OpinionBlockchain
|7 min ReadSandeep Nailwal: From Delhi Slums to Building Polygon
Jax Morales
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
From survival to conviction
Survival makes hard calls easy. Sandeep Nailwal learned that young. His father disappeared for days, returned with an $80 paycheck gone to alcohol and gambling, and the family bounced across Delhi’s Jamna-Paar settlements. He stood outside classrooms when tuition was missing. At ten, a family accident ended childhood. Someone had to step up. He did.
He started late in school and was always the oldest in class. He tutored kids in sixth grade for 300 rupees a month. He bought pens wholesale and sold them for a margin. The lesson was simple. Create value, capture a slice, change your path. IIT was the dream, but prep was too expensive. He took loans, went to Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology, and sometimes used loan money to pay off his father’s gambling debts. A TV segment on Facebook pushed him to computer science. It was naive and perfect. He chased the idea anyway.
An MBA in Mumbai followed. Deloitte paid down debt. Stints as developer, consultant, CTO. Promotions landed. Money was good. The itch to build something was stronger. He quit in 2016. He borrowed $15,000 meant for a future wedding and launched Scope Weaver, a services marketplace. Revenue came. Scale did not. Clients wanted a face to blame. He was becoming the bottleneck. He shut it down and looked deeper.
Betting everything on Bitcoin and Ethereum
He had heard about Bitcoin in 2010. He had tried and failed to mine during his MBA in 2013. In 2016 he read the white paper. The switch flipped. He put the entire
800. He admits it was pure FOMO. If he had waited a year and bought at $20,000, he says he would have lost it all. Luck met conviction. Price helped, but Ethereum changed him. Programmable contracts meant a new compute platform that no one owned.In 2017 he met Jaynti Kanani online. Ethereum was choking on its own success. CryptoKitties sent fees up 600 percent. Kanani wanted to scale. Nailwal joined him, with Anurag Arjun and Mihailo Bjelic, to build Matic Network in early 2018. They raised
165,000 for two years. Salaries were a few thousand a month. The runway often read three months. He begged other founders for $50,000 just to survive a quarter.Two days before his wedding in late 2018, a Chinese fund canceled a planned
6,000 to $3,000. Matic’s treasury was in BTC. It halved too. The wedding happened. The company almost did not.In early 2019 Binance approved Matic for a $5.6 million Launchpad sale after eight months of diligence. It gave breathing room, not momentum. The team hit hackathons, pitched devs, and pushed code city by city. Growth was slow until 2021 when Ethereum fees made small transactions impossible. Builders moved to Matic.
From Matic to Polygon, and the ZK wager
Matic launched as a sidechain scaling stack that combined Plasma and proof of stake. In 2021 it rebranded to Polygon. The signal was bigger than a name. The project shifted from a single chain to a broader multi-chain vision for Ethereum-compatible scaling. The market rewarded the pivot. Market cap jumped from
19 billion by December.Developers followed. Total value locked peaked near
MATIC, which secures the legacy PoS chain, to $POL, which is designed to secure the full Polygon stack including the coming Staking Hub. The migration mattered. It also introduced temporary uncertainty and liquidity fragmentation.Polygon Labs then made its biggest strategic call. Go all in on zero knowledge rollups. It acquired ZK teams and built zkEVM so developers could keep Ethereum tooling and get ZK scalability and security. Optimistic rollups launched earlier and looked simpler. Polygon bet the endgame belongs to ZK. If zkEVM delivers speed, security, and full EVM compatibility, Polygon can lead the next layer 2 wave.
Crisis, charity, and hard resets
April 2021 hit India hard. Hospitals overflowed. Oxygen ran out. Nailwal’s family in India caught COVID while he was stuck in Dubai. He set up a multisig wallet to raise crypto for relief. He hoped for
10 million in days. Then Vitalik Buterin donated
474 million.
200 million to Buterin, who sent it to U.S. biomedical research. Another $200 million stayed to seed long-term “blockchain impact” work.By mid 2025 new pain hit at home. $POL fell more than 80 percent from the high. Arbitrum and Optimism gained share. Headcount had swelled to 600 and culture sagged. Two layoff rounds cut to a tighter core. Projects that ate months of engineering were killed if they no longer fit strategy.
In June 2025 he became the first CEO of the Polygon Foundation, consolidating leadership that had been spread across founders and the board. Three of four cofounders had stepped back. He was the last one still on point. He said most founders cannot make hard calls when it counts. He did, including cutting teams and canceling his own pet projects. It hurts more when you fire believers or sunset work you pushed into existence. He did it anyway.
The 2030 bet: AggLayer and a million chains
With a single leader, Polygon refocused on AggLayer. The goal is interop at scale. Make thousands of chains feel like one network to users. He says by 2030 there may be 100,000 to 1,000,000 chains and that activity will move to app-specific chains. It is bold. It lives or dies on execution.
He thinks in decades, not quarters. He wants infrastructure that carries crypto to the mainstream. He wants the impact to exist even if it is not branded Polygon. His charity work is shifting from emergency relief to incentives. He talks about an Indian Nobel-like prize to catalyze science and engineering. He wants
200 million “blockchain for impact” pool. It sounds absurd until you remember a
30 billion.There are headwinds. Arbitrum and Base own more share and simple UX. Bridges feel complex and the MATIC to POL shift created uncertainty. Dev-first messaging has not yet turned into mass retail apps. The ZK bet and AggLayer need flawless delivery in a crowded market. That is the job.
The path from a village without electricity to an internet of value is not over. It never is. The boy who stood outside classrooms built rails that now carry millions of transactions a day. The next test is simple. Can those rails carry the world.
Disclaimer: This document is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be taken as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, which are not considered here, before investing. This document is not an offer, or the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned.