Brian Trunzo is the lead metaverse officer at Polygon Studios and a veteran of the cryptocurrency space. In this exclusive interview, we had the pleasure of interviewing Brian about his role at Polygon Studios and the future of the open metaverse.
Hi Brian, great to meet you. Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you became the metaverse lead at polygon studios?
“My background is in fashion, which, incidentally, is now a major vertical in the metaverse. I actually first discovered crypto in 2017, just after I sold my retail fashion business. I was doing trend forecasting for multinational corporations at the time, and I just kind of stumbled upon Ethereum — it completely changed my life. From there, I started getting more involved in the space and formed a metaverse consultancy business focused on bringing large legacy IP holders into Web3 safely. I had been a Polygon superuser since their move to Proof of Stake and met some Studios employees within a DAO discord (Friends with Benefits). A position opened up that matched my skill set, and the rest is history!“
What are Polygon studios?
“Polygon Studios is the advisory and consulting arm of Polygon, offering developers BD, Marketing, Game Design, Tokenomics, Technical, and Strategy support to the developers building apps on the Polygon blockchain. We aim to be the home of the most popular blockchain projects in the world. We’re focused on supporting developers building decentralized apps on Polygon by providing Web2 and Web3 teams with a suite of services such as developer support, partnership, strategy, go-to-market, and technical integrations. Polygon Studios supports projects from OpenSea to Prada, D&G to DraftKings, Sandbox, and more.“
What do you do at Polygon Studios?
“As metaverse lead, I’m tasked with onboarding brands, large IP holders and native Web3 developers into the Polygon ecosystem. We’ve brought on major brands from numerous industries spanning the fashion, CPG, entertainment, celebrity, media, music and art worlds in recent months, and new use cases continue to emerge by the day.“
What does the Open Metaverse mean?
“The open metaverse is a concept that imagines future virtual spaces as open, accessible, and decentralized, where the end user can exercise complete autonomy over their financial, social, and recreational activities. The opposite of the open metaverse would be a proprietary virtual space, where a singular, overseeing entity owns and controls everything.“
What is the goal of the studio, to create its own metaverse?
“We aim to provide a collection of tools and technical frameworks that allow metaverse virtual worlds to flourish. A big part of this is making blockchain technology scalable enough to handle the kind of constant heavy usage demanded of a truly global and interoperable metaverse. That’s why we’ve devoted time and over $1 billion to developing ZK-rollup technology — such as the recently announced zkEVM — that will usher in a 65x increase in transaction speed and a 90% reduction in fees compared to Ethereum.“
How do Polygon Studios work with Polygon Technology?
“Put simply, Polygon is the technology, and Polygon Studios is the group that helps businesses and brands utilize the technology through technical support, business development, funding, partnerships, and marketing. Essentially Polygon Studios help businesses understand the utility of the Polygon blockchain, while providing the funding to help continue its development.“
Is anything exciting coming up for Polygon studios? What does your roadmap look like?
“There’s always something exciting coming down the pike; it’s just usually behind an NDA! That said, we are excited for the influx of large Web2 and legacy IP leaning into the space. We like to say that the bear market is really a buidl [sic] market – so be on the lookout for announcements similar in size and scope of our previous partnerships, like Meta, Stripe, Reddit etc.“
How do Polygon studios help fellow web3 creators and community members?
“There’s a litany of ways we help support, from technical and strategic advice to funding and marketing. We are the connective tissue that helps developers and brands navigate the Polygon ecosystem – now 37,000 dApps strong! We’ve also been leading from the front since the collapse of the Terra ecosystem, which left many native Terra-based applications stranded. We recently launched an uncapped fund designed to help projects migrate from the defunct Terra chain and redeploy on Polygon. Over 50 projects have transitioned so far, aided by funding and technical support from Polygon and Polygon Studios.“
