Written by: Thejaswini M A

Translated by: Block unicorn

Preface

Sandeep Nailwal's father often went days without coming home.

When he did return, his monthly salary of $80 was gone, squandered on alcohol and gambling debts.

The family lived in a settlement along the banks of the Yamuna River in Delhi, a place locals derisively referred to as "Jamna-Paar," which roughly means "the other side of the river." But it was not a compliment.

As a child, Sandeep often stood outside the classroom because his parents had not paid the school fees, preventing him from entering. When he was ten, his brother suffered a serious accident, marking the end of his childhood. His father's addiction meant someone had to step up. That person was Sandeep.

Today, Nailwal runs Polygon, a blockchain infrastructure company that processes millions of transactions daily, collaborating with companies like JPMorgan, Stripe, and Disney. From the slums of Delhi to creating technology used by Fortune 500 companies, this journey took just thirty years.

But the road was not smooth; the scars from his early experiences influenced every decision he made.

Sandeep Nailwal was born in 1987 in Ramnagar, a rural village at the foot of the Himalayas, where there was no electricity. His parents were illiterate when they married, and when he was four, they moved to Delhi in search of opportunities that were unavailable in their village.

What they found instead was a slum.

The settlement on the eastern bank of the Yamuna River was crowded, dirty, and rife with violence. Illegal firearms and knives were the preferred tools for resolving disputes. His family squeezed into any accommodation they could afford, constantly moving as circumstances changed.

His parents did not understand education. They did not know that children could start school at three or four years old. Sandeep did not begin school until he was five, simply because no one informed his parents. Starting school so late meant he was always the oldest child in the class, two years older than his peers, a constant reminder of his lagging behind.

The trauma of poverty was not just about hunger or the shame of being ragged. It also included the humiliation of watching his father squander school fees while he stood outside the classroom. It included seeing his mother struggle to keep the family fed while battling an alcoholic husband.

It was at a young age that he understood that no one would come to save him.

The Sixth-Grade Entrepreneur

Sandeep coped with poverty by working. In sixth grade, he began tutoring younger students, earning 300 rupees a month. He also found a friend who owned a stationery store and started buying pens at cost, then selling them to classmates at a markup.

Though the amounts were small, the lessons he learned were significant: you can create value, take a portion of it, and use that money to change your circumstances.

He dreamed of getting into the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), a prestigious engineering college that offered a pathway out of poverty for aspiring students. But IIT required expensive tutoring fees to compete for 5,000 spots among millions of applicants. His family could not afford it.

So, Nailwal enrolled in the second-tier Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology, financing his tuition with student loans. Sometimes, he had to use the loans to pay off his father's gambling debts instead of buying textbooks or a computer.

His decision to study computer science stemmed from seeing Mark Zuckerberg on Indian television. At the time, Facebook was booming globally, and young Sandeep thought, "I want to create my own Facebook."

He now admits he was naive back then. But the combination of naivety and desperation forged a unique determination.

After obtaining his engineering degree, Nailwal pursued an MBA at the National Institute of Industrial Engineering in Mumbai. There, he met Harshita Singh, who later became his wife. After graduation, he worked as a consultant at Deloitte, quickly paying off his student loans and his father's debts.

Nailwal held positions at several companies: as a software developer at a computer science firm, as a consultant at Deloitte, and as the Chief Technology Officer in the e-commerce division of Welspun Group. He performed well, received promotions, and earned a good income.

But he could never shake the urge to start his own business.

In Indian culture, buying a house before marriage is a pressure. A man without property has no future. Nailwal felt this pressure acutely. He had a good job, could take out a loan to buy a house, and could settle down.

Harshita told him something that changed everything: "You will never be happy this way. I don't care about having our own house; we can rent."

In early 2016, Nailwal quit his job. He borrowed $15,000 (money he originally planned to use for his wedding) and founded Scope Weaver, an online platform providing professional services. His idea was to standardize India's fragmented service industry, creating a platform similar to Alibaba, but for Indian service providers instead of Chinese manufacturers.

The company did reasonably well and generated some revenue. But Nailwal realized he was becoming a bottleneck. Clients wanted a face, someone accountable when things went wrong. He was turning into just another service provider, but now he had to pay employees.

The business could not scale. A year later, he began looking for the next opportunity.

