you can straight up just win the case. And that was the whole idea behind that. The problem with it is, as you pointed out, it's impossible to run a business when you've got two businesses that are both crucial to the success of the project that you're working on, but they are at arm's length from one another, or at least are trying to appear as if they're arm's length from one another with different leaders and different operations.
How do you really execute on that? And I think the ones who ended up doing this best are the ones who knew how to push back on lawyers properly because I always say like as a lawyer or as a CEO, as a founder. Your job is not to just take legal advice and sit there and say, cool, thank you. I'm going to do exactly what you say. I think anyone who does that is a really big trouble, but your job is to listen to that. Understand that and push back where it's going to hurt your business. And I think the ones who did that most successfully did best. And I think those who just straight up, like, listen to every bit of advice ended up in a spot where it was very hard for them to offer it successful. And the Frankenstein that you described and perceived.
But I will say that this perception of young labs and foundation as a separate thing, continuing to persist today is, I think, a reflection of the lack of sophistication in the industry in many cases, because what often happens is everyone just does what others have done. And we can talk about this in the context of Polygon. But you know, when I became this first chief legal officer to being CEO at Polygon, the first thing that I did was actually do the opposite of what I had done over the last four years when it came to other projects, and there were very specific reasons why I felt comfortable doing it, but I did do it differently for that reason. So long, long way of saying that I just strongly agree with your description.
Lex Sokolin:
It's fascinating to hear that from you. And I think it's just evidence of the challenges that this industry, which has absolutely revolutionized financial services and given it a new life after sort of the stagnation of the web2 approach, you know, has been prevented for a long time from reaching its potential, which takes me to before we get into Polygon, kind of rounding out the legal topic. When we were in the sort of anti-crypto era, there was the debunking and the issues that you've mentioned, and there were a lot of players who were very much caught in the middle trying to play this game of like, even though we're being innovators, we are trying to be responsible.
You know, sometimes we can't follow the letter of the law because the letter of the law has been written at a time when we didn't have computers and mail was all physical, and there was no such thing as millisecond algorithmic trading. Right. And a lot of these players kind of weren't able to be really successful or were not extractive like others during the time when the industry was very tightly controlled. And then you fast forward to the current administration and it's a complete 180-degree turn from, you know, like you can do nothing at all to everything's allowed, even the worst. And the first thing that happens is like the Trump and Melania meme coins, which are both immediately scalped by very obviously criminals like Kelsier Ventures that went on to steal money from the Libra meme coin launch. And you know, all of this has expanded into Meteora and Jupiter and Solana, and it's like promoted to the highest audience possible. Right. So, we go from this kind of Stockholm syndrome situation to the people who are the most aggressive and completely disregarding of, of any good behavior, are the ones who captured the pumped-up fund. Meme token launches, right? All the stuff that's sort of been the downfall of the industry in the last two years. Can you reflect on that sort of just dissonance? I mean, somebody who's always preferred the middle path, I find it to be so disorienting to navigate that.
Marc Boiron:
Look, I think that we as an industry and, you know, obviously without the help of Regulators have often had this issue of perception that has held the industry back and in some meaningful ways. I think some useful things being built. Has been a problem, frankly. But I do think that perception has been an issue. And look, one of the beauties of the technology is its permissionless nature. Like it is what really interested me in Ethereum in the first place. And when you get that, you are going to get the biggest grifts you can possibly find, because nothing stopping me from doing it. And it's in a way that moves much faster than other potential grifts, and people are going to take advantage of that.
And there's nothing that can really be done about that, frankly. But it's also the nature of blockchains that also allowed for the rest of the technology that we're building. That permissionless ends up being used for, for good. And so given my belief in like the permissionless nature of it, I do think people should be able to do the things that they are interested in doing on a on blockchain. Grifting not being one of them that's, you know, generally illegal activity that's being undertaken that I don't think is okay. You know, when I look at things like meme coins, it's a weird thing in our society that right now, the way most people spend their time engaging in finance is through some form of semi gambling in one way or another, that is what they do. They want a big win in some way. Meme coins are a form of that options trading on Robinhood or another form of that. You know GameStop is another form of that. We talk about it in the context of crypto as being the only thing.
But the reality is, it's like where we are as a society is one that is very much preferring a all or nothing outcome in finance. Then the stable cash flows that Warren Buffett would tell you should be the thing you should be focused on. And so many points are reflective of that. And personally, I think it was it is bad for the industry. At the same time, I personally think it's we've built permissions and that works that people choose to use in the way that they want. And if people choose to express their desires very well, I'm going to go all or nothing on a new coin. They should have the right to do that. I personally don't spend my time on that. I think that, you know, having a, I think having a use case that is sustainable and brings something real to the world is much more exciting. And I think building a blockchain that is focused on doing that means that you can have a bigger impact. And so that's where I spend my time.
