Checking In On Polygon

[00:00:00]This is the 10-minute conturion podcast.

[00:00:02]This is VP. We are solutions-based podcast diving into the world of conturian investing and alternative finance. You can find us hosted on the nononsense4ex YouTube channel, nononsense4ex.com, and podcast players everywhere. Episode 259 is brought to us by ByBID. This whole World Cup trading long short thing BBET has going on has really really caught fire and it's just one of so many things you can do when you immerse yourself in this ecosystem. I have people that come in and just sign up for buyit as a placeholder and don't do anything which is weird but then I have people that go in and actually make it their main trading hub and when you do that you get all of the benefits and all the great things Bybit has going on. The best way to do that is to also get great bonuses and great customer service added on, which you can do by clicking the link in the Bybit blog, which you can find down below in the show notes. It's a brand new era. Old school investing platforms just can't do things like this. But Bybit certainly can, and it can do the same for you because with Bybit membership has its rewards. It is the 10-minute contrarian podcast late Sunday edition. Uh, once again, this time I had a big power outage here at the apartment yesterday, which was really a bummer because again, I don't obsess over numbers. I just think they're very interesting. I know topics like this generally aren't going to draw the same type of numbers as the previous episodes have. And with the late release, almost nobody's going to see it. But that's okay, actually, because this is historically where all of the biggest Sleeper episodes have resided.

[00:01:40]And I've been so excited to bring you this episode for a few weeks now. So, this is for the real ones and we'll let it rip and see what happens. But, it's time to really kind of dive deep and talk about um one of the biggest losses, if not the biggest loss right now in my entire portfolio. And that is going to be Polygon, ticker symbol P, formerly known as MAD, ticker symbol M-at TIC.

[00:02:05]Now, as is often the case with altcoins, narratives drive the the short to midterm market. And the big narrative at the time was the layer 2 narrative because layer 1's were just too darn slow. Then layer 1's got faster and the market was like, "Oh, okay. Well, I guess we don't need layer twos anymore."

[00:02:23]Now, the market thought that, but companies who are going to rely on these blockchains for the next 40 to 50 years did not see it the same way. And I I don't know why I have to keep expressing this, but there is a major major disconnect between what the market looks like and what is actually going on behind the scenes. Like during this whole quote crypto crash, do you really think these large companies have stopped moving forward with their blockchain endeavors?

[00:02:54]The complete opposite is happening. It is only ratcheted up because they understand what Tyler from Nebraska does not understand is that web 3 and blockchain is the way forward especially with stable coins but really with everything else too. You cannot stop technology. This is a superior technology to the way we've been handling payments for the last 65 years.

[00:03:17]And whether you like it or not makes no difference. What is is what is. And we not only get to benefit from being early to this, we also get to benefit from depressed prices from a market that doesn't really understand what's going on behind the scenes, nor do they even care to look. I absolutely love it. As a speculator, this is more than you could ever ask for. And that is what we do here with all coins. We speculate. We have other investments like gold, Bitcoin, copper, uranium, index funds which are not speculations and so we look at them and we handle them very differently. The crazy part is a lot of people don't make the distinction very well. But I'll get more to the investment side of things towards the end of the show. Let's talk about what's actually there for Polygon. You don't hear about them hardly at all.

[00:04:09]You're like, are they even doing anything? Did they just quit? Now, that's what a lot of people are probably thinking. Uh, all of those people, as usual, are about as wrong as you can get. This company has been building and evolving. And it actually helps that I'm not a super techy person because I I'm not going to sit there and bore you and drown you with techie details, but I'll give you the the best TLDDR synopsis I can here. So when Polygon migrated from MADC over to P, this marked a bit of a paradigm shift in what they were attempting to do, they started to narrow their focus and narrow their target. And their target became major US payment processors and payment companies because when you target them, you are more or less targeting the entire world because the entire world uses US payment companies in some capacity like minus maybe China who has their own closed loop. And so what they did is they realized, hey, we are extremely fast and extremely cheap and we have this competitive advantage over pretty much every blockchain layer out there. So we know that's great, but that's not going to be enough to get us over the top in all likelihood because as we saw maybe like what was it 8 n years ago, the whole race for transactions per second uh changes as these blockchains all get faster. So, do you want to sit there and play that game for the next 40 years? Or do you want to distinguish yourself and separate yourself from the pack by taking what you do have and leveraging it to create something your competition cannot do and to really solve one of the biggest problems out there in the blockchain space as it pertains to a lot of these payment companies. And that big problem is dealing with all of these chains. Why can't there just be one chain to rule them all? Well, there actually can be kind of, and I'll explain this. So, Ethereum is pretty much the frontr runner for how a lot of the big financial institutions are going to move money going forward. Ethereum is doing a lot of great things on their end, too, but they are still way too slow for most payment processors to want to use. there are superior options out there and that's what they're going to choose. And oh, not to mention that so much of this is going to be done by AI in the future and it's going to be done so fast and there's absolutely no way Ethereum is going to be able to keep up with that speed and volume. Yeah. And this is why payment processors don't really pay too much attention to Ethereum or if they do they absolutely mix in other chains. And there kind of in lies the problem is having to deal with all these chains and especially the bridges that connect one chain to the next. That's really where almost all of the hacks in modern day happen is on the bridges because they're the most vulnerable. The chains themselves are really not that vulnerable. Their security is pretty tight. It's the bridges that connect them. So, it's almost like you being extremely safe in your own home because you got great home security, but if somebody's going to rob you, they're going to do it while you're driving over to somebody else's house.