The $800 Bitcoin Bet

Nailwal first heard about Bitcoin in 2010. A friend suggested they mine together, but Nailwal did not have a laptop, and the conversation ended there.

In 2013, while pursuing his MBA, he encountered Bitcoin again. He tried to set up a mining rig, but his laptop was too weak. He attempted to understand Bitcoin, read a couple of paragraphs, saw "no backing," and thought it was a scam, choosing to give up.

In 2016, Bitcoin came back into his view. After realizing Scope Weaver could not become the business he envisioned, he began exploring opportunities in "deep tech." He considered artificial intelligence but found the mathematics beyond his capabilities.

Then, he truly read the Bitcoin white paper.

"Oh, this is so important," he thought, "this is the next revolution for humanity."

Whether it was belief or recklessness, depending on your perspective, Nailwal took the $15,000 he borrowed for his wedding and invested it all in Bitcoin at $800 per coin.

He admitted, "I had a very strong FOMO (fear of missing out) feeling at the time; even if I had waited a year, I would have done the same thing at $20,000 and lost all my money."

But he did not lose. The price of Bitcoin rose. More importantly, Nailwal discovered Ethereum and its programmable smart contracts. It was a new computing platform that could run applications without centralized control.

He became completely fascinated.

In 2017, Nailwal met Janti Kanani through the online Ethereum community. Kanani proposed a solution to Ethereum's scalability issues. At the time, the Ethereum network was congested due to its own success. CryptoKitties had caused transaction fees to skyrocket by 600%.

Kanani and Nailwal, along with co-founders Anurag Arjun and Mihailo Bjelic, began developing Matic Network in early 2018. They raised $30,000 in seed funding, planning to build a working product first and then raise funds through an ICO.

This principled approach almost led to their failure. By the time they had a usable testnet, the crypto market had crashed. No one wanted to invest, especially in Indian projects. At that time, two Indian crypto projects were exposed as scams.

"No one believed Indian founders could develop a protocol," Nailwal recalled.

The team survived on just $165,000 in the first two years. The founders took only a few thousand dollars in salary each month. Several times, their funds were only enough to last three months. Nailwal remembers begging other cryptocurrency founders for $50,000 just to make it through another quarter.

In 2018, on the eve of his wedding, his life hit rock bottom. A Chinese fund promised to invest $500,000. Two days before the wedding, Bitcoin plummeted from $6,000 to $3,000. The Chinese fund called and said, "We were going to invest in 100 Bitcoins. Now that it has halved in value, we are not investing." Worse, Matic's funding was all in Bitcoin, which had also halved in value.

His wedding went ahead as planned. Friends celebrated with him. But Nailwal knew that three months later, they might not have a company.

In early 2019, Binance approved Matic to raise $5.6 million through its Launchpad project. The due diligence took eight months. This funding also gave Matic a chance to breathe. But final approval still did not materialize. The team attended countless hackathons, visiting developers one by one to explain their technology.

Growth was slow at first, but in 2021, due to Ethereum's high transaction fees making the network nearly unusable for small transactions, growth began to accelerate. Developers flocked to Matic.

Initially launched as Matic Network, it was a single-chain scaling solution operating in a sidechain format, combining Plasma and Proof of Stake (PoS) mechanisms. In 2021, Matic Network underwent a significant rebranding, becoming Polygon, reflecting its transition from a single chain to a broader multi-chain ecosystem aimed at providing diverse scaling solutions for Ethereum-compatible blockchains.

The market responded positively to this rebranding. Polygon's market capitalization soared from $87 million at the beginning of 2021 to nearly $19 billion by December.

Developers flocked to Matic, with the total value locked in the network peaking at $10 billion.

Additionally, the native token transitioned from $MATIC (used to secure the original Polygon PoS chain) to $POL (aimed at supporting the entire Polygon ecosystem), especially under upcoming upgrades (such as Staking Hub) designed to solidify and enhance cross-chain security and governance. This token migration was crucial, although it brought some temporary uncertainty to holders during the transition and led to liquidity fragmentation.

