• Sandeep Nailwal has tipped blockchain gaming to become the biggest driver of the next digital asset mass adoption.
• Polygon partners with Immutable X to develop next-generation scalable blockchain games built on Polygon’s zk-rollup technology.
• Polygon’s alleged centralization comes under scrutiny once more, but Nailwal debunks the claims with facts. 

Blockchain gaming boasts a $4.6 billion market capitalization with an expected growth of 70% to hit $60 billion by 2027, according to a MarketsandMarkets Analysis.

Sandeep Nailwal, a co-founder of Polygon, believes the once-bubbling blockchain gaming industry can make a comeback and drive the next mass adoption of crypto. Addressing the community on Reddit, he was asked about real-life uses of cryptocurrencies apart from payments. 

He responded by tipping blockchain games as the future of the industry. 

“I think gaming is the largest scale opportunity for crypto. There are some top games launching in Web3 in the next 6-18 months and it would be very interesting to see if some of them are able to crack the crypto code. Last year itself there was $2 billion+ in funding for Web3 games,” he said.

Polygon combined with its ecosystem players like IMX [Immutable X], got the lion’s share in terms of those funded games. Fingers crossed for some of them to go big,” he added.

The community also sought clarity why digital assets have become too speculative. Nailwal did not deny the speculative nature of crypto but stated that it has become the “boon and band of crypto.”

“Boon because it attracts top talent towards the industry, bane because obviously, a large number of users and applications are speculative in nature. But one could argue that any potential big industry invites a lot of speculation early on. It was the same with the Gold rush area and it was also the same for the Dot com boom,” he added. 

Users question centralization

Concluding the session with the community, users questioned the centralization of most web3 firms despite their decentralization claims. Nailwal noted that only Bitcoin and Ethereum have achieved better decentralization, as the rest are still playing catch up. 

“Crypto is still in its nascent stage. I don’t believe that any blockchain ecosystem, except Bitcoin and Ethereum, is fully decentralized yet. It’s not necessarily important that networks are fully decentralized from the get-go,” he said. 

Finally, Polygon’s Nakamoto Coefficient was described as being too low by users. Nakamoto’s Coefficient rating measures a network’s level of decentralization. Polygon has a rating of four according to NakaFlow, indicating that four nodes control a third of Polygon. 

Nailwal explained that the network has two chains with the Polygon POS and not the Polygon zkEVM having a low Nakamoto Coefficient. He, however noted that the Polygon POS will become more decentralized.

“Eventually we expect all public (non-app-specific) chains to have large decentralization factors, and we are working on some really big releases in the coming days. The eventual goal is to take the Polygon ecosystem to have 1000s of validators.”