The multimillionaire from the slums: Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal

Original title: 《 Web3 version of the "millionaire" in the slums: Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal｜Crypto Tycoon 》

Original source:  Old Yappie 

The rise of blockchain technology has also witnessed the rise of Polygon.

Today, Polygon has become one of the public chains that builders love. As a multi-chain system, it supports the interconnection of multiple blockchains and networks. However, did you know? Before the Polygon network broke into the top 15 cryptocurrencies and was called the "Internet of Blockchain", it was called "MATIC". In the crypto market, it appeared like a dark horse, so it was nicknamed "Horseshoe" by the domestic industry.

Polygon is a public chain built on the Layer2 expansion solution on Ethereum. Compared with Ethereum, Polygon has advantages in speed, scalability and availability.

As a blockchain native to India, it enables blockchain networks to connect and expand, and aims to create a multi-chain ecosystem compatible with Ethereum. It is called the "Internet of Blockchains" and uses a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism to process on-chain transactions while obtaining security from Ethereum.

Just these two days, Polygon said on Twitter that it has launched a comprehensive security audit of zkEVM. This audit will focus on the correctness and robustness of zkEVM, and is also a key step that needs to be completed in the last test network before launching the main network.

This company, founded in 2017, has become increasingly famous, and its founders have also been pushed to the forefront and known to more people. Today, in our "Crypto Tycoon" column, let's talk about Sandeep Nailwal, the co-founder of Polygon.   

It’s a cliché that knowledge changes destiny

Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon. In other words, he is a software developer living in Delhi, India.

As a software developer, Sandeep Nailwal never intended to be an entrepreneur in his life plan. He was even heavily in debt at one point, but now he is indeed the founder of Polygon, a multi-billion dollar company, and is working hard to make it one of the largest companies in Web3.

In Delhi, India, the west bank of the Yamuna River is what we often call the rich area. On the other side of the river, the east bank is just the opposite. It is contemptuously called "Jamna-Paar" (Yamuna-paar), that is, slums, and people living here are looked down upon. And Sandeep Nailwal, the co-founder of the multi-billion dollar Web3 company, has long had his home on the east bank of the Yamuna River.

Sandeep was born into a poor peasant family in Ramnagar, and later his family moved to Delhi. In Delhi, their family lived in a slum-like environment. Members of poor families like them are accustomed to doing the lowest-level menial jobs. In fact, his grandfather worked as a domestic help.

Growing up, it was common for kids around him to drop out of school after class 10. Some of them also turned to alcohol and gambling. When Sandeep saw his own father falling victim to these vices, and when he witnessed instances of domestic violence in his own home, his motivation to break away from that life came – he resolved to continue his studies after class 10.

“I always said I would be someone big. I didn’t want to play small and hated to fail, but I didn’t know how to succeed. Everyone made fun of me,” he says. This, no doubt, laid the foundation for Sandeep’s personal success and his future success at Polygon. Pain and suffering built his resolve.

“In my own family and environment, there were several examples of people I didn’t want to be. I lived in an environment where many people also stopped respecting me after knowing about my father’s problems,” Sandeep says.

The inner hustle has always been Sandeep Nailwal’s best friend, taking him from Delhi’s “Jamna-paar” to leading the multi-billion dollar Web3 company Polygon.

Today, under the leadership of Sandeep and his co-founders, Polygon has grown into a global, industry-leading platform with over 40,000 decentralized applications. At the time of writing, its native token MATIC has a market cap of over $7 billion.

Vow to break through and take risks in entrepreneurship

Sandeep credits Mark Zuckerberg and his success with Facebook as a source of inspiration for his own journey as an Internet entrepreneur. Today, he wears multiple hats, becoming an active guide, business mentor, and angel investor, integrating into the lives of several founders and builders in Web3.

Starting a business was not part of Sandeep's early life. After completing his computer science engineering and MBA courses with bank loans, he started working to pay off his loans and buy a house. He has worked in the technology department of Welspun, Asia's largest textile company, and Deloitte.

“I thought I needed to buy a house, even though it was cliche because it was customary for a man to own a house before getting married. My current wife told me that, she told me to ignore it and said it was OK if we lived in a rented house. She supported me in pursuing my entrepreneurial dream,” he said.

With his wife’s support and the idea of entrepreneurship always on his mind, he later quit his job. In early 2016, Sandeep founded blockchain services startup Scope Weaver. At the same time, JD Kanani, a data scientist at Housing.com who would later co-found Polygon with Sandeep, discovered a weakness in the Ethereum blockchain.

There’s always light at the end of the tunnel

The creators of Ethereum never imagined it would be as widely adopted as it is today. As a result, they didn’t write any large-scale features to handle hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.

It wasn’t until the NFT project CryptoKitties overloaded and caused network congestion that JD Kanani realized the need to build an Ethereum scaling solution.   

