SANDEEP NAILWAL

Nailwal grew up poor in Delhi. His childhood basically ended at 10 when his brother had a serious accident and his father struggled with addiction.

He clawed his way through engineering school and an MBA from NITIE in Mumbai. Then came the boring corporate years.

Software work, a stint at Deloitte, and a CTO role running e-commerce for the Welspun Group. In 2016 he read the Ethereum white paper and could not stop thinking about it.

He quit, started an online services marketplace called Scope Weaver, then co-founded Matic Network in 2017 to fix Ethereum's biggest problem. Speed.

Matic rebranded to Polygon in 2020 and exploded.

Polygon is the big one. It started as a way to make Ethereum faster and cheaper, and grew into a whole family of scaling tools used by everyone from Starbucks to Nike.

Nailwal co-founded it with Jaynti Kanani and Anurag Arjun in 2017. Mihailo Bjelic joined later.

Before crypto he ran e-commerce tech at Welspun and built a small services marketplace called Scope Weaver. He also invests in early crypto startups and funds Indian builders.

And he runs philanthropy through the Crypto Covid Relief Fund he set up during India's 2021 COVID wave.

Nailwal invests like a builder, not a trader. He backs the infrastructure and the people building it, not the hot token of the week.

His whole thesis is that crypto only matters if regular people actually use it. He once said the only metric he cares about is daily active users.

So he bets on things that could pull in the next hundred million people, not things that pump for a weekend. Think of him as someone who owns the road, not the cars racing on it.

Polygon, obviously. The MATIC token sold on Binance Launchpad in 2019 at around $0.00263.

By the 2021 bull run it hit roughly $2.92. That is more than a 1,000x.

At its peak Polygon was worth well over $10 billion and became one of the most-used networks in crypto, with big brands building on it. Nailwal went from a borrowed $15,000 bet to co-owning all of that.

And he did it as an Indian founder in a space that, in his words, nobody believed could produce a protocol from Indian co-founders.

Trying to do everything at once. After the 2021 boom, Polygon spent aggressively to buy up scaling teams, including the Hermez zk-rollup project for around $250 million in MATIC.

It chased many roadmaps at the same time. Critics say that scattered focus and let rivals like Arbitrum and Optimism grab ground in the Ethereum scaling race.

Polygon is still huge. But the sprawl is a real lesson.

Sometimes doing five things well beats doing fifteen things at once.

Conviction over comfort. Nailwal reads something, decides it is the future, and goes all in.

He said reading the Bitcoin white paper felt like watching the next revolution of humanity begin. He thinks in decades, not quarters.

He once claimed that if you gave him 10 years, he could tell you exactly what the endgame architecture of crypto looks like. He also believes wealth built this fast comes with a duty to give it back, which is why he moved so hard during India's COVID crisis.

Nailwal rarely puts his personal life on display. What is public is where he came from.

He grew up in Delhi's poorer settlements, the kind of place people call Jamna-Paar. Money was so tight that as a boy he was once turned away from school over unpaid fees.

When his younger brother was badly hurt and his father struggled, Sandeep became the one who had to hold things together. That origin story shapes everything he does now, especially the giving.

He studied computer science at the Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology in Delhi, then earned an MBA from the National Institute of Industrial Engineering in Mumbai. The engineering background is why he can talk protocol design with the best developers.

The MBA is why he can also raise money and run a company. That combination is rarer than it sounds in crypto.

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