Fran Velasquez
Fran is a reporter on the Layer 2 team, the site's magazine section. He has written for CNBC Make It and Inc. He owns no crypto holdings.
Layer 2 platform Polygon is reiterating its attempts to lure Terra developers in the wake of Terra’s collapse. What’s more, the India-based company is also coming out swinging against Solana, the layer 1 blockchain that suffered yet another outage Wednesday.
Developers who are looking to continue to build within the Web 3 ecosystem following the implosion of Terra’s UST algorithmic stablecoin last month need confidence that they are going to be moving to a platform that will be around for a while, said Polygon Studios CEO Ryan Wyatt. Polygon recently made a public push to attract Terra developers with a fund, although it didn’t disclose the size of the fund.
“We felt there was an opportunity for those that wanted to build on Polygon to make sure that they knew that we were here to welcome them with open arms, [and] that we were going to help them financially get back on their feet and support their movement,” Wyatt said on CoinDesk TV’s “First Mover” program.
Wyatt – a former head of gaming partnerships at Google and head of gaming at YouTube who was hired by Polygon to lead the platform’s NFT (non-fungible token), gaming and metaverse initiatives – adds that there are a number of incremental costs that developers will need to worry about as they consider migrating from one platform to another.
Read more: Terra Devs Need a Home. Other Blockchains Are Courting Them
Polygon put together a multimillion-dollar fund via a partnership with NFT marketplace One Planet, promising to help some developers cope with the financial woes they faced after Terra’s near demise. The initiative, however, has been met with some criticism.
Wyatt took a few verbal shots at Terra’s attempted relaunch.
“We would benefit from this space no longer participating and having a platform around that has had some of those catastrophic mistakes,” Wyatt said. “I’m not a huge supporter of relaunching something just a couple of weeks later, after all the people that were hurt in this fiasco.”
Although Wyatt said he’s indifferent about what Terra 2.0 does next, he said he doesn’t necessarily see bailouts, like those issued during the banking and housing crisis of 2008-2009, as the right answer, especially if the risks were “well known and well stated.”
Taking digs at Solana
Meanwhile, as the layer 2 platform looks to continue scaling Ethereum, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal chimed in during "First Mover" on the recent network outages that have plagued the layer 1 Solana network. On Wednesday, Solana was down for four hours.
Nailwal, who said that he has been speaking to developers, claimed that “on a weekly basis, two or three times, they find downtime or the network is clogged,” which means that “for end users, the network is unusable.”
Nailwal added that scalability problems were bound to happen with most layer 1 platforms, saying that “Ethereum is the only proven, battle-tested layer 1 solution out there.” Polygon is a layer 2 system built atop Ethereum.
Wyatt said, “It will be very difficult for them [Solana] to capture anything outside of PFP [profile picture] NFTs if they’re going to continue to have these levels of outages and be centralized.”
Nonetheless, some players aren’t deterred. As CoinDesk reported earlier Thursday, Web 3 developer platform Alchemy is expanding its services to the Solana ecosystem.
Polygon’s token’s price decreased by 1% over the past 24 hours, trading at 61 cents at the time of this writing.
