Layer 2 platform Polygon is once again trying to lure Terra developers following Terra's collapse. In addition, the India-based company is also taking action against Solana, the Layer 1 blockchain that suffered another outage on Wednesday.
Developers who want to continue building within the Web 3 ecosystem after last month's collapse of Terra's algorithmic stablecoin UST need to be confident they are moving to a platform that will last for a while, according to Ryan Wyatt, CEO of Polygon Studios. Polygon recently made a public push to attract Terra developers with a fund, though it did not disclose the size of the fund.
"We felt like there was an opportunity for those who wanted to build on Polygon to make sure they knew we were here and welcome them with open arms, [and] that we would help them financially get back on their feet and support their movement," Wyatt said on CoinDesk TV's "First Mover" show.
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 additional costs developers need to think about when considering migrating from one platform to another.
Polygon, through a partnership with NFT marketplace One Planet, has set up a multi-million dollar fund to help some developers overcome the financial issues they faced after Terra's near-collapse. However, the initiative has been met with criticism.
Wyatt took verbal aim at the attempt to revive Terra.
"We would benefit from this space not participating anymore and having a platform that has made some of these catastrophic mistakes," Wyatt said. "I'm not a big proponent of relaunching just a few weeks later after all the people who were hurt in that fiasco."
Although Wyatt said he was indifferent to what Terra 2.0 did next, he said he didn't necessarily view bailouts like those issued during the 2008-2009 banking and housing crises as the right response, especially when the risks were "well known and well laid out."
Sideswipes at Solana
As the Layer 2 platform continues to scale Ethereum, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal commented on the recent network outages that have plagued the Layer 1 network Solana on "First Mover." On Wednesday, Solana was down for four hours.
Nailwal, who said he has spoken with developers, claimed that outages occur two to three times a week or the network is clogged, meaning the network is unusable for end users.
Nailwal added that scalability issues are 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 on top of Ethereum.
Wyatt said, "It's going to be very difficult for them [Solana] to capture anything outside of PFP [profile image] NFTs if they continue to have failures like this and are centralized."
Nonetheless, some players are not deterred. As CoinDesk reported earlier on Thursday, Web 3 developer platform Alchemy is extending its services to the Solana ecosystem.
The price of the Polygon token has dropped 1% in the last 24 hours, trading at 61 cents at the time of writing.