Polygon Labs’ Marc Boiron on Unifying Blockchains

Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, speaks with a practiced clarity that reflects his background as a lawyer. Over the course of our conversation, he outlines Polygon’s strategy to position itself as the connective tissue in an increasingly crowded blockchain ecosystem. As competition intensifies and market conditions fluctuate, Polygon is betting on a new product called AggLayer to unify the fragmented world of blockchain – a vision that’s ambitious, though not without its challenges.

Boiron’s path to blockchain leadership followed an unconventional route through legal corridors. A former law firm partner, he served as Chief Legal Officer at dYdX before joining Polygon Labs in a similar capacity, eventually ascending to CEO. He talked about blockchain infrastructure, as the industry confronts questions of interoperability, scalability, and practical utility.

Boiron is a speaker at this year’s Consensus festival in Toronto May 14-16.

CoinDesk: Your background is primarily in law rather than technology. Tell me about it?

Boiron: I’m the CEO at Polygon Labs. I’ve been the CEO for about two years now. Before that, I was the Chief Legal Officer at Polygon Labs for about a year. I joined Polygon after having been the Chief Legal Officer at 0x for a while. I was frankly just really excited about joining a team that was looking to scale Web3 in the way that Polygon is.

Before being on the Polygon legal team, I was a partner at various big law firms in the U.S., advising on crypto since 2017.

CoinDesk: Polygon describes itself as building an ‘Internet of Value.’ That’s a compelling phrase, but what does it actually mean in concrete terms?

Boiron: From Polygon’s perspective, we’re trying to build a trustless internet that makes it easily accessible to anyone to do whatever they want whenever they want with their assets. The way that shows up is through a product that we are developing called the AggLayer. The AggLayer is intended to be a form of settlement for every chain across crypto in general.

The Internet of Value contrasts with today’s internet, which is primarily the Internet of Information. Web3’s fundamental innovation is bringing actual value on-chain. The challenge we face is how to scale this capability across the entire digital ecosystem

Right now the answer is many different blockchains that exist. But if you actually want to have something that feels like the internet of information becoming the internet of value, you need something that brings together all of those chains so that you can get a massive amount of transactions happening across all of these chains, but in a seamless way that feels just like the current internet. So the Internet of Value really gets brought to life through AggLayer.

CoinDesk: Interoperability has been promised by many projects over the years. What technical approach is Polygon taking with AggLayer that you believe will succeed where others have struggled?

Boiron: AggLayer is a product designed to unite all of Web3 on a single settlement layer. Currently, what’s missing in the ecosystem is a secure way to move between different chains.

The only effective solution for secure and rapid cross-chain movement is to use a settlement layer like AggLayer. In practice, this means the ability to finalize transactions between two different chains in less than two seconds.

Our model differs from other cross-chain infrastructure in how it handles asset transfers. We monitor all assets moving in and out of chains. When someone initiates an asset transfer out of a chain, we use pessimistic proof to verify and confirm the assets’ existence on that chain before allowing the transfer.

Currently, this system works exclusively with Polygon CDK chains. However, we’re launching an update soon that will allow any EVM chain to connect to AggLayer. This expansion brings us closer to our vision of unifying all of Web3 through AggLayer.

CoinDesk: Real-World Assets on blockchain have been discussed for years with limited practical implementation. What’s your perspective on RWAs, and how do they fit into Polygon’s overall approach to the market?

Boiron: One of Polygon’s core strengths has always been our relationships with financial institutions, which is crucial for both real-world assets (RWA) and payments.

When it comes to payments, Polygon POS hosts nearly 50 stablecoins. Every major fintech player that operates on other chains is also on Polygon, though many Polygon-based companies operate exclusively on our platform.

For instance, Lemon Cash in Argentina operates exclusively on our platform. Other major payment companies like Stripe process most of their volume through Polygon POS, while companies like Grab in Singapore use Polygon POS alongside other chains.

We’ve established 18 tokenized funds on Polygon POS, and our strategy focuses on making these assets truly functional. Currently, most tokenized assets across chains remain dormant after creation, offering little advantage over their traditional counterparts.

Our focus is integrating these assets into DeFi, starting with enabling them as collateral in lending pools for borrowing purposes.

CoinDesk: How is Polygon responding to recent market volatility and regulatory developments?

Boiron: From our perspective, we just keep building regardless of what the environment is. We know what it is that we want to build, and we just keep building away at it.

The market reactions obviously impact adoption. Ultimately, the economy ends up impacting the adoption for everything in the world, and it’s no different for crypto. The only thing that we can do is keep building away, and as the market turns, being very well-positioned with great products that users want to use.

CoinDesk: Several new blockchains have launched with claims of superior performance metrics. How does Polygon position its original POS chain in this increasingly competitive landscape?

Boiron: I think Polygon POS is already very well-positioned for that. There’s a reason why we see payments being adopted on POS — it is because it is actually already fast and low-cost.

The thing with everything that we build, including Polygon POS, is that we’re continuing to adapt it. One of the things that’s exciting is that we get to see innovations across the space. People get to see how Polygon POS is innovated and adopt some of those things. We get to look at what others are doing and adopt some of their ideas as well as continuing to research and bring in new ideas ourselves.

So I think what you’ll end up seeing on POS is a chain that’s just as fast or faster than all of the new chains that we’re talking about here. The nice thing is that comes along with years of very good security and still maintaining the low costs that currently exist on-chain.