Article written by Thejaswini MA

Article compiled by: Block unicorn

Preface

Sandeep Nailwal's father often didn't come home for days.

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

The family lives in a settlement along Delhi's Yamuna River, an area locals disparagingly call "Jamna-Paar," which roughly translates to "across the river." But it's not meant as a compliment.

As a child, Sandeep was always standing outside the classroom, unable to enter because his parents hadn't paid his school fees. When he was ten, his younger brother was in a serious accident, ending his childhood. His father's drug addiction meant someone had to step up. That someone was Sandeep.

Today, Nairwal runs Polygon, a blockchain infrastructure company that processes millions of transactions daily and works with companies like JPMorgan Chase, Stripe, and Disney. His journey from the slums of Delhi to building technology used by Fortune 500 companies took just three decades.

But the road wasn't smooth, and the scars of his early years influenced every decision he made.

Sandeep Nailwal was born in 1987 in Ramnagar, a rural village without electricity in the foothills of the Himalayas. His parents were both illiterate when they married, and when he was four, they moved to Delhi in search of opportunities that lay beyond their village.

Instead, they discovered slums.

The settlements on the east bank of the Yamuna River are crowded, filthy, and often violent. Illegal guns and knives are the tools of choice for settling disputes. His family squeezes into whatever shelter they can afford, moving frequently as circumstances change.

His parents didn't understand education. They didn't know children could start school at just three or four years old. 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 child in his class, two years older than the others, a constant reminder that he was falling behind.

The trauma of poverty isn't just the shame of going hungry or wearing tattered clothes. It's the shame of standing outside the classroom while your father loses all his tuition. It's the shame of watching your mother struggle to keep her family fed while struggling with her alcoholic husband.

It's about understanding at a young age that no one is going to save you.

Sixth grade entrepreneurs

Sandeep coped with poverty by working. In sixth grade, he began tutoring younger students, earning 300 rupees a month. He also found a friend who owned a stationery store and began buying pens at cost, then selling them to his classmates at a marked-up price.

While the amount was small, the lesson he learned was important: you can create value, capture a portion of it, and use that money to change your situation.

He dreamed of attending the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), a prestigious engineering school that offered ambitious students a path out of poverty. But IITs required expensive tutoring to compete against millions of applicants for just 5,000 spots. His family couldn't afford it.

So Mr. Narwal enrolled at the second-tier Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology, paying for his education with student loans, which he sometimes had to use to pay off his father’s gambling debts rather than buy textbooks or a computer.

The decision to study computer science came from seeing Mark Zuckerberg on Indian television. At the time, Facebook was a global sensation, and young Sandeep thought, “I want to create my own Facebook.”

He now admits he was naive, but that naiveté combined with desperation created a unique kind of resolve.

After earning his engineering degree, Nairwal 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 and quickly paid off his student loans and his father's debt.

Nairwal held various positions at companies: as a software developer at Computer Sciences Corporation, a consultant at Deloitte, and chief technology officer at the e-commerce division of the Welspun Group. He excelled at his job, rose through the ranks, and earned a handsome salary.

But he could never shake the urge to start a business.

In Indian culture, buying a home before marriage is a source of pressure. A man without property has no future. Narwal felt this pressure deeply. He had a good job, which allowed him to take out a loan and settle down.

Hashita said something to him that changed everything: "You'll never be happy like this. I don't care about owning my own house; we can rent one."

In early 2016, Nairwal quit his job. He borrowed $15,000 (money he had planned to use for a future wedding) and founded Scope Weaver, an online platform for professional services. His idea was to standardize India's fragmented service sector and create a platform similar to Alibaba, but for Indian service providers rather than Chinese manufacturers.

The business was doing well and generating some revenue, but Nerval realized he was becoming a bottleneck. Customers wanted a face, someone to hold accountable when things went wrong. He was becoming just another service provider, except now he had to pay his employees.

The business couldn't scale, so a year later, he started looking for his next opportunity.

$800 Bitcoin Bet

Nerval first heard about Bitcoin in 2010. A friend suggested mining it together, but Nerval didn't have a laptop, so the conversation dropped.