Lex Sokolin:
Prediction markets and Polymarket I think is also a useful footnote. A lot of that comes from the generational squeeze. And people not feeling like the traditional path to success is no longer available. And sort of like this unfairness, generational unfairness that the only rational answer to is to buy lottery tickets. Let's put that to the side and switch over to Polygon. Polygon I think at the time when you took over had just taken this very strong position in the ecosystem. It was the first really commercially successful at the time sidechain to Ethereum. And I think a lot of the framing of it was kind of similar to today's framing of the Layer Twos, although that's moving on where it was. You know, Polygon is Ethereum, And I do wonder what that means. Like, how can Polygon be Ethereum when Polygon is Polygon and has its own token and so on. But again, like going back to 2023, you had an enormous rush into NFTs, which just meant that the media and gaming companies were coming in.
And Polygon had a really successful business development arm focused on the media industry, creating lots and lots of sort of headline partnerships, whether it was, you know, Starbucks or the Nike NFTs. But then we had the FTX collapse, and everything changed in a way that has been difficult to recover from. Can you take us back to that moment and maybe refresh, like what that Polygon of 2023 looked like? And then from there we can start to think about the future.
Marc Boiron:
So yeah, when I joined Polygon as the CLO, it was definitely at the time where Polygon was high flying, both in having been incredibly successful in DeFi. And I mean, it was it was the place you went for DeFi. You didn't go anywhere else. It was it. Polygon was the place to, you know, Sandeep. Sandeep, when he founded Polygon, his goal was always, I want to bring real use cases to the world. It's always been what he what he wanted to do. And so, the second he saw the opportunity, he turned in that direction, which is, you know, Polygon had, you know, a $30 billion token, over $10 billion of TVL, and it had the opportunity to go and try to bring real world use cases in with large enterprises who could who had the distribution to make an impact.
So that was that was like very appealing to me. It was really this idea of like; we can bring real use cases to people. And so, you know, when I joined, it was definitely exciting, right? It was every, every corporate in America, frankly, was considering working with Polygon in one form or another, and frankly, I can't remember. I think it's a close to 50% of the fortune 500 actually did in one way or another. Most people don't realize that, but two problems existed at the time. First is the technology still wasn't good enough, right? Polygon ran very smoothly. It was very cheap. It was very fast. But everything that you needed around it from the wallet to the RPC providers, they just weren't stable enough. They weren't easy enough to use. And so definitely like the regulatory landscape was such that everything being done was exploratory in nature. And whether it becomes something more was, was very, very unclear. And then the second thing that happened and that you touched on is the FTX collapse.
So I think there's a whole other world in which, you know, Polygon doesn't go through the journey that we've been on where, you know, FTX doesn't collapse and corporate America continues to experiment with, you know, blockchain technology and slowly starts incorporating more of it into their products and what they do in a way that we're starting to see now with more on the stablecoin side of things. But that that wasn't what happened. And so when Sandeep asked me to take over as CEO, there was actually a really interesting time for Polygon, because externally Polygon was the place to be. Everything was being done right. But the interesting dynamic that I thought a lot was, do I step into this role at a point where externally Polygon looks incredibly successful, but internally it was extremely problematic. And specifically, it was. We knew that enterprises coming into the space was no longer viable, but the company had grown like 10X internally in months, all with the expertise being outside of anything in Web3 meaningful at all, because everybody was from fend in one way or another, had no idea what a blockchain was.
Didn't understand the economics of a blockchain, or had to grow a blockchain in any way whatsoever. And for Polygon to survive, we had to go back to building things from a more like web through centric perspective, which is when I took the CEO role. And so that was that was actually one of the more, more interesting things for me was this dichotomy of what the world saw externally versus what was actually happening internally. And my view being I'm brought in to turn this around when the whole world was thinking Polygon is actually at its most successful moment. And so that's one that I think about a lot. And I think we're actually back when I, when I looked at like where till I got this position now and what we're doing and we'll talk about that. But it's been like a long journey to go from the we very successfully have brought in, you know, corporate America to corporate America doesn't want to touch this technology. Where do we go now to not only corporate America, but everybody wants this technology again, but for a much more narrow use case than we originally imagined.
