Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, speaks with a practiced clarity that reflects his background as a lawyer. During our conversation, he outlines Polygon’s strategy to place himself as a connective tissue in an increasingly crowded blockchain ecosystem. When competition intensifies and market conditions are fluctuating, Polygon is aiming for a new product called Agglayer to unite the fragmented world of blockchain – a vision that is ambitious, but not without its challenges.

Boiron’s path to blockchain management followed an unconventional route through legal corridors. A former law firm partner, he served as head of legal officer at Dydx before joining Polygon Labs in similar capacity and eventually rose to CEO. He talked about blockchain infrastructure as the industry confronts questions about interoperability, scalability and practicality.

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

Coindesk: Your background is primarily in law rather than technology. Tell me about that?

Boirir: I am CEO of Polygon Labs. I have been CEO for about two years now. Before that, I was head of legal officer at Polygon Labs for about a year. I joined polygon after being the top legal officer of 0x for a while. I was honestly just really excited about joining a team looking for scale web3 the way polygon is.

Before I was on the Polygon Juridic Team, I was a partner at various large law firms in the US and advised about crypto since 2017.

Coindesk: Polygon describes itself as building a ‘value of value’. It’s a compelling phrase, but what does it actually mean in specific terms?

Boirir: From Polygon’s perspective, we try to build a trusting internet that makes it easily accessible to anyone to do what they want when they want with their assets. The way that emerges is through a product that we develop called Agglayer. Agglayer is intended to be a form of settlement for each chain across crypto in general.

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

Right now, the answer is many different blockchains that exist. But if you actually want something that feels like Internet of Information that becomes the value of value, you need something that brings together all these chains so you can get a huge amount of transactions that happen across all these chains, but in a trouble -free way that feels like the current internet. So the value of value is really brought to life through the agglayer.

Coindesk: Interoperability has been promised by many projects over the years. What technical approach does polygon take with agglayer that you think will succeed where others have fought?

Boirir: Agglayer is a product designed to unite all web3 on a single settlement layer. Currently, what is missing in the ecosystem is a safe way of moving between different chains.

The only effective solution for safe and fast transverse chain movement is to use a settlement layer like Agglayer. In practice, this means the ability to end transactions between two different chains in less than two seconds.

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

Currently, this system works exclusively with polygon CDK chains. However, we will soon launch an update that allows any EVM chain to connect to Agglayer. This expansion brings us closer to our vision of uniting all web3 through the agglayer.

Coindesk: Activate in the real world of blockchain has been discussed for years with limited practical implementation. What is your perspective on RWAs, and how do they fit into polygon’s overall approach to the market?

Boirir: One of Polygon’s core forces has always been our relationship with financial institutions, which is crucial to both the real world (RWA) and payments.

When it comes to payments, Polygon POS hosts almost 50 stableecoins. Each major fintech player operating on other chains is also on polygon, although many polygon-based companies operate exclusively on our platform.

For example, Lemon Cash in Argentina works exclusively on our platform. Other major payment companies such as stripe processes most of their volume through Polygon POS, while companies like Grab in Singapore use polygon pos with other chains.

We have created 18 tokenized funds on Polygon POS, and our strategy focuses on making these assets really functional. Currently, most tokenized assets remain across chains sleeping after creation and provides a small advantage over their traditional colleagues.

Our focus is to integrate these assets into DEFI, starting with enabling them as security in loan basins for borrowing.

Coindesk: How does polygon react to recent market volatility and regulatory developments?

Boirir: From our perspective, we just continue to build what the environment is. We know what we want to build and we just continue to build away by it.

The market reactions obviously affect the adoption. Ultimately, the economy ends up affecting the adoption of everything in the world and it is no different for crypto. All we can do is continue to build away and when the market turns, it is very well positioned with amazing products that users want to use.

Coindesk: Several new blockchains have been launched with claims of superior performance metration. How does Polygon place its original POS chain in this increasingly competitive landscape?

Boirir: I think polygon pos is already very well positioned for it. There is a reason why we see payments adopted on POS-It is because it is actually already fast and cheap.

The thing with everything we build, including Polygon POS, is that we continue to customize it. One of the things that is exciting is that we get to see innovations across the room. People get to see how polygon pos is innovated and adopt some of these things. We look at what others are doing and adopt some of their ideas as well as continue to research and bring new ideas themselves.

So I think what you end up looking at POS is a chain that is as fast or faster than all the new chains we are talking about here. The lovely thing is that there are many years of very good security and still maintain the low costs currently available on-chain.