Sandeep Nailwal

Sandeep Nailwal is an Indian entrepreneur and software engineer who co-founded Polygon (originally Matic Network) in 2017 alongside Jaynti Kanani, Anurag Arjun, and Mihailo Bjelic. Born in Uttarakhand, India, Nailwal studied electrical engineering and pursued a career in software consulting and enterprise blockchain before recognising the scalability problem that would define early Ethereum DeFi: the network could not handle the transaction volumes that mainstream adoption would require without prohibitive fees.

Matic Network was founded to address this problem directly — building a Plasma-based sidechain that would process transactions off Ethereum's mainnet and settle them in batches, dramatically reducing fees and increasing throughput while maintaining Ethereum's security for large value settlements. Nailwal's role was in business development, fundraising, and ecosystem building, while co-founder Jaynti Kanani led the technical architecture.

The Matic Network rebranded to Polygon in February 2021, accompanied by a strategic pivot from a single-sidechain solution to a comprehensive 'Ethereum's internet of blockchains' vision. The MATIC token retained its name for several years but the project's scope expanded enormously: Polygon acquired Hermez (ZK rollup), Mir Protocol (ZK proof systems), and Nightfall (enterprise privacy), building a suite of Ethereum scaling technologies.

Nailwal was central to Polygon's ability to attract institutional partnerships that no other blockchain scaling solution had achieved at that scale. Disney's Accelerator programme, Meta's Instagram NFT integration, Reddit's Collectible Avatars (which onboarded millions of users to crypto via Polygon), Starbucks Odyssey NFT loyalty programme, and the NFL's NFT initiatives all deployed on Polygon PoS. These partnerships reflected Nailwal's emphasis on practical adoption over technical purity — Polygon would go where the users were, even if that meant working with centralised corporations.

During India's devastating second COVID-19 wave in May 2021, Nailwal founded Crypto Relief — a fundraising initiative that collected over $1 billion in cryptocurrency donations for Indian COVID relief. The initiative was one of the largest cryptocurrency-funded humanitarian efforts in history, demonstrating that on-chain capital could be mobilised for large-scale real-world impact on short notice. Nailwal donated a significant personal amount and coordinated donations from major crypto figures including Vitalik Buterin, who donated Shiba Inu tokens that were subsequently converted to substantial funding.

The humanitarian dimension of Nailwal's public profile — unusual for a blockchain founder — has given Polygon and its founder a distinctive reputation for contributing beyond the crypto industry's boundaries.

Nailwal has championed Polygon's strategic pivot toward zero-knowledge proof technology as the foundation of its next phase. The Polygon zkEVM, launched on mainnet in March 2023, is an EVM-equivalent ZK rollup that provides stronger security guarantees than Optimistic Rollups. The AggLayer, unveiled in 2024, extends this further — aggregating liquidity across multiple ZK chains through atomic cross-chain proofs.

The MATIC-to-POL token migration, part of the Polygon 2.0 roadmap, repositions the ecosystem's native token as the staking and governance asset for the entire multi-chain Polygon ecosystem rather than just the PoS sidechain. Under Nailwal's continued leadership at the Polygon Foundation, the project aims to become the unified ZK-based liquidity layer for the Ethereum ecosystem — an ambition that would place it at the centre of Ethereum's long-term scaling roadmap.