[00:07:36]So, what Polygon has done is created this a layer in their tech stack. So, layer 1 is just doing everything extremely fast and cheap. Layer two is this a layer which actually does connect a lot of these chains and bypasses a lot of this bridging at the same time. And if there are bridges which absolutely have to be used and they do get hacked, this a layer actually prevents a lot of those hacks from even going through like uh check out the last katana hack if you really want to do a deep dive here and see how the egg layer prevented what could have been a really bad situation there. Yeah. And in this overall stack, there are another two layers above the egg layer, but they're not nearly as important as the bottom two. So that's what we'll stick with for now. Uh but obviously companies love this. You have an established layer 2 company who can do things extremely fast and extremely cheaply and solve the problem of having to deal with all these blockchains at one time. Of course, this is going to draw interest from the large payment companies. And let's see who has gotten on board as a result. And looking at the list here, it's really nobody important, nobody of any significance. Just companies like Visa and Stripe and Meta and Revolute. There's also a company that you probably haven't heard of, but they are extremely essential in the overall plumbing here, and that's a company called Money Treasury. And and Paxos uses Polygon for their rails to distribute PAX gold. You know, Paxos is not really a network in and of itself.

[00:09:11]So when you have a company who is targeting large US payment companies and the companies they are targeting have all come on board already. This is extremely bullish. Doesn't matter what the price is doing right now. If anything if the price is going down that makes it even more bullish. Remember what we're doing here contrarians. We are looking to see who will be the payment rails for everything in the future. And now that companies have figured this out, especially through the use of stable coins, the race is on like it has never been before. Years ago, when we were trying to, you know, put our money down on this race, there were a lot of companies that just weren't convinced yet. But in a very short amount of time, they have all gotten the picture. They have all figured out what we have known this entire time.

[00:10:05]Blockchain is the future of just about everything. Almost all payments and all commerce are going to end up running on this thing. Much of AI is going to run on this thing. And it's up to us as speculators to decide, okay, who are the front runners in this space? Who is best of breed? Who has things that the other blockchains don't and cannot compete on?

[00:10:29]And when it comes to this overall a layer and the way you connect these chains with one API, Polygon is in the lead here. I know that's hard for the average mind to process because you almost never hear about Polygon anymore and their token price has crashed, which your your average normie sees as a bad thing. Your contrarian does not. Your contrarian asks, "Okay, well, what's there?" And if there's even a little something there, the pot odds alone would probably say it's worth putting your money down, but when you dig deeper into Polygon, you not only find that yes, they they are still alive and there is something there, there is way more there than you likely knew about before.

[00:11:14]Fair to say? I mean, we're only 11 minutes in. And the gap between what you thought Polygon was doing and what they're actually doing and who is taking them on is actually pretty large. A lot larger than you probably thought it was.

[00:11:29]No. Yeah. That's why you do the research. You know what you own or you try to have a deep knowledge of the things you want to own in the future.

[00:11:37]You know, as contrarians, we don't just sit there and blindly do the opposite of what other people do. That's dumb.