Polygon Labs has boldly shifted its strategic focus to zero-knowledge (ZK) Rollups and acquired teams specializing in ZK to develop zkEVM, a virtual machine capable of achieving Ethereum-equivalent execution power while benefiting from the scalability advantages of ZK proofs. While optimistic Rollups (OR) initially garnered attention due to their simpler design and earlier release, Polygon's emphasis on ZK Rollups reflects its long-term bet on Ethereum's ultimate Layer-2 scaling solution. The zkEVM technology aims to combine high security, scalability, and full compatibility with existing Ethereum tools, potentially positioning Polygon as a leader in future multi-chain architectures.

Turning Point of the Pandemic

In April 2021, the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic hit India hard. Hospitals were overwhelmed, and oxygen supplies were scarce. Nailwal's family in India contracted COVID-19, while he was helplessly far away in Dubai.

"It was clear at that time that our family couldn't all make it through 100%," he said, "not everyone would survive."

He expressed on Twitter that he could not stand by during this crisis. He created a crypto multi-signature wallet to receive donations, expecting to raise a total of $5 million. Within days, donations reached $10 million. Subsequently, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin donated $1 billion worth of Shiba Inu coins.

The real challenge was: how to liquidate $1 billion worth of meme coins without causing a market crash?

Nailwal collaborated with market makers to slowly sell off the coins over several months. The Shiba Inu community initially panicked over fears of a massive sell-off, but calmed down after Nailwal promised to execute the process cautiously. Ultimately, he netted $474 million, far exceeding Buterin's expectations.

The crypto COVID relief fund deployed $74 million to India in emergency situations. Nailwal returned $200 million to Buterin, who donated it to U.S. biomedical research. The remaining $200 million was allocated to long-term projects under "Blockchain for Impact."

Shaping Character in Adversity

By mid-2025, Polygon faced new challenges. The price of $POL had dropped over 80% from its peak. Competitive Layer-2 solutions from Arbitrum and Optimism were capturing market share. The company had expanded to 600 employees during the boom, leading to cultural issues and organizational bloat.

Nailwal made tough decisions. Two rounds of layoffs streamlined the team to a more cohesive size. Several projects that consumed months of engineering time were canceled as they no longer aligned with the strategy.

In June 2025, Nailwal became the first CEO of the Polygon Foundation, consolidating leadership that had previously been dispersed among co-founders and board members. Of the four co-founders, three had stepped back from active roles, leaving him as the last one standing.

"When the critical moment arrives, most founders cannot make tough decisions," he said in an interview, "executing market strategies the hard way, firing people who are not aligned with the current strategy, and abandoning projects that consumed a lot of time and emotional resources."

The feeling of making these decisions is different when you cut projects you personally supported or fire those who believed in your vision during tough times.

Under Nailwal's full leadership, Polygon refocused on AggLayer, an interoperability protocol aimed at unifying blockchain networks. Its technical vision is to create infrastructure that allows thousands of independent blockchains to appear as a single, seamless network to end users.

"By 2030, there could be 100,000 to 1 million chains," Nailwal predicted, "all activities will shift to these application chains."

This is a bold claim. Whether it can be realized depends on execution in the coming years.

Long-Term Game

Nailwal thinks in decades rather than quarters. When discussing Polygon's competition or the future of DePIN, he frequently references timelines of 10 years and 50 years.

"If you give me 10 years, I can 100% tell you that this is the ultimate architecture for cryptocurrency to go mainstream," he said when discussing AggLayer. "But whether it's Polygon's version or others joining in to build something similar, no one can predict."

He is deeply convinced of his vision for blockchain infrastructure. Whether realized by Polygon or others, seeing it built is far more important than who builds it.

Through the "Blockchain for Impact" project, he is shifting from emergency relief to "incentive-based" philanthropy. He is planning awards similar to the Indian Nobel Prize to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.

"I hope to get $20 trillion in output from this $2 billion BFI," he explained, and the leverage he described sounds absurd until you remember he turned $30,000 in seed funding into a company that briefly reached a market cap of $30 billion.

However, Polygon faces headwinds. Competitors like Arbitrum and Base have captured more market share, offering simpler user experiences and stronger support. Polygon's bridging technology remains complex, and the transition from MATIC to POL has brought uncertainty. Whether Nailwal's long-term infrastructure investments will pay off depends on execution in an increasingly crowded market.

What is certain is that Sandeep Nailwal's journey from his starting point has exceeded most people's imaginations. But whether the infrastructure he built can help others as cryptocurrency helped him remains to be seen.

From a village without electricity to building the value internet, the destination is uncertain, and the journey continues.

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