The bet between Polygon CEO and AAVE guardian: Is Polygon's dual-currency design a blessing or a curse?

Author: Luke, Mars Finance

"The money has arrived."

With a screenshot of an Etherscan transaction posted by Marc Zeller on the X platform, a war of words about the future of the Polygon ecosystem has officially escalated into a $50,000 public bet with smart contracts as witnesses and a guarantor from a big shot in the industry. This money is not a joke, but is actually locked into an escrow address managed by Cobie, a well-known crypto KOL.

On June 24, 2025, this gamble was officially finalized, with the protagonists being two influential figures in the crypto world: Marc Zeller, a core contributor to the Aave ecosystem, and Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs.

Their bet has put a fundamental question plaguing the industry in the spotlight: When a leading blockchain ecosystem introduces a second token, is it creating new value, or is it merely cannibalizing and diluting the original value?

The terms of this confrontation were made clear in the verbal battle between the two sides, clear and strict:

• Stake: $50,000 USD in stablecoins.
• Custodian (Escrow): Well-known crypto KOL Cobie (@cobie).
• Source of Truth: Coingecko.
• Settlement Time: December 24, 2025 at 8:00 PM (UTC).
• Winning condition: At that time, whether the combined market value of POL and the new token KAT is higher than the market value of POL itself (US$2.387 billion) when Polygon officially announced the Katana plan. If it is higher, Boiron wins; if it is lower, Zeller wins.

Behind this gamble is a fierce collision of two completely opposite views of the crypto world.

On one side is Marc Zeller, the "guardian" of the Aave ecosystem. As the founder of the Aave Chan Initiative (ACI), he is the most determined "risk-averse" in the DeFi world. He is firmly bearish on Polygon's "dual token" model, asserting that this approach will only dilute value and ultimately lead to a negative-sum game of "1+1<1".

On the other side is Marc Boiron, the "empire builder" of Polygon Labs. This ambitious CEO is committed to unifying the fragmented blockchain world through the Polygon 2.0 aggregation layer (AggLayer) strategy. He refuted tit-for-tat, believing that sophisticated collaborative design will break the "curse" and achieve a value leap of "1+1>2".

This is not just a battle of wills over personal reputation and money, but also a public experiment to test two diametrically opposed philosophies of industry development.

The trigger: a long-standing war of ideas

This public confrontation was not a spur-of-the-moment act, but rather a volcanic eruption of a long-standing ideological conflict between the two protagonists and the protocols they represent.

The conflict between the two was first publicly intensified in December 2023. At that time, the Polygon community put forward a controversial proposal: it hoped to activate the "sleeping" assets on its PoS cross-chain bridge and increase treasury income through yield farming. In the eyes of Boiron and the Polygon community, this is a wise move to revitalize assets. But in Zeller's eyes, this is tantamount to playing with fire next to Aave's vault. Aave has billions of dollars in assets on the Polygon chain, and the cross-chain bridge is precisely one of the most vulnerable links in the entire DeFi world. Zeller quickly launched a counterattack in the Aave community, proposing to significantly increase the borrowing costs of related assets on Polygon, using economic means to "punish" this reckless behavior in his opinion, and firmly stated that "Aave should not pay for Polygon's risky experiments."

This conflict clearly outlines the philosophical gap between the two sides: Aave, represented by Zeller, puts risk control above all else, like a banker with a lot of money and who moves cautiously at every step; while Polygon, represented by Boiron, regards ecological growth as its top priority, like a bold, pioneering, and risk-unafraid empire builder.

This long-standing conflict of ideas reached a new boiling point on May 28, 2025, when Polygon officially announced that its ecological star project Katana Network would issue its own token KAT. Zeller once again brought out his signature "dual token curse" theory. In the conversation that finally finalized the bet, Zeller even sarcastically mocked Boiron: "This all started six months ago when you were working on Pre-PIP (an early version of the Polygon Improvement Proposal). Since then, the price of POL has started to fall, and this is all the result of your own decisions."

This explosive accusation undoubtedly revealed the depth of the conflict between the two parties, and also made the gamble shift from a pure ideological dispute to one of personal grudges.

Zeller’s Curse: Historical Ghosts and the “Dual Token Curse”

Marc Zeller’s pessimism is not groundless. It is deeply rooted in the bloody lessons of cryptocurrency history. The “curse” he mentioned can be called the “dual token curse” - that is, the introduction of a second token not only fails to create incremental value, but will destroy the existing value by distracting the community, confusing the value proposition, and increasing the complexity of the system. There are two famous cases in history, like ghosts lingering in the crypto world, that provide strong support for his argument.

