Sandeep Nailwal: From the Delhi Slums to Building Polygon

By Thejaswini, Source: Token Dispatch

Foreword

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

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

The family lived in a settlement along the Yamuna River in Delhi, an area disparagingly called “Jamna-Paar” by locals, which roughly means “across the river.” But it wasn’t meant as a compliment.

As a child, Sandeep would stand outside the classroom because his parents hadn’t paid their tuition and he couldn’t get in. 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, Narwal runs Polygon, a blockchain infrastructure company that processes millions of transactions daily and partners 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 it wasn't always an easy road, and the scars of his early years shaped every decision he made. Sandeep Nailwal was born in 1987 in Ramnagar, a rural village without electricity, nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas. His parents, both illiterate when they married, moved to Delhi when he was four, seeking opportunities they couldn't find in their village. Instead, they found slums. The settlements on the east bank of the Yamuna River were crowded, squalid, and often violent. Illegal guns and knives were the tools of choice for settling disputes. His family squeezed into whatever shelter they could afford, moving frequently as their circumstances changed. His parents had no understanding of education. They didn't know that children could start school at just three or four. Sandeep didn't start 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 about the shame of going hungry or wearing tattered clothes. It also includes the shame of standing outside the classroom while your father loses all his tuition. It also includes watching your mother struggle to keep the family fed while battling an alcoholic husband. It's about learning at a young age that no one is coming to save you. A sixth-grade entrepreneur Sandeep's response to poverty was work. 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 markup. While the amount was small, the lesson he learned was significant: you can create value, capture a portion of it, and use the money to change your circumstances. 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, Narwal enrolled at the second-tier Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology, relying on student loans to pay for his education. Sometimes, he had to use the loans to pay off his father's gambling debts instead of buying textbooks or a computer. His decision to study computer science stemmed from watching Mark Zuckerberg on Indian television. Facebook was a global sensation, and young Sandeep thought, "I want to create my own Facebook." He now admits that he was naive. But that combination of naiveté and desperation fostered a unique determination. After earning an 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, quickly paying off his student loans and his father's debts. Nairwal held various positions: as a software developer at Computer Sciences Corporation, as a consultant at Deloitte, and as CTO of the e-commerce division of the Welspun Group. He excelled at his job, rising through the ranks and earning a healthy income. But he couldn't shake the entrepreneurial urge. In Indian culture, there's pressure to buy a house before marriage. A man without property has no future. Nairwal felt this pressure deeply. He had a good job, could get a loan to buy a house, and could settle down. Harshita said something that changed everything: "You'll never be happy like this. I don't care about owning my own house; we can rent." In early 2016, Nairwal quit his job. He borrowed $15,000 (money he had originally planned to use for a future wedding) and founded Scope Weaver, an online platform for professional services. His vision was to standardize India's fragmented service sector, creating a platform similar to Alibaba, but for Indian service providers rather than Chinese manufacturers. The company was doing well and generating some revenue, but Nairwal realized he was becoming a bottleneck. Clients wanted a positive response, 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 wasn't scalable, and a year later, he began looking for his next opportunity. An $800 Bitcoin Bet Nerval first heard about Bitcoin in 2010. A friend suggested mining together, but Nerval didn't have a laptop, so the conversation ended there. He encountered Bitcoin again in 2013 while pursuing his MBA. 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 "no endorsement," he dismissed it as a scam and gave up. In 2016, Bitcoin resurfaced. After realizing Scope Weaver wouldn't 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 humanity's next revolution." Acting with conviction or recklessness, depending on your perspective, Nerval took the $15,000 he'd borrowed for his wedding and plowed it all into Bitcoin, which was trading at $800 a coin. "My FOMO (fear of missing out) was so intense," he admits. "Even a year later, I would have done the same thing at $20,000 and lost everything." But he didn't. The price of Bitcoin rose. More importantly, Nerval discovered Ethereum and its programmable smart contracts. It was a new computing platform that could run applications without centralized control. He was hooked. 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 suffering from congestion due to its own success. CryptoKitties caused transaction fees to soar by 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 led to their downfall. By the time they had a working testnet, the crypto market had collapsed. No one wanted to invest, especially in Indian projects, which had been exposed as scams. "No one believed Indian founders could build a protocol," Narwal recalls. The team operated on just $165,000 for the first two years. The founders received monthly salaries of just a few thousand dollars. At times, they only had enough funding to last three months. Narwal 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 going to invest 100 Bitcoins. Now it's worth half, so we're not investing." To make matters worse, Matic's funding was entirely in Bitcoin, and its value had also plummeted. His wedding went on as planned. Friends celebrated for him. But Nerval knew they might be out of business in three months. In early 2019, Binance approved Matic to raise $5.6 million through its Launchpad program. Due diligence took eight months. The funding gave Matic some breathing room. But 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. Developers flocked to Matic. Initially launched as Matic Network, it was a single-chain scaling solution running as a sidechain, combining Plasma and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanisms. In 2021, Matic Network underwent a major rebrand, changing its name to 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, although it introduced some temporary uncertainty for holders and fragmented liquidity during the transition. Polygon Labs has also boldly shifted its strategic focus towards zero-knowledge (ZK) Rollup, acquiring a dedicated ZK team to develop the zkEVM, a virtual machine capable of achieving execution power 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. 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 was infected with the coronavirus, 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 in total. Within days, donations reached $10 million. Later, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin donated $1 billion worth of Shiba Inu coins. The practical challenge was: how to liquidate $1 billion worth of memecoins without causing a market crash? Narwal worked with market makers to slowly sell them over several months. The Shiba Inucoin community initially panicked, fearing a massive sell-off, but Narwal calmed down after promising careful execution. Ultimately, he netted $474 million, far exceeding Buterin's expectations. The Crypto COVID-19 Relief Fund deployed $74 million to India in emergency measures. Nerval 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 Through 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 the boom years had led to cultural issues and organizational bloat. Nerval made difficult decisions. Two rounds of layoffs streamlined the team to a more cohesive size. Several projects, which 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 board members. Three of the four co-founders had retired from active roles, leaving him as the last remaining. "When crunch time comes, most founders can't make the hard decisions," he said in an interview. "Execute market strategies the hard way, fire people who don't fit the strategy, abandon projects you've invested a lot of time and emotional resources in." These decisions feel different when you cut back on projects you personally support or lay off people who believed in your vision during tough times. Under Nerval's full leadership, Polygon 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 100,000 to 1 million chains,” Narwal predicts, “and all the activity will move to these application chains.” It’s a bold claim. Whether it can be achieved depends on execution in the coming years. The Long Game Narwal thinks in decades, not quarters. When discussing Polygon’s competition or the future of DePIN, he keeps mentioning 10-year and 50-year timelines. “If you give me 10 years, I can tell you 100% that this is the ultimate architecture for cryptocurrency to go mass market,” he says of AggLayer. “But whether it’s Polygon’s version, or someone else comes along and builds something similar, no one can predict.” He believes deeply in the vision for blockchain infrastructure. Whether it’s realized by Polygon or someone else is far less important than seeing it built. Through Blockchain for Impact, he’s shifting from emergency relief to “inspirational” philanthropy. He’s planning an award, akin to India’s Nobel Prize, to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers. “I want to get $2 trillion out of this $200 million BFI,” he explains, describing a level of leverage that 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 carved out more 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 pitch hasn't yet translated into large-scale retail adoption, as has its competitors. Whether Narwal's long-term infrastructure investments will pay off depends on its execution in an increasingly crowded market. What is certain is that Sandeep Narwal has come a long way from his starting point, far beyond most people's imagination. 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.