Vitalik praised Sandeep and Polygon for their contributions to the Ethereum ecosystem.

 Vitalik posted on the X platform, expressing his gratitude to Sandeep for his personal contributions, as well as the huge value that Polygon has brought to the Ethereum ecosystem. In summary:

Polygon hosts @Polymarket, which may be the only typical example of a truly successful and value-providing "non-monotonic finance" application.

Polygon also hosts many other applications that require high scalability.

Polygon invested heavily in ZK-EVM proof early on, whether by introducing Jordi Baylina's team or through other efforts, greatly advancing the development in that field.

Polygon built infrastructure for proof aggregation (AggLayer) and many other technologies.

In addition:

Sandeep has dedicated a lot of personal effort to @CryptoRelief_, making significant contributions to India's biopharmaceutical infrastructure and research.

He voluntarily returned to me the $190 million earned from the SHIB token I donated, enabling the entire Balvi open-source anti-airborne disease biotechnology project to be realized, and possibly accelerating our understanding of important epidemic topics (such as clean indoor air) by a few years.

CZ also recently donated $10 million in BNB to support the project, and I myself recently invested around $20 million (not obtained by selling ETH 😛).

I am very grateful to both of them. Most "big whales" just passively think these things are cool, but will not take real action and make personal contributions unless everything is privatized through a company form, becoming a tool for personal profit. @sandeepnailwal (and CZ) are very special in this regard.

Regarding the ZK issue (after all, to obtain the complete security guarantee that L2 should provide, a proof system is indeed needed), I can understand Polygon's dilemma: they supported Jordi's team wholeheartedly when the technology was not yet mature and not suitable for production, so they made a contribution to the early, most difficult learning curve, but at that stage, it was difficult for them to directly benefit from the results.

Since then, the market structure has differentiated into L2 teams and ZK teams (such as @SuccinctLabs, @RiscZero, the recent @brevis_zk, and many other teams) existing as independent entities. I believe this is more reasonable than the previous approach where each L2 developed internally (OP or ZK) proof systems: it is very difficult to be both the best L2 and the best ZK team, as they require completely different skills.

Personally, I hope @0xPolygon can quickly adopt ready-made, already mature ZK technology and apply it to the PoS chain, obtaining complete first-stage and subsequent second-stage guarantees from the Ethereum L1. Many people are not aware