Sandeep Nailwal: From the Slums of Delhi to Building Polygon

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

Written by: Thejaswini M A

Translated by: Block unicorn

Preface

Sandeep Nailwal’s father would often be gone for days at a time.

When he returned, his monthly $80 salary would be gone, squandered on alcohol and gambling debts.

The family lived in a settlement along the Yamuna River in Delhi, an area locals derisively called “Jamna-Paar,” roughly meaning “the other side of the river.” But it was far from a compliment.

As a child, Sandeep was often left standing outside the classroom because his parents hadn’t paid the tuition, so he couldn’t enter. When he was ten, his younger brother suffered a serious accident, and Sandeep’s childhood ended. 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 and partners with companies like JPMorgan, Stripe, and Disney. From the Delhi slums to building technology used by Fortune 500 companies, the journey took just thirty years.

But the road was far from smooth, and the scars of 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 with no electricity. His parents were both illiterate when they married, and when he was four, they moved to Delhi in search of opportunities unavailable in the village.

What they found, however, was a slum.

The settlements on the east bank of the Yamuna River were crowded, filthy, and violent. Illegal guns and knives were the preferred tools for settling disputes. His family squeezed into whatever housing they could afford, moving frequently as circumstances changed.

His parents knew nothing about education. They didn’t know children could start school at three or four. Sandeep didn’t start school until he was five, simply because no one told his parents. Starting so late meant he was always the oldest in his class, two years older than his classmates, a constant reminder that he was behind.

The trauma of poverty was not just about hunger or the shame of tattered clothes. It also meant watching your father gamble away your tuition while you stood outside the classroom in shame. It meant watching your mother struggle to feed the family while battling an alcoholic husband.

It meant understanding at a young age that no one was coming to save you.

Entrepreneur in Sixth Grade

Sandeep’s way of coping with poverty was to work. In sixth grade, he began tutoring younger students, earning 300 rupees a month. He also found a friend who owned a stationery shop and started buying pens at cost, then selling them to classmates at a markup.

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

He dreamed of getting into the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), the prestigious engineering schools that offered ambitious students a path out of poverty. But IIT required expensive coaching to compete for 5,000 spots among millions of applicants. His family couldn’t afford it.

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

His decision to study computer science came 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. But the combination of naivety and desperation forged a special kind of determination.

After earning his engineering degree, Nailwal pursued an MBA at the National Institute of Industrial Engineering in Mumbai. There, he met Harshita Singh, who would later become 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: software developer at Computer Sciences Corporation, consultant at Deloitte, and CTO of the e-commerce division at Welspun Group. He excelled at his jobs, received promotions, and earned a good income.

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

In Indian culture, there’s pressure to buy a house before marriage. A man without property is seen as having no future. Nailwal felt this pressure acutely. He had a good job, could get a mortgage, and settle down.

Harshita said something that changed everything: “You’ll never be happy this way. I don’t care about owning a house; we can rent.”

In early 2016, Nailwal quit his job. He borrowed $15,000 (money he had planned to use for his future wedding) and founded Scope Weaver, an online platform for professional services. His idea was to standardize India’s fragmented service sector, building an Alibaba-like platform, but for Indian service providers instead of Chinese manufacturers.

The company did reasonably well and generated some revenue. But Nailwal realized he was becoming the bottleneck. Clients wanted a face to take responsibility when things went wrong. He was turning into a regular service provider, only now he had to pay employees’ salaries.

The business couldn’t scale. After a year, he started looking for the next opportunity.

An $800 Bitcoin Bet

Nailwal first heard about bitcoin in 2010. A friend suggested mining together, but Nailwal didn’t 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 tried to understand bitcoin, but after reading two paragraphs and seeing “no backing,” he decided it was a scam and gave up.

In 2016, bitcoin re-entered his radar. After realizing Scope Weaver couldn’t become the company he envisioned, Nailwal began exploring “deep tech” opportunities. He considered AI but found the math beyond his abilities.

Then he actually read the bitcoin whitepaper.

“Oh, this is huge,” he thought. “This is humanity’s next revolution.”

Whether it was conviction or recklessness, depending on your perspective, Nailwal took the $15,000 he had borrowed for his wedding and put it all into bitcoin at $800 per coin.

He admits, “My FOMO was so strong that even if I was a year late, I would have done the same at $20,000 and lost all my money.”

But he didn’t lose. Bitcoin’s price rose. More importantly, Nailwal discovered Ethereum and its programmable smart contracts. This was a new computing platform for running applications without centralized control.

He was completely hooked.

In 2017, Nailwal met Jaynti Kanani through the online Ethereum community. Kanani proposed solving Ethereum’s scaling problem. At the time, the Ethereum network was congested due to its own success. CryptoKitties had caused transaction fees to spike 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.

This principled approach nearly doomed them. By the time they had a usable testnet, the crypto market had crashed. No one wanted to invest, especially in Indian projects. At the time, two Indian crypto projects had been exposed as scams.

“No one believed Indian founders could develop protocols,” Nailwal recalled.

The team survived the first two years on just $165,000. The founders took only a few thousand dollars a month in salary. Several times, they had only three months of runway left. Nailwal remembers begging other crypto founders for $50,000 just to survive another quarter.

In 2018, on the eve of his wedding, his life hit rock bottom. A Chinese fund had promised a $500,000 investment. Two days before the wedding, bitcoin dropped from $6,000 to $3,000. The Chinese fund called: “We were going to invest 100 bitcoins. Now it’s worth half, so we’re not investing.” Worse, all of Matic’s funds were in bitcoin. Their value was also halved.

