Original source:SmartDeer Chinese

Written by: Emily, @cl_lyt

Interviewed by: Anurag Arjun, @anuragarjun

If you had a million and someone came to borrow money from you, would you lend it to him? If this person was a good friend of yours and knew everything about it, you might borrow it, but if this was just the 50th person you met this year , I’m not familiar with it yet, would you consider borrowing it?” When answering how to popularize blockchain technology, Anurag Arjun, co-founder and chief product officer of the blockchain project Polygon, asked me this question. Polygon is the top ten public blockchain project by market capitalization, and Anurag is one of the first crypto billionaires in India.

(Note: Anurag is now a multi-millionaire based on Polygon’s recent market capitalization)

My answer may be the same as many peoples, it should not be borrowed.

After hearing this expected answer, Anurag smiled and continued to explain,There is a trust-based issue here.If you dont know him and cant trust him, you wont lend him money.But in fact, when everyone deposits money in the bank, the money will also be loaned out by the bank to someone you dont know and dont trust at all.

The distributed storage and accounting characteristics of the blockchain allow you to get rid of the role of a bank and realize the interaction between individuals without the need for trust. Everyone can see it from the chain. everything that happened,Create a Trustless World.

Building a Trustless World is Anurag’s belief since he entered the blockchain industry in 2017. Polygon (formerly known as Matic Network) is Anurags first entrepreneurial project in the blockchain industry. It currently has a market value of approximately US$7 billion, and he himself is among the first batch of crypto billionaires in India.

Anurag, who was born in a middle-class family and now has billions of wealth, did not lay down and start enjoying life. Instead, he chose to go from zero to one again and develop his new project Avail, a module focusing on data availability. It is a blockchain project that aims to provide developers with the ability to build customizable and scalable applications.

If Elon Musk’s ultimate goal is to promote human progress through energy transformation and interstellar exploration, then Anurag’s ultimate goal is to build a decentralized trustless world. He believes that blockchain-based Web3 technology will change in the future Some existing operating logic changes everyones lifestyle just like the Internet.

Read Mastering Bitcoin in One Night

In 2017, Anurag started his second entrepreneurial venture. At this time, he did not fully understand blockchain technology. His entrepreneurial direction was also to provide cash flow-based loan services and Goods and Services Tax (GST)-related financial technology solutions. .

In the shared workspace, he met Jaynti Kanani, who had also just started his own business. The two young people, who were born with the same technical background, had experience in the financial technology industry, and also had entrepreneurial dreams, hit it off immediately. From the exchange of their respective entrepreneurial ideas to the cooperation possibility,At that time, he wanted to get me to invest in his company, and I wanted to get him to invest in my startup company.

Jayntis entrepreneurial direction is centered on blockchain technology, providing expansion and infrastructure for existing blockchain networks. At that time, Jaynti had already earned some income through cryptocurrency and believed that this was an area with great potential.

This is not Anurag’s first exposure to the blockchain concept. A year before getting to know Jaynti, the Central Bank of India wanted Anurags team to investigate the possibility of using blockchain for cross-bank accounting to avoid loan fraud that uses the asynchronous ledgers, that is, using the same certificate in two banks. Borrow money. However, before Anurag had time to report after the investigation, the project was stopped by the central bank.

The two people who admired each other were in a stalemate for a while, and no one could convince the other. The breaker was a book - Mastering Bitcoin. This book is widely regarded as the authoritative guide for learning Bitcoin and blockchain technology. The book details the working principle, history, etc. of Bitcoin, and involves its underlying technologies, including blockchain, encryption technology, and Bitcoin. The decentralized nature of the network.

After Anurag got the book, he stayed up all night: I still remember reading the entire book in one night.

Before reading this book, Anurag only knew that blockchain could be used for cross-organizational accounting, but this book made him understand that this is a technology that does not require any centralized organization and is a complete innovation: To me at the time, Bitcoin was like magic.It cleverly combines cryptoeconomics and cryptography. In this system, you do not need to completely trust a single individual, but rely on a permissionless network of many participants. These participants join the network, run nodes, run mining software, and actually maintain the network.

The three founders of Polygon, Anurag is the first from the left

Before that, no technology could operate without a trusted entity. In Anurags view, Bitcoins technology itself is very clever, and its practical significance during the 2008 financial crisis is also crucial, read After finishing this book, I felt that this technology contained infinite possibilities, and this also became an opportunity for me to enter the industry.

Shuttle Bull and Bear to make products

Anurag joined Jaynti to co-found Polygon (formerly known as Matic Network) in 2017. This year, the cryptocurrency market is in a bull market. Bitcoin has climbed from less than $1,000 at the beginning of the year to a maximum of nearly $20,000, and has become the wealth code of some traders. Countless young people with the hope of wealth and freedom came to the news and started trading one after another:“At that time, many people were doing transactions 24 hours a day, and our team was the only one who concentrated on writing code.”