“At that time, people were crazy about Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). Blockchain projects released white papers online, raised funds without product demonstrations, and then failed,” Sandeep recalled.

When JD Kanani met Sandeep, the two hit it off and decided to collaborate on this project. So, in 2017, Sandeep, JD Kanani and Anurag Arjun jointly launched MATIC Network.

The trio started their journey with a registered address in Mumbai and an office in a house in Bangalore. JD Kanani took care of the programming and engineering aspects, while Sandeep and Anurag took care of the rest. In the environment at that time, Matic could have easily raised $15-20 million for their project, but the co-founders did not choose this path. Taking shortcuts and making quick money were against Sandeep's philosophy of becoming a big shot.

“Matic is solving a long-term problem, so we have to choose a slower growth path. For me, it is all about ensuring that we have unlimited possibilities. If we raised a lot of money from external investors in the initial years, it might have limited our potential and our own vision,” he said.

At the time, Matic wasn’t product ready, so it chose to raise only a limited amount of funding — $5 million from Binance — in an initial exchange offering, with the founders selling some of their MATIC tokens.

“I had a responsibility to ensure that Matic continued to operate.”

I often had sleepless nights when I made the difficult decision not to raise more money,” Sandeep recalls.

Was it wrong to be the founder of an Indian web3 company?

The days of starting a business were not all smooth sailing. Then, the most serious blow since the establishment of Matic Network came.

While Matic’s product was progressing well, the bear market that hit in 2018 quickly dried up funding for Matic Network. At the same time, Sandeep discovered that Silicon Valley startups were able to raise funding.

“People who studied at Stanford and other top universities were still able to raise funding. There was a perception that Indians couldn’t build software infrastructure companies. People in the industry called Indian founders like us ‘pajeets’ — a derogatory and racial slur,” Sandeep explained.

Matic tried to reach out to investors, but was unsuccessful. Sandeep recalls that some investors were disrespectful of the Indian startup and decided not to invest in Matic even before making a pitch.

After a dark moment, the light at the end of the darkness finally came.

Mihailo Bjelic, an engineer from Serbia, believed in Matic's vision and joined as a co-founder. Persistence, persistence, and persistence, always down-to-earth, and finally luck favored them.

In 2021, the co-founders decided to take a broader approach to Matic's problems. Instead of just building a PoS chain, they used the same idea to build a scalable blockchain internet around Ethereum. In the same year, they caught the attention of American tech billionaire Mark Cuban and raised an undisclosed amount from him.

Following this line of thought, Matic eventually changed its name to Polygon and has never looked back since.

2021 has seen many milestones for Polygon. It released an SDK that allows developers to quickly deploy Ethereum-compatible chains using a built-in EVM and a set of pluggable modules. It also raised $450 million in its first major venture capital round led by Sequoia Capital India, with a market cap of $14.4 billion.

Today's Polygon is both small and big

In mid-2021, Polygon had about 400 decentralized applications running on the platform. Today, it has more than 40,000. It also cooperates with companies such as Meta (Instagram), Starbucks, Reddit, Flipkart, etc. to introduce Web3 products to the public through cross-border cooperation. As the helmsman of this industry-leading project, Sandeep can be said to be a "big shot". But he still doesn't like being alone.

“Even at our peak, I felt like we were small. It continues to drive me. I remain in awe and so does the team. We had to make it to the top and be among the top three projects alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum,” he said. “I have absolutely no sense of success and I don’t look back. Now we have all the expectations of the Indian crypto community and it’s a responsibility and there’s no way we can fail from here.”

No matter how big or small, Sandeep still believes that the decisions he made in the early days of building Polygon are converging at different points over time to make it what it is today.

Suffering is wealth, but also pain

Though Sandeep has come a long way from his days in Jamna-Paar, the experience of growing up still has an indelible, sometimes negative, impact on him. For him, success comes at a price.

Recently, he is still taking medication for psychological stress. "Only when I take the medicine do I feel like myself. Without it, every day affects my life," he said.

“Right now, I am slowly finding ways to feel happiness. Recently, my baby was born, which made me very happy. I am also interested in exploring meditation. My journey came from this place of pain, and all the negativity triggered self-redemption.”

After facing these challenges personally, he began speaking out about mental health and stress-related issues, and has been giving back to various communities. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sandeep started Crypto Relief, a community-run fund that raised more than $475 million to help Indians in need of healthcare services. So far, the fund has paid out more than $58 million in grants and has released a public audit report on the same.

He has funded several economically disadvantaged communities. He says he sees himself and his family in these people.

"We have been donating some money to help people in those areas. If someone does not have enough funds to hold a wedding, we will provide help, and my parents even came as the main guests. For them, life has changed a lot." Sandeep said proudly.

For now, Sandeep continues to look forward. His mission is to make Polygon one of the top three Web3 platforms in the world. Although, he also realizes that his mother said he should relax and enjoy life first. But people with a sense of mission never want to stop running for their mission, right?

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