[00:11:42]That's lazy. That's not going to get you where you want to be. But we are contrarian because we do things that other people simply don't do. And your average crypto investor doesn't do any research at all. And if they did, Coin Market Cap would look a lot different than it does right now. But pretty soon, reality is going to hit. And when it does, and when these companies establish themselves, that's when you want to be already positioned. However long it takes, and that's fine. As speculators, we are good with that. At this point, how dumb would you have to be to invest in a crypto project and then get all bent out of shape when it's not doing what you wanted it to do like 2 or 3 years down the road? It's like, have you not learned anything in the past 10 years? This is not just a new technology. This is a complete paradigm shift in the way things are done in the world. And you have a company here in Polygon which has separated themselves from the pack in not just one way. There is another way we haven't talked about.

[00:12:48]And so uh let me kind of introduce this with a question. When it comes to a a quote killer app like something everybody knows a particular blockchain to be known for. What is that killer app for Salana?

[00:13:07]You can't just say a DeFi platform.

[00:13:09]That's like that's something only, you know, DeFi nerds know about. You know, I know we like Jupiter. We invest in it.

[00:13:14]But what is Salana's killer app?

[00:13:18]What is Cardano's?

[00:13:21]What about Near Protocol?

[00:13:23]What about Stellar?

[00:13:25]What about AX? Can you name one? Like, these are all projects that we like. And there's a whole list of reasons to be bullish with every single layer one I just named. But if you want to sit there and play the whole what have you done for me lately game, okay, what's the killer app on any of those blockchains as we sit here and talk today in June of 2026?

[00:13:48]As of right now, there really isn't any yet. I mean, maybe you could come up with something, but it's nowhere near the answer I'm about to give you with Polygon. You should probably know it.

[00:14:00]You've all heard of it, and it's [ __ ] gigantic. It's called Poly Market. the standard bearer for prediction markets all across the entire world. A testament just to how well this chain works and operates. And your average crypto ding-dong thinks there's nothing there because your average crypto ding-dong is lazy and does absolutely no research. If he did maybe 30 seconds of research, he could have not only figured out poly market but their global place in the prediction markets world and then maybe then a light bulb would have gone on.

[00:14:35]Probably not. I mean, look who we're talking about here. But really, in all of blockchain, you have really kind of one killer app that has hit the mass public worldwide and that is Poly Market. Any other answer you can come up with would be a distant second to that. If I'm wrong, tell me I'm wrong in the comments. This podcast does go to YouTube, but Poly Market's a freaking behemoth. And it's great. It's a testament to, you know, to what blockchain can already do for us right now. Like, this is good for everybody, but it certainly puts and positions Polygon on the map as a major player. A very serious blockchain that can do very serious things. Now, I'm not going to sit there and say that this whole investment comes without risks.

[00:15:24]There are certainly risks, but I will preface this with saying that these are risks which pretty much every blockchain company out there is dealing with right now. None of this is unique to Polygon.

[00:15:35]And so, when I talk about this, you could pretty much insert any other layer 1 blockchain, much less layer 2, and they are dealing with the same thing.

[00:15:43]But hear me out. So for example, let's go let's take Paxos which we just spoke of. Uh now in recent periods, check this out. Paxos has been able to move over $1.5 billion over their network through Polygon for the mere fee of $1,000.

[00:16:08]Think about that. moving a billion and a half in USD over the blockchain for about a thousand dollar in fees.

[00:16:18]Incredible, right? Well, yeah, incredible. Unless you're a business who is trying to make money, how the hell are you going to make any money off of that? You almost can't. It's just it's way too efficient.

[00:16:34]And it's a very unique problem blockchains are having. are so efficient and so successful they become a victim of their own success uh by being able to do things so cheaply you simply can't pay the bills and so Polygon just like all of the other layer ones right now are just burning through VC money and not making hardly any profit and this is obviously a problem right well it is but let me answer this pretty simply for starters this is not 1991 all right we invest differently now the world invests differently now. You don't have to be a profitable company to be a very very investable company. Amazon broke that model a long time ago. Amazon wasn't making money for the longest time, but people knew it was obvious they were going to make a lot of money and they eventually did. Uh but the stock had gone way up well before they became profitable. And then once they became profitable, they became profitable forever and the stock just continued to go up even more. You know, that's what intelligent speculation looks like in modern day. And this is what we're trying to do here. So the whole, well, you can't invest in these companies because they're not profitable. When I hear somebody say that, this is probably somebody who is reading books about investing that were printed back in the 60s and 70s and just never quite evolved. and I just don't have the time or the patience to sit there and explain this to them. So, I'll just sit here and explain to everybody right now. You know, is it a greater risk to invest in a company who's not making money? Of course, it is. But the models have changed over time. The math has changed over time. The way newer companies operate has changed over time.

