A peek into Polygon’s plans to drive mass adoption of Web3

Sanket Shah, the head of strategy at major blockchain player Polygon, has been trotting the globe of late.

So has the entity he works for, which develops a suite of technologies to scale up blockchains.

“We joke that Dubai is the crypto capital of India,” he tells Tech in Asia. Although it started out in the world’s most populous nation, Polygon has been hiring rapidly in the Emirati city and the US.

Reddit’s digital collectibles are built on Polygon. / Image credit: Reddit

India’s dithering stance on crypto may be part of the reason behind the move. “The brain drain is absolutely crazy,” Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal told Bloomberg.

But the biggest motivation is its global ambitions: Polygon’s infrastructure could play a significant role in getting blockchain adopted by the masses.

The company, however, has learned that developing technology alone won’t get it to the promised land.

That explains the enviable list of high-profile integration partners, which include the likes of Reddit, Meta, Robinhood, and Starbucks.

“One of the most important things for us is where will the crypto users come from,” says Shah.

While centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Binance have proven track records as drivers of mass adoption, decentralized apps only have less than 5 million users, he estimates.

The “clunky” onboarding process and poor user experience could account for the gap. That’s what got Polygon thinking about going to where people are already congregating.

Popular platforms already have a “huge distribution channel,” Shah reasons. “There’s no point doing something they’re already good at.”

More than that, these platforms “help abstract away the blockchain.” Instagram, for example, calls NFTs “digital collectibles” instead.

Research and development at hyperspeed

For Polygon, the race to secure partnerships at lightning speed is the inevitable result of how fast blockchain technology develops.