Lex Sokolin:
You know, a lot of that resonates, obviously at Consensys. We did a lot of this around Ethereum. But during this moment between 23 and 26, you know, there was like this attention drain for DeFi into the Layer twos, the rise of arbitrage. Now the rise of hyper liquid Solana as a meme coin platform, which has sort of pushed a lot of the gambling activity into those areas. But also, in the last two years we've had the rise and adoption of stablecoins, where for whatever reason, if you call a token a stablecoin, if people get really excited, which is sort of astounding to me, like, yeah, you like tokens, that's nice, you know? And now you've had the legislation around it and everything. But the acquisition of bridge by Stripe, sort of aggressive movement into building their own old chain Circle, the issuer of USDC and their aggressive movement towards issuing their own chain, building their own chain. Obviously, you've got tether, and with tether you've got two different stablecoin chains, a layer two and a whole chain.
At our venture fund, we see a lot of pitches and even made some investments. You know, we have a East Asia stablecoin chain, a Western stablecoin chain, and there's been a lot of kind of adoption and excitement around stablecoins replacing the Web2 fintech approach of embedded finance and sort of Scotch taping bank accounts into apps, which hasn't worked well and has resulted in lots of money being lost. But then there's like this incredible amount of competition around stablecoin chains and stablecoins and all of that. Recently, from the outside, it appears that Polygon's made kind of operating company acquisitions around payments and is driving in this direction successfully, you know, capturing meaningful volume. How would you characterize the competitive environment? And then what is the business strategy business model for Polygon to navigate the sort of fairly saturated situation?
Marc Boiron:
I do think it's incredibly competitive when we decided to start focusing on payments, this was probably obviously the thing we spent most time talking about was payments is an incredibly competitive space, both in terms of incumbents, but also those who want to come into payments from a more like a Web3 stablecoin first perspective.
And there are a couple things that that influenced our decision for moving forward with it. The first one was the size of the opportunity. It's just that simple. We've very much the past. The question of how like, will stablecoins take off? Will they be used broadly? Will they replace the way we move money completely or only partially? And the bet that we took is that it will replace the way that we move money completely. This is why our mission is to move all money from chain. Like our view is that my, my view is that in ten years, all money will exist on chain, whether that's tokenized deposits or stablecoins. Doesn't matter. They will be moving on blockchain based rants. If I'm wrong about that, Polygon is going to fail. I don't think I'm wrong about that and therefore was willing to take a bet on it. And when taking that bet and thinking of that competition, first of all, as I always like to win, and I think that winning means $1 trillion opportunity.
And that is very exciting to me. And I think to everyone who is in the ecosystem. But failing to win does not mean you end up with a very bad outcome for everyone involved. You could probably be the 50th or 100th most successful payments company focused on stablecoins. And just because the entire stablecoin industry for launching money movement industry takes over the way we move money today, you will end up being one of the more successful companies in the next decade, and so I view it as relatively low risk from a competitiveness perspective, simply because the best move you can always make is being an industry that is going to grow at massive multiples, in which case everybody is going to end up being successful. And the question is only degree of success. And then I say everybody, obviously not everybody, but I think those who execute well are going to do well. And so that that was kind of like some, some baseline analysis and thought process that we had on the other side. Now, for us, most people think of us as weird payments now because they saw our acquisitions.
This actually started about 12 months ago. So, Polygon has already done over $2.3 trillion of stablecoin movement on the chain. And I would say specifically like stablecoins, it is a chain that's been around for a long time. It has been battle tested. The volumes that Polymarket currently does in USDC on Polygon is not something literally any other chain has seen yet. And when we looked at 12 months ago how the chain was actually being used. What we realized was there was ten different ways the chain was being used. And we were trying to capture this whole thing. And it goes back to the point that I made when I was looking at what do I do as a lawyer? I was like, do I do this thing that everybody is competing in that is generalized, or do I find a niche to go compete in where I can have a much bigger impact? And I think this weird thing that grew in the crypto world of blockchains do everything, is going to get decimated as a concept. I think it already is decimated as a concept.
And the simple reason is because, you know, five years ago, being fast and cheap was a differentiator, and it made a lot of sense to focus on being fast and cheap for any use case possible, because there were hardly any use cases. But today that doesn't make sense, because being generalized, you know, blockchains and having generalized block space just means that you're giving somebody else the opportunity to do something better than you are, and that doing something better is. It happens in multiple ways, right? It's not just from a technical perspective. It's also from social perspective. It's from a legitimacy perspective. Relationships. So, a little over 12 months ago, you know, I was just looking at the space as a whole. And I was chatting with Sandeep and I just said, man, we can't keep trying to do everything. Like, all blockchains are coming around to a similar design, right? I think in two years from now, it'll be very hard to see the differences between blockchains, and you're already starting to see them.