When talking about why he did not become a trader, Anurag admitted that he was not good at trading. He once traded in the traditional financial market for 6 months and lost money. From the time he entered the blockchain industry in 2017 until now, he has not bought much crypto. currencies, more are investing in startups:“I focus more on the products and technologies themselves, that is, how to increase the usability of blockchain technology.”

If the birth of Bitcoin made decentralization possible, then the birth of Ethereum enriched the decentralized ecosystem. Bitcoin is a pure accounting network, while Ethereum provides developers with a foundation to create and run decentralized applications. Polygon was created on the basis of Ethereum and aims to solve the main problems of high transaction fees and slow processing speed of the Ethereum network.

This sounds very practical, and it has indeed incubated many projects now. However, when they started their business, they were an Indian team that no one knew and was not trusted.At that time, the mainstream crypto crowd’s impression of the Indian team was that of a “leek-cutting fraud project.” No major investment institution was willing to invest money in the team. Their first fund, which came from family and friends, was only US$200,000.

To make matters worse, in the second year of starting a business (2018), the cryptocurrency industry entered a bear market, and the difficulty of financing increased again.

We found more than 70 investors at the time, but no one was willing to invest money in us, Anurag recalled. Finally, one investor was willing to invest, and we also tracked him down to where he was vacationing, but the next day Bitcoin The currency suddenly dropped to $3,000, and investors immediately withdrew their investment commitments.”

This was perhaps the most difficult year for Polygon. At its worst, the company could no longer pay its employees’ salaries for the next month. Anurag was not afraid of a bear market, but he was afraid of “letting down the good team he assembled.” In the end, a friend in the cryptocurrency industry “saved” them by lending the team $50,000.

Funding isnt the only problem. Because it is unknown, it is not easy to attract developers into ecological development. As the founder, Anurag personally went out to solve bugs for developers in the ecosystem, even if the underlying code of their project itself was not written well: At that time, there were probably hundreds of communication groups to help developers, as long as the other party had a little knowledge of our network, If you are interested, we will get in touch and provide support personally.”

Since users come from all over the world, this kind of customer service work is extremely time-consuming, almost every day from early morning to late at night. Anurag didn’t feel tired because the team needed users very much at that time:“We could have had a 9-to-5 job, but that was the path we chose.”

This down-to-earth, near-promotion strategy helped Polygon accumulate early users. Until the end of 2020, Anurag was still answering user questions personally, jokingly saying, Maybe its because we are Indians.

Do Something Big

On March 16, 2023, Anurag published a series of posts on Twitter, officially announcing his withdrawal from Polygon and focusing all his energy on Avail, a new project spun off from Polygon. Avail is a modular blockchain project designed from the ground up to provide developers with the ability to build customizable and scalable applications.

Existing basic networks such as Ethereum do not handle data availability satisfactorily. Although there are teams making improvements in this area, for a network that already has more than 3,000 projects and a large amount of data, the cost and time of change are very high, and it will take at least three to five years.

“The development of blockchain will not wait for you for five years,” Anurag said, “and we are fortunate to be able to start from scratch, separate basic functions such as consensus, security, data availability and execution, and build a data-focused architecture from the bottom up. Usability, a network that brings more convenience to on-chain developers.”

The idea for Avail was born in 2020, helmed by Anurag himself, and founded within Polygon. Now, more than half a year after becoming independent from Polygon, Avail has completed two rounds of internal testing, the last round of testnet has also been launched, and the audit before the official launch has also begun.

In this new venture from zero to one, Anurag also used actions to support his views:Blockchain is not all a scam project to cut leeks.

When faced with the sharp question of the bad reputation of the currency circle, Anurag thought for a moment and pointed out that there is a chaotic stage in the early stages of the development of all technologies, from the portals of the year to todays blockchain and AI and all technologies have seen so-called fraud projects since their birth, butProjects that are willing to work hard will eventually let everyone see themselves. Just like Amazon in the past, and Ethereum today.

At present, blockchain technology in its early stages is still difficult to use, and it is very difficult for developers to actually develop applications on the blockchain. Although he is sure that blockchain will change peoples lifestyles in the future, Anurag does not have very specific ideas about what kind of blockchain apps there will be in the future.

He likes to use the early mobile app as an analogy to the current blockchain. When mobile phones first appeared, developers could not have imagined that people would later be able to use mobile apps to take photos, hail taxis, and even conveniently communicate with people on the other side of the ocean via video. These are created based on the step-by-step upgrade of infrastructure.

Creating a set of infrastructure that is more suitable for developers and allowing more developers to enter ecological development is what Anurag is. A three-time entrepreneur who revealed his entrepreneurial ambitions in college, everyone around him knows that he wants to do something big Business is what Indian entrepreneurs need to pay most attention to at this stage.