[00:18:15]And if you want to sit there and wait for these companies to start turning a profit overall now and forever, uh you're going to get in at a way worse price than we're getting in. And even if you do, you will probably still be very happy with your investment, but we will be extraordinarily happy with our investment. You know, because we understand these things and we also understand the risk. We take risks, but we find ways to mitigate that risk or we find ways that these companies are mitigating their own risk. And in the case of Polygon, which I cannot say about any of these other layer ones or layer twos, as of right now, their killer app, Poly Market, is turning a profit. They have already broken out of that venture capital dependency cycle and are now profitable to the tune of anywhere from about $580,000 to $900,000 a day already. So, it just goes to show that you can get there over time. This is not, you know, some doom loop they'll never be able to crawl out from underce you get that mainstream presence. And sometimes even if you don't, you just become the thing that everybody wants to use or the thing that some people want to use. Not everybody uses Poly Market, but you know it just it doesn't take much once these things really start getting adoption to all of a sudden start turning into a profitable company and then the math changes altogether.

[00:19:48]Now, one other risk I will say, I just told you how all these companies are on board with Polygon. They're not exclusive to Polygon. All right? That'd be great if they were, but what companies are doing now, rightfully so, you have to think, you have to put yourself in the shoes of these companies. You know, they're using a lot of different blockchains because they want to see what the experience is like.

[00:20:10]They want to see how well they work, what happens when things go wrong.

[00:20:14]committing to one blockchain right now.

[00:20:17]Uh if you want I mean committing to Ethereum would be okay if you didn't require the speed, but if you do, you're going to have to play around with different solutions until one really rises to the surface. And this is what Polygon is trying to solve. They want to be the one chain to rule over them all.

[00:20:35]not by being the only chain, but being the chain to where you can use all the other chains at the same time without having to worry about all the riskiness of the bridges that go in between them.

[00:20:44]And so because of this one thing and because of the speed and the cost and the efficiency, it wouldn't surprise me if Polygon won a lot of these races. And once the big US payment processors and payment companies are using whatever blockchain's the winner, you know, that's going to be the litmus test for all of the other companies to jump into.

[00:21:06]Now, this still doesn't completely solve the issue of being way too cheap and efficient for your own good, which will still be a thing with Polygon. But what they are attempting to do as well here is the same thing that I teach other people to do. And so this all kind of goes handinand, right? I've announced before on this show that I am coming out with paid products this year. One of those paid products is going to be a course on how to monetize and make a business out of some type of financial product, whether that's your knowledge or some algorithm that you've put together or some software you've created or anything. Uh because too many people come up with these really great things, but they have no idea how to monetize it. And they all do it the wrong way.

[00:21:52]And they get really frustrated because the market's not friendly to people who have just come up with something new for the first time. And then most of these people flame out and quit and this product never really sees the light of day. And so while we're here, while the real ones are here, I'll go and you you made it this far into an episode that's probably not going to do the numbers that the previous ones have. Let's uh let me go ahead and give this to you.

[00:22:15]I'll actually tell you one of the main concepts that's going to be in this paid course. The best way to sell products because I'm going to sell a good amount of these courses. I'm telling you right now, especially because people have understood the the value I bring with the free stuff. God forbid if I were able just to apply myself and put a structured paid course together, what that would look like, you know, they're going to be interested. But I have also built an audience over time, which most people have not. So, they try to create something and then sell it on these marketplaces, even though nobody knows who they are or why their product's awesome, and then they get absolutely no traction. Here is one of the things you need to do to fix that. All right, you need to build the monolith first or what I call the Death Star. There has to be a central thing that brings people into it before you can really start making money off of everything else. Now, making money with a product is not impossible if you don't do this, but oh boy, does it go a long way. Uh, so, for example, nononsense Forex, you know, I had to create the free thing, the thing that actually put me in the negative a little bit. Not much. It was It's not expensive to make a YouTube channel, but you do have to pay for, you know, a certain software and and a microphone and, you know, whatever podcasting platform you want to use, all those type of things.

[00:23:40]It's nominal, but it does put you in the negative a little bit. But once you have grown that, and here's the secret, you don't have to grow it all that big. But once you have grown it a little bit, like from there, it is so much easier to make money in I put I've made a spreadsheet on this like over 60 different ways. you and that's a lot of what I'm going to talk about in the course. But the monolith really needs to come first, you know. So, for example, was I making money from YouTube? Yes.