Yes, there's a difference between with L1 and L2. But when you start looking at L1s, do you see any real differences? And so, you start needing to differentiate yourself in another way. And when we looked at everything that we did, what we actually realized was that we were doing incredibly well in payments. And this is an area that we've had a team focused on for four years now, but it was just one of the many things that we did. But when we looked at those numbers, we also looked at where our reputation is strong. And it goes back to the question you asked earlier about, you know, the 2022 and 2023 of unintentionally building a reputation in the enterprise and fintech world that people know Polygon in many cases because of the work that we did back then. And even if they don't know us, all they need to go do is do a little bit of research to know that Starbucks is already diligence to Polygon and Revolut federated diligence Polygon.
And you know Stripe was already defaulting to Polygon for almost everything that they do on a chain. And that is the type of thing that when you're dealing with enterprises and fintechs are really, really important. And so, we saw that we had an opportunity there. Now the question. So, I often when I think about this and I split the roles between like the crypto like Web3 approach and then like incumbents while I will like never just like assume that somebody is not going to outcompete us because I'm just always going to be petrified of being outcompeted. It's the only way I'll make sure I don't get competed. I look at Polygon and just nobody is even close in the crypto world to what we've done. Like just not. It's just not comparable when it comes to like, payments. And that gave me a lot of confidence that to the extent you have an advantage from coming from that perspective, Polygon is well positioned. So, the question then becomes, what about everybody who's going to come into crypto that is currently in the payment space that has the opportunity to outcompete us? And there's a few things that that we thought were important.
And I have like expanded my views on this partially from, you know, John Egan joined us. He was heading Crypto Stripe. He joined us about six months ago. And a lot of it had to do with, you know, a lot of its conversations I've had with him on like look stripes in super like crypto forward. Like why, why did you choose to join us when you were at a place where you already crafted one of the better strategies to execute on, and you could have continued to execute on that? And, you know, John said, well, I just like to look at who has like a right to win that people don't recognize yet. And what he means by that is who is well positioned to be successful. That has not yet been recognized. And the thing about Polygon is when you've done trillions of transactions, you have relationships everywhere. You have a unique advantage. First is all of these other blockchains that are launching. They literally don't exist.
They like to tempt speed. They like to tout, you know, specific attributes that they have. They don't exist. Polygon exists. It does. You know, often over 100 transactions per second. It can do thousands of transactions per second and has done live and production with you during for years in a stable way, with fintechs in Latam in Africa and Southeast Asia, in Europe, in the US all using them, you know, revenues not over $1 billion on the Polygon like Tesla pays over $1 billion. Now you've got significant like actual like usage for payments purposes. And that is not something that others can actually say and prove. Now the question is, can you build off of that successfully to compete with existing payments companies and distributions? And I think the answer is very much yes. First is there's a mindset difference when we approach things we don't have existing businesses to protect. I don't need to unwrap somebody and offer it to somebody to make my chips. All I need to do is get them on the chain and keep them on the chain.
Give them something useful to do on the chain, and give them investments, to give them ways to earn and make the money movement better and smoother for them when they want confidentiality. We have it on Polygon. They can have confidentiality. They want for those transfers. I just need to make it better. I don't need to protect that business. Second is payments. Companies are not global by nature. They're very regional by nature. Like any name that you think about that, it's like really leaning into crypto and blockchain right now. They'll have the presence that we have. It's very weird to say of like, you know, massive companies that we are competing with but who don't have the Latam relationships that we have, the African relationships that we have, the Southeast Asian relationships that we have. And that's led to any fintech in Latam that is on a blockchain. Same thing in Africa and mostly true in Southeast Asia is on Polygon. They're usually supporting other teams too. But you will definitely see Polygon in there.
And so we look at all of that and our perspective is we have a huge lead. People just don't realize it yet. And the question is can we actually successfully build on that lead? And that's where some of the acquisitions that we've made are intended to help accelerate that and really make kind of the Polygon, you know, the home of blockchains. I'll stop there. You asked me about strategy, but I've talked for so long that maybe I'll stop there for a second.
Lex Sokolin:
No. That's fantastic. I'm super excited to see how it develops. It feels like the right strategy. And to your point, there are a series of really positive outcomes because payments is too big to be a winner take all market and there's lots of space. If you were to direct our audience to learn more about Polygon or about you. Where should they go?
Marc Boiron:
0xMarkB on Twitter. You find me on LinkedIn as well. You can find Polygon on both LinkedIn and on Twitter. But if you go to if you go to Polygon's page, visit the Open Money stack. It's really core to our strategy. You know, one API that allows companies to move stablecoins all around the world from, you know, off the chain to on a chain, across chains and on the chain. And ultimately, we got to make stablecoins super easy to use. And that's ultimately what we're going to do. And so, I think, you know, go check out the open money staff to really cool product that is core to our strategy. And that I think is going to change the way stablecoins get adopted. And so yeah, that's really it. And really appreciate lots of fun conversation.
Lex Sokolin:
My pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us.
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