The first, and most tragic, is the death spiral of Terra/LUNA. In May 2022, this huge ecosystem, which once had a market value of up to $40 billion, was wiped out in just one week. At its core is a dual-token model: the algorithmic stablecoin UST and its governance token LUNA. UST is pegged to the US dollar through a sophisticated arbitrage mechanism, but this mechanism has become an out-of-control money printing machine under extreme market pressure. When UST was unpegged due to panic selling, the arbitrage mechanism required a massive issuance of LUNA to absorb the selling pressure of UST. The collapse of LUNA prices further exacerbated the distrust of UST, forming an inescapable "death spiral". This case proves in the most extreme way that the risk of a dual-token system with an inherent flaw in design is not linear, but exponential, and will eventually lead to the annihilation of the value of "1+1<0".

The second case is the "community civil war" between Steem and Hive. Unlike Terra's implosion, this is a story about division. In 2020, due to dissatisfaction with the acquisition by Tron founder Justin Sun, the core members of the Steem community chose to "leave" by hard fork and created a new blockchain Hive. This fork is essentially a split of the community and assets. The original network effect was divided in two, liquidity was diluted, and development power was dispersed. Although Terra's zeroing did not occur, the once unified community was torn apart, and the original value was divided by two competing tokens, which perfectly illustrates the "value dilution" effect in Zeller's argument.

These two cases, one about systemic collapse and the other about community division, both point to the same conclusion: the dual-token model is extremely easy to backfire. However, Boiron and Polygon's rebuttal is also based on this: Katana was born neither to maintain a fragile algorithm nor as a product of community division. It is an intentional ecological expansion with clear hierarchy and synergy in a grand strategic blueprint. Therefore, simply applying the failed experience of the first two to Polygon may be a way to seek a sword by cutting the boat. This gamble is actually testing a new and unproven third multi-token model.

Boiron’s blueprint: Breaking the curse with “aggregation”

In response to Zeller's pessimistic judgment based on history, Marc Boiron gave a huge, sophisticated and ambitious blueprint for the future - Polygon 2.0. The core of this system is to fundamentally solve all the problems raised by Zeller.

First, Polygon upgraded its core token from MATIC to POL, and gave it a new positioning as a "super-productivity token." This is much more than just a name change. Traditional PoS tokens, such as MATIC, can only be staked on one chain to earn the income of that chain. The design of POL allows holders to stake it while providing security and verification services for countless chains within the Polygon ecosystem, and playing multiple roles such as transaction sorting and generating zero-knowledge proofs. This means that the value of POL is no longer just tied to the rise and fall of a certain chain, but is directly linked to the prosperity of the entire Polygon "value Internet." It can capture value from the economic activities of all chains in the ecosystem like a pump.

Secondly, there is the “nerve center” of this blueprint, the aggregation layer (AggLayer). If the cross-chain bridge in the past was like a bumpy country road connecting two independent countries, often infested with robbers, then the AggLayer is like the central terminal of a super international airport. It can unify the liquidity and status of all Layer 2 networks connected to it, and realize nearly instant and trustless atomic cross-chain transactions between chains. This not only fundamentally solves the cross-chain security problem that Zeller was most worried about at the beginning, but also lays the foundation for a unified and seamless user experience.

Finally, there is another protagonist of this gamble - Katana. In Polygon's grand narrative, Katana is not a "second son" who comes to compete with POL for resources, but a carefully selected "strategic special forces soldier". Its only mission is to show the world the power of AggLayer. Katana's design is extremely subversive. It only allows one head protocol in each DeFi track to exist on one chain (such as Sushi in the DEX field), so as to highly concentrate liquidity and avoid the common liquidity fragmentation problem on general chains. At the same time, it will inject strong economic impetus into these exclusive cooperation agreements through token incentives, real income and other means.

This design reveals a deep strategic intention of Polygon: Katana plays a strategic "showroom" role. Its primary value does not lie in how high its own market value can reach, but in whether it can successfully prove that AggLayer is a viable technical paradigm that can attract massive liquidity and top projects. If Katana becomes a hit, it will become AggLayer's brightest billboard, attracting countless project parties to join Polygon's aggregation ecosystem. This powerful network effect will, in theory, greatly boost the demand for POL tokens in turn. The story that Polygon is trying to tell is not "A+B < A" as Zeller worries, but an exponential growth myth of "(A+B) → A++".

