Sandeep Nailwal of Polygon Labs is building the future of Web3, one block at a time

Founded in 2017, Polygon develops blockchain scaling solutions to make the internet (Web3) more scalable, affordable, secure and sustainable. It creates open-source protocols that allow developers to build on top of the Polygon ecosystem. One of its aims is to achieve mass adoption of blockchain technology by providing the underlying infrastructure and tools for other developers and institutions. His philanthropic venture, Blockchain for Impact (BFI), harnesses the technology for social good. Nailwal also sounded the call for decentralised AI through his company Sentient—founded in 2024, it raised $85 million in a seed round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.

Nailwal’s life began far from the high tech world of tech billionaires. He was born in 1987 in Ramnagar, Uttarakhand, where his father worked odd jobs to make ends meet. By age 5, his family had moved to Shakarpur in East Delhi looking for better work, and lived crammed into a single rooftop shanty, which also served as a pit stop for relatives coming to the city in search of jobs.

Life in East Delhi was not the easiest. Like many other men in the locality, his father had a drinking and gambling addiction. With growing debts, Nailwal, then in class VI, started tutoring second- and third-graders, earning ₹300 a month—just enough to buy school books and help his mother keep the family afloat. “I’d give up my glass of milk for my brother," he says.

Education became his escape. After studying at various nondescript neighbourhood schools, Nailwal did his BTech from Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University and later an MBA from NITIE Mumbai (now IIM Mumbai) on student loans. “I didn’t make it into one of the IITs," he says, laughing, “but I was ambitious". He kept telling himself that he’d do better in life than school or engineering exam toppers. “They were made out to be our heroes. Today I look at Elon Musk and get inspired to achieve that status. After a few more years in the crypto world, I want to do something in space technology," he says.

In 2009, a college project he worked on that converted PDFs into database queries earned him ₹20,000—and planted the seeds for entrepreneurship in his mind.

After stints as a management consultant at Deloitte and head of e-commerce at Welspun, he paid off his family’s debts. It was during this period, 2011-14, that he fell in love with blockchain, drawn by its radical transparency and potential to transform finance. Encouraged by his wife Harshita, he started his first business, ScopeWeaver in 2015, an online marketplace for professional services, with an angel investment of ₹8 lakh. Although successful, he eventually sold this venture to delve into deep tech.

In 2017, Nailwal co-founded Polygon with Jaynti Kanani, Anurag Arjun, and Mihailo Bjelic in Mumbai. What started with a meeting of like-minded founders in a WhatsApp group for the bitcoin community led to the formation of Polygon (then known as Matic), a scaling solution for Ethereum. It grew into a sprawling, decentralised infrastructure, often likened to leading cloud computing service Amazon Web Services for Web3, a technology which is widely recognised as the next, more decentralised stage of the internet built on blockchain and cryptocurrency to give users more control over their data and reduce reliance on large corporations.

Today, Polygon, with a team of 200, processes over 3.5 million transactions daily and boasts 8 million monthly active wallets—a 31% rise since January. It powers applications for global brands like Nike, Reddit, Puma, SK Telecom, Lufthansa, Flipkart, and Reliance Jio. Some of its competitors include Optimism, Arbitrum, Solana, Polkadot, Cardano, Cosmos.

Recent upgrades such as Heimdall v2, which reduces transaction confirmation time to just five seconds, and the Bhilai hardfork, which allows the network to handle more than 1,000 transactions per second, have made Polygon well-suited for fast payments—whether for everyday transactions, cross-border transfers, or settlement of digital assets like tokenised real estate, art, or securities. “We’re building a chain that feels like the internet—fast, reliable, seamless," says Nailwal.

A key initiative is the Agglayer—a unifying layer across blockchains, scheduled for rollout by year-end. “Blockchains are disconnected today. Agglayer makes them one network," he explains. Powered by the POL token, Polygon’s coin that is traded, the Agglayer Breakout Program incentivises stakers to secure and expand this ecosystem. Addressing investor wariness in a sluggish market, Nailwal says, “The market’s tough, but our tech leads. We’re shipping—fast payments, unified chains, real value." Donald Trump NFTs during his election campaign were launched on Polygon, marking crypto’s march into the mainstream. “Crypto’s a freedom tool," says Nailwal. “When Trump backs NFTs and Musk names his department DOGE after a crypto coin, you know it’s unstoppable."

India, he believes, could lead the crypto wave. With 30-40 million crypto users, the country is a sleeping giant, he asserts, held back by policy paralysis. “We could’ve created billions, but fear held us back," he says, urging regulators to take a cue from India’s success with digital payments and the fact that the country has one of the highest number of investors in crypto. He says we have to acknowledge crypto as the new financial system.

“People should look at the videos from the early 1990s and see how the internet was spoken about. It was said to be only for gambling, pornography and credit card frauds. Crypto stands for cryptography but everyone only talks about cryptocurrency. This is like saying the internet is only for (sending and receiving) emails," he says.

Beyond business, Nailwal’s heart lies in social impact. He is CEO of Polygon Foundation, a non-profit organisation established in January 2023 by Polygon’s co-founders to support development, research, and education in the blockchain ecosystem. Through BFI, he launched the Biome Virtual Network Program, funding biomedical research across 25 Indian institutions like AIIMS and Birla Institutes of Technology and Central Drug Research Institute (CDRI), Lucknow. Fifty researchers receive $50,000 annually. “Covid relief wasn’t enough. We need to invest in research to be ready for future pandemics," he says. BFI’s goal is create a “virtual university" for virology, an open, patent-free platform synthesising research for public use. “If startups emerge, I’ll fund them," he adds, “but the knowledge stays free."

His empathy is rooted in lived experience—student loans, family sacrifices, the weight of poverty. These struggles inform his deep concern over AI’s future. “AI builds apps instantly, writes code, fixes bugs," he says. “A 100-person team could shrink to two. I wouldn’t let my son study computer engineering," he says.

While he sees humanity’s future as one of abundance with autonomous cars, automated construction, cheap food and Universal Basic Income, he worries about meaning. “If everything’s easy, what’s the purpose of life?" he wonders. Sentient AI is developing an open-source, composable artificial general intelligence (AGI) ecosystem. The goal is to make AI infrastructure transparent and community-driven, rather than closed and proprietary. He hopes to counter the risks of centralised artificial intelligence. “AI is like nuclear power. Whoever controls it, controls the world. We need more and more countries to have powerful AI to stop any one country’s domination," he warns.

With blockchain as the check-and-balance layer, he envisions a system that keeps AI loyal to human values. “It’s just pattern matching now," he says, “but AGI is coming. Blockchain can rein it in."

Mentorship is another cornerstone of his mission. Through the Nailwal Foundation, he supports entrepreneurs across India and beyond. “I know how exclusion feels," he says. “Countries that fund innovation lead."

Recalling his struggle at raising funds in the initial days of Polygon, he says no big VC firm believed that a crypto company from India or with Indian founders could build a global deep tech project. He recalls, without rancour, relatives and friends calling him delusional. Whenever he would talk about an Indian company turning unicorn or raising a big amount, they would mock him, asking when he would be announcing his million-dollar deal. When he raised $5 million for Polygon in 2019, he announced in the college WhatsApp group that he had actually done it. Leaning back in his seat, he says, “My dream has always been to bring Web3 to the masses, especially in emerging markets, so that anyone, anywhere, can have full financial freedom. I saw first-hand what financial exclusion looks like."

Amin Ali is a New Delhi-based journalist