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

In early 2019, Binance approved Matic for $5.6 million in funding through its Launchpad project. Due diligence took eight months. This funding gave Matic some breathing room. But final approval was still not realized. The team participated in countless hackathons, visiting developers one by one to explain their technology.

Growth was slow at first, but in 2021, as Ethereum’s high fees made small transactions nearly impossible, growth accelerated. Developers flocked to Matic.

Originally launched as Matic Network, it was a single-chain scaling solution operating as a sidechain, combining Plasma and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanisms. In 2021, Matic Network underwent a major rebranding to Polygon, reflecting its transition from a single chain to a broader multi-chain ecosystem, aiming to provide diverse scaling solutions for Ethereum-compatible blockchains.

The market responded positively to the rebrand. Polygon’s market cap soared from $87 million at the start of 2021 to nearly $19 billion by December.

Developers flocked to Matic, and the network’s total value locked peaked at $10 billion.

In addition, the native token transitioned from $MATIC (used to secure the original Polygon PoS chain) to $POL (designed to support the entire Polygon ecosystem), especially with upcoming upgrades like Staking Hub, aiming to consolidate and enhance cross-chain security and governance. This token migration was crucial, though during the transition, it brought some temporary uncertainty to holders and led to fragmented liquidity.

Polygon Labs also boldly shifted its strategic focus to zero-knowledge (ZK) Rollup, acquiring ZK-focused teams to develop zkEVM, a virtual machine capable of Ethereum-equivalent execution with the scalability advantages of ZK proofs. While Optimistic Rollup (OR) initially attracted attention for its simpler design and earlier launch, Polygon’s emphasis on ZK Rollup reflects its long-term bet on Ethereum’s ultimate Layer-2 scaling solution. zkEVM technology aims to combine high security, scalability, and full compatibility with existing Ethereum tools, potentially positioning Polygon as a leader in the future multi-chain architecture.

Pandemic Turning Point

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

“It was clear at the time that our family couldn’t all make it through 100%,” he said. “Not everyone would survive.”

He tweeted that he couldn’t stand by during the crisis. He created a crypto multisig wallet to receive donations, expecting to raise a total of $5 million. Within days, donations reached $10 million. Then, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin donated $1 billion worth of Shiba Inu tokens.

The real challenge: how to liquidate $1 billion worth of meme coins without crashing the market?

Nailwal worked with market makers, selling slowly over several months. The Shiba Inu community initially panicked over fears of a massive sell-off, but calmed down after Nailwal promised to proceed cautiously. In the end, he netted $474 million, far exceeding Buterin’s expectations.

The Crypto COVID Relief Fund deployed $74 million to India in emergency relief. Nailwal returned $200 million to Buterin, who donated it to U.S. biomedical research. The remaining $200 million was reserved for long-term “blockchain impact” projects.

Character Forged in Adversity

By mid-2025, Polygon faces new challenges. The price of $POL has dropped more than 80% from its peak. Competing Layer-2 solutions from Arbitrum and Optimism are taking market share. The company expanded to 600 employees during the boom, leading to cultural issues and organizational bloat.

Nailwal made tough decisions. Two rounds of layoffs reduced the team to a more cohesive size. Several projects that consumed months of engineering time were canceled for no longer fitting the strategy.

In June 2025, Nailwal became the first CEO of the Polygon Foundation, consolidating leadership that had previously been spread among co-founders and board members. Of the four co-founders, three have stepped down from active roles; he is the last one remaining.

“When critical moments come, most founders can’t make the hard decisions,” he said in an interview. “Executing market strategies the hard way, firing people who no longer fit, abandoning projects you’ve invested so much time and emotion in.”

When you cut projects you personally supported or let go of people who believed in your vision during tough times, those decisions feel different.

Under Nailwal’s full leadership, Polygon has refocused on AggLayer, an interoperability protocol designed to unify blockchain networks. The 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 predicts. “All activity will move to these application chains.”

It’s a bold claim. Whether it can be realized depends on execution in the coming years.

The Long Game

Nailwal thinks in decades, not quarters. When discussing Polygon’s competition or the future of DePIN, he repeatedly mentions 10- and 50-year timelines.

“If you give me 10 years, I can tell you 100% this is the ultimate architecture for crypto to go mainstream,” he said of AggLayer. “But whether it’s Polygon’s version or others building something similar, no one can predict.”

He is deeply convinced of the vision for blockchain infrastructure. Whether it’s realized by Polygon or someone else matters less than seeing it built.

Through the “blockchain impact” project, he is shifting from emergency relief to “incentive-based” philanthropy. He is planning an award akin to an Indian Nobel Prize to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.

“I want to get $2 trillion of output from this $200 million BFI,” he explained. The leverage he describes sounds absurd—until you remember he turned $30,000 in seed funding into a company briefly valued at $30 billion.

However, Polygon faces headwinds. Competitors like Arbitrum and Base have already 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. The company’s developer-focused messaging has yet to translate into large-scale retail applications as competitors have. Whether Nailwal’s long-term infrastructure investments will pay off depends on execution in an increasingly crowded market.

What’s certain is that the distance Sandeep Nailwal has traveled from his starting point exceeds most people’s imagination. But whether the infrastructure he’s built can help others as crypto helped him remains to be seen.

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