A lesson from Spectre: Can Polygon cure Cosmos’ “value capture disease”?

Theory is rich, but reality is bleak. Whether Polygon's grand blueprint can be realized, there is an ecosystem in history that provides the most important and cruel reference system - Cosmos.

Cosmos can be called the "spiritual mentor" of Polygon's aggregation vision. It was the first to propose the idea of a network composed of countless sovereign, interconnected "application chains". However, although many star projects such as dYdX and Celestia were born in the Cosmos ecosystem, with their own independent, huge market value tokens, the value generated by these successes is difficult to effectively flow back and be captured by the core token of the ecosystem, ATOM. This is called the "value capture problem" of Cosmos. A research report by Coinbase once pointed out that the prosperity of the Cosmos ecosystem has rarely benefited ATOM holders in history.

This is the brilliance of Polygon’s design, and the key to whether it can break the “dual token curse”. Polygon’s strategy is not a blind copy of the Cosmos model, but a well-thought-out correction to the “Cosmos value capture disease”.

The core "prescription" it prescribes is a mandatory and institutionalized value-sharing mechanism. The most direct link is that Katana will airdrop 15% of the total supply of its token KAT directly to POL stakers. This move established a strong and formal economic connection between the new project and the core token at the beginning of the ecological expansion. In the Cosmos ecosystem, application chains can develop freely without "paying taxes" to ATOM holders; in the aggregated ecosystem of Polygon, this "taxation" is institutionalized in the form of airdrops.

This creates a powerful "golden shovel" effect: holding and staking POL is equivalent to having a tool to tap into the value of all new projects in the entire ecosystem in the future. This creates direct and continuous demand for POL purchases, because rational investors will expect that all future projects that graduate from the "aggregation layer breakthrough plan" will follow the same rules.

Therefore, the real focus of this gamble is no longer "whether Polygon will repeat the mistakes of history", but "whether Polygon has designed a solution that can successfully solve the problem of Cos-mos' value capture."

Final prediction: Who will have the last laugh?

Now that all the cards have been revealed, it's time to make the final predictions for this year-end showdown.

There is a good reason to support Marc Zeller: the burden of history. Markets tend to be short-sighted and averse to complexity. In a short six-month window, investors may be more inclined to punish the complexity of a new model rather than pay a premium for its long-term vision. The ghosts of Terra and Cosmos still hover over investors, and any disturbance may trigger pessimistic associations in the market.

The reason to support Marc Boiron is the ingenuity of the design and the grandness of the narrative. Polygon's entire strategy can be said to be designed to refute all of Zeller's arguments. The mandatory airdrop mechanism may ignite the market's FOMO sentiment in the short term and trigger a strong narrative-driven rise.

However, the key variable that determines the outcome of this gamble is the seemingly ample but extremely tight time window of six months. For a grand project aimed at reshaping the underlying infrastructure of blockchain, six months is just a blink of an eye. It is almost impossible for the true value and network effect of AggLayer to be fully realized before the end of 2025.

Therefore, the winner of this gamble is not so much the full realization of fundamentals as it is a race between short-term market sentiment and narrative power.

My final prediction: Marc Zeller has a slightly higher chance of winning this bet.

The inertia of history is powerful. For the market to completely reverse its pessimistic view of the "dual token model" in just half a year and fully convince Polygon of its complex and novel value proposition, Katana needs to achieve immediate and indisputable success. This requires not only technical perfection, but also extreme marketing and community mobilization. Against the backdrop of the year-end macro environment and the possibility of tightening market liquidity, this is undoubtedly a daunting task. A more likely scenario is that Katana is successfully launched, and the combined market value of POL and KAT falls back after the initial hype, and it is difficult to steadily surpass the baseline of US$2.387 billion at the precise time point of December 24.

But this does not mean that Polygon has failed. On the contrary, it may just be a misalignment of "time". Boiron and Polygon bet on the industry landscape in the next few years, while Zeller only bet on the market sentiment in the next six months.

Regardless of who the champagne is finally opened for, this bet will be recorded as an extremely interesting footnote in the history of Web3 development. It forces us to think about fundamental issues such as how the ecosystem should expand and how value should be captured. The real victory or defeat may not be known until 2026 or 2027, when the AggLayer is truly full of applications. And the winner at that time will be the entire crypto industry.