In 2013, while pursuing his MBA, he encountered Bitcoin again. He tried to set up a mining rig, but his laptop was too slow. He tried to learn about Bitcoin, but after reading two paragraphs and seeing the phrase "no endorsement," he dismissed it as a scam and gave up.

In 2016, Bitcoin resurfaced. After realizing that Scope Weaver wasn't going to be the business he envisioned, Nerval began exploring opportunities in "deep tech." He considered artificial intelligence, but found the math beyond his capabilities.

Then he actually read the Bitcoin white paper.

“Oh, this is so important,” he thought. “This is the next revolution for humanity.”

With either conviction or recklessness, depending on your perspective, Nairwal took the $15,000 he had borrowed for his wedding and plowed it all into Bitcoin, which cost $800 each.

He admitted: "My FOMO (fear of missing out) was so strong at the time that even if I had done it a year later at $20,000, I would have done the same thing and lost everything."

But he didn't lose money. Bitcoin's price rose. More importantly, Nerval discovered Ethereum and its programmable smart contracts, a new computing platform that could run applications without centralized control.

He was completely fascinated.

In 2017, Narwal met Janti Kanani through an online Ethereum community. Kanani proposed solving Ethereum's scaling problem. At the time, the Ethereum network was swamped by congestion due to its own success. CryptoKitties had caused transaction fees to soar 600%.

Kanani and Narwal, along with co-founders Anurag Arjun and Mihajlo Bijelic, began developing Matic Network in early 2018. They raised $30,000 in seed funding, planning to build a working product first and then raise funds through an ICO.

This principled approach nearly cost them their lives. By the time they had a working testnet, the crypto market had collapsed. No one wanted to invest, especially in Indian projects. Two Indian crypto projects had been exposed as scams.

“No one believed that Indian founders could develop a protocol,” Narwal recalls.

The team operated on just $165,000 for its first two years. The founders only received a few thousand dollars in monthly salary. At times, their funds only lasted three months. Nerval remembers begging other cryptocurrency founders for $50,000 just to hang on for another quarter.

In 2018, on the eve of his wedding, his life hit rock bottom. A Chinese fund pledged a $500,000 investment. Two days before the wedding, Bitcoin plummeted from $6,000 to $3,000. The Chinese fund called and said, "We were planning to invest 100 Bitcoins. Now it's worth half, so we're not investing." To make matters worse, Matic's entire capital was in Bitcoin, and its value had also plummeted.

His wedding went ahead, and his friends celebrated for him. But Nerval knew that in three months, they might be out of business.

In early 2019, Binance approved Matic to raise $5.6 million through its Launchpad program. Due diligence took eight months, and this funding gave Matic some breathing room. However, final approval remained elusive. The team participated in countless hackathons, visiting developers one by one to explain their technology.

Growth was slow at first, but accelerated in 2021 as Ethereum’s high fees made even small transactions nearly impossible on the network, and developers flocked to Matic.

Initially 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, becoming Polygon, reflecting its transition from a single chain to a broader multi-chain ecosystem designed to provide diverse scaling solutions for Ethereum-compatible blockchains.

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

Developers flocked to Matic, and the total value locked in the network climbed to $10 billion at its peak.

Additionally, the native token transitioned from $MATIC (used to secure the original Polygon PoS chain) to $POL (designed to support the entire Polygon ecosystem), particularly with upcoming upgrades like the Staking Hub, which aim to consolidate and enhance cross-chain security and governance. This token migration was crucial, despite creating some temporary uncertainty for holders and fragmented liquidity during the transition.

Polygon Labs has also boldly shifted its strategic focus to zero-knowledge (ZK) Rollup, acquiring a dedicated ZK team to develop the zkEVM, a virtual machine capable of achieving execution capabilities comparable to Ethereum while offering the scalability benefits of ZK proofs. While Optimistic Rollup (OR) initially garnered attention due to its simpler design and earlier release, Polygon's focus 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 Ethereum's existing tooling, potentially positioning Polygon to take a leading position in future multi-chain architectures.