[00:24:12]Was it good money? No. You know, it's probably going to pay for the cost of, you know, whatever it cost you to create the content. You're almost going to break even there, you know. So, where does my money come from when it comes to the channel itself? Comes from the affiliates. And you guys know me, I leave so much money on the table. I could have made so I could have sold so many other things and done so much other you know monetizable side projects from the channel and I just didn't one because I have other businesses I need to focus on too uh but also because I was more or less financially free by the time I started the channel so I didn't really need to and you on the other hand might not have that luxury just yet and so that's a lot of what the course is going to be about but my point is once you have that monolith and once you establish your presence in the market.

[00:25:02]It is so much easier to sell other things on the back end or even in my case, you know, I wasn't even selling anything with the affiliates. Like I I've been making good money this whole time by costing you guys nothing. You know, eight, nine years later, I'm just now coming out with actual paid products. That's that not including my book. But you guys get the idea. You have to have that thing first. And Polygon has that thing by being one of the fastest and most efficient blockchains in the world right now. And they also have a very special thing that nobody else has yet in Poly Market. So if I were to really and it's weird doing this, but if I if I were to correlate this to to what I do, and I'm only making this example because you guys are all familiar with it, but you know, if Polygon is nononsense Forex, for example, Poly Market would be like the algorithmic trading system I came up with, you know, that unique thing that really drew a lot of people to my channel and brought the eyes and the attention to it that eventually made it a good money maker over time. So, just like people are doing with Polygon right now, I had a lot of my friends were asking me, they're like, "Hey, dude, like why are you spending all this time and energy to build this thing that's not making you any money because they simply just didn't get it. The same way the crypto market doesn't get what's going on with these layer ones right now. And the same way your average person is going to look at these things and like, well, they're not making any money. Why would I invest in that?" You know, it's just like there's levels to this, you know, and it's not like these levels are really hard to get to or understand. And it's just your average person has absolutely no [ __ ] idea.

[00:26:40]With just a little bit of research and a little bit of understanding and being able to put your emotions aside, if you bought in at a high price and now it's way down, Polygon really does seem like a rational decision to make, especially at these prices. So we are looking at about 7 12 cents right now. And my cost basis was 80 cents. And I say was, but you know, the price had gone down to a tenth of where I bought in. That's why this is one of my biggest losses. Now, what do you do in a situation like this?

[00:27:15]This is a good moment to to talk about this, you know, when you have an investment that loses this much. You know, do you really sell at the bottom?

[00:27:24]Like, why would you do that? Are you desperate for the money that badly? If you are, then go ahead and liquidate.

[00:27:30]Yeah. But you have to ask some questions at this point. Question number one has to be, okay, is this just a like a completely dead project that's never going to make money in the future?

[00:27:40]Because if it is, yeah, go ahead and dump it and put the $3 you have left over in into I don't know what can you even buy for $3 nowadays? Stick of gum.

[00:27:50]Uh but if there's something there, and not just something there, like really really something there, then it's not only a good idea to hold It might even be a a good idea to average down in DCA in, which is exactly what I did this week. It's too good to pass up. You know, let's say I'm not going to tell people my position size, but let's say if you spent $1,000 on Polygon at 80 and now it sits at under 8 cents. Well, for under $100, you can double your entire investment.

[00:28:32]And this is what I did about a week ago when it was at 8 cents. Because why the hell not? For a tenth of what I bought in, I can double my stack based on what's already there and what they've already accomplished at this point. Like at seven and a half cents, contrarians, you don't want in on this at all. And the risk doesn't bother me because we've talked about this on the show before.

[00:28:54]When you have anywhere from 40 to 60 positions, I have over 40. Like you can take risks like this and if it quote crashes the way it does, it doesn't really bother you. And if anything, it you look at it as a an even greater opportunity to add on. You know, it's in contrarian land, things like this are not really a negative. And you guys are all starting to get that quote catastrophic crashes in the market that mainstream media and social media both try to make it out to look like, you know, this is like the end of the world are the absolute best things that could ever happen to us. So instead of getting all sads about our positions going down, we take the opposite approach and we get very excited. And I think Polygon, yes, Polygon is one of the most exciting projects out there for the reasons I just named.

[00:29:45]Go tell somebody you just invested in Polygon who actually knows a little bit about the crypto market and see what they have to say to you. They're going to think you've lost your mind. They're going to think you're absolutely crazy.

[00:29:56]But we know just like we've always known. We are certainly not crazy.

[00:30:02]We are just early.