A turning point in the COVID-19 pandemic

In April 2021, the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic hit India hard. Hospitals were overcrowded and oxygen supplies were in short supply. Nerwal's entire family in India contracted COVID-19, and he was far away in Dubai, unable to do anything to help.

“It was clear at that point that not 100% of our family would make it,” he said. “Not everyone would survive.”

He tweeted that he couldn't sit idly by during this crisis. He created an encrypted multi-signature wallet to receive donations, hoping to raise $5 million. Within a few days, donations reached $10 million. Later, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin donated $1 billion worth of Shiba Inu coins.

The actual challenge is: how to liquidate $1 billion worth of memecoins without causing a market crash?

Nerval worked with market makers to slowly sell the tokens over several months. The Shiba Inu Coin community initially panicked, fearing a massive sell-off, but calmed down after Nerval pledged to proceed with caution. Ultimately, he netted $474 million, far exceeding Buterin's expectations.

The Crypto COVID-19 Relief Fund deployed $74 million to India during the emergency. Narwal returned $200 million to Buterin, who donated it to US biomedical research. The remaining $200 million was reserved for long-term projects focused on "blockchain impact."

Building Character in Adversity

By mid-2025, Polygon faced new challenges. The price of $POL had fallen over 80% from its peak. Competing second-layer solutions from Arbitrum and Optimism were taking market share. The company's expansion to 600 employees during its heyday led to cultural issues and organizational bloat.

Nairwal made difficult decisions. Two rounds of layoffs reduced the team to a more cohesive size. Several projects that had consumed months of engineering time were canceled because they no longer aligned with the strategy.

In June 2025, Nerval became the first CEO of the Polygon Foundation, consolidating leadership previously divided between the co-founders and the board of directors. He was the last of the four co-founders to step down from active roles.

“When crunch time comes, most founders can’t make the hard decisions,” he said in an interview. “Executing on a go-to-market strategy the hard way, firing people who don’t fit the strategy, abandoning projects in which they’ve invested significant time and emotional resources.”

When you cut back on projects you personally support or lay off people who believed in your vision during tough times, those decisions feel different.

Under Nerval's leadership, Polygon has refocused on AggLayer, an interoperability protocol designed to unify blockchain networks. Its 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 anywhere from 100,000 to 1 million chains,” Narwal predicts, “and all activity will move to these application chains.”

This is a bold claim. Whether it can be achieved depends on execution in the coming years.

Long-term game

Nerval thinks in decades, not quarters. When discussing Polygon's competition or the future of DePIN, he keeps mentioning 10- and 50-year timelines.

“If you give me 10 years, I can tell you 100% that this is the ultimate architecture for mass-market cryptocurrency,” he said of AggLayer. “But whether it’s Polygon’s version or someone else comes in and builds something similar, no one can predict.”

He believes deeply in the vision for blockchain infrastructure. Whether it’s implemented by Polygon or someone else is less important than seeing it built.

Through his Blockchain for Impact project, he is moving beyond emergency relief to “inspirational” philanthropy. He is planning an Indian Nobel Prize-like award to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.

“I want to get $2 trillion out of this $200 million BFI,” he explains, describing leverage that sounds absurd until you remember he turned $30,000 in seed money into a company that briefly had a market capitalization of $30 billion.

However, Polygon faces headwinds. Competitors such as Arbitrum and Base have captured market share, offering simpler user experiences and stronger support. Polygon's bridge technology remains complex, and the transition from MATIC to POL introduces uncertainty. The company's developer-centric focus hasn't translated into large-scale retail adoption like its competitors. Whether Nerval's long-term infrastructure investments will pay off depends on its execution in an increasingly crowded market.

What’s clear is that Sandeep Narwal has come further from his starting point than most people imagine. But whether the infrastructure he’s built can help others the way cryptocurrency helped him remains to be seen.

From a village without electricity to building the Internet of Value, the destination is uncertain and the journey continues.

That’s the story of the Polygon guys. See you in the next article.

Until then…keep calm and do your own research (DYOR).