“What do we need to get these next 100 million, 200 or maybe a billion users in Web3? We see the demand. The demand is there right now. Infrastructurally, we are not ready, and that is what Polygon is working on.”

Biography:

Sandeep Nailwal is the co-founder and chief operating officer of Polygon, formerly known as Matic Network. Based in Delhi, Nailwal has spent much of his professional life as a software developer and began his IT career in 2010 as a software engineer at Computer Sciences Corporation. In 2014, he joined Deloitte as a consultant and worked on management consulting and program management initiatives. In the two years following, Nailwal worked as the chief technology and supply chain officer for Welspun Group, a multinational conglomerate based in Mumbai. Later, in March 2016, he launched ScopeWeaver but soon became interested in AI and blockchain technology. In 2017, Nailwal co-founded Polygon, where he continues to serve as chief operating officer.

Prior to his work in the emerging technologies sector, he completed his MBA in finance and supply chain management from the National Institute of Industrial Engineering in India. In 2021, a year after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sandeep announced his intentions to launch a treatment effort in his home country. Reports show that the India Covid Crypto Relief Fund raised more than $2.2 million in April 2021 with the help of the crypto community.

Nailwal’s 2022:

Polygon weathered the storm of the ongoing crypto bear market in 2022. In a company-authored blog post, it marked it as a “breakout year.” It started off with an all-time high of just short of 2 million NFTs sold on the platform. Just a month later, the platform raised $450 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital India and other prominent investors such as SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Galaxy Digital, Tiger Global Management and Republic Capital. Throughout the year, around 778,000 smart contracts were deployed on the network.

However, one of the most important developments out of the Polygon ecosystem was its public commitment to going carbon neutral in 2022. The initial announcement came in April, during which the network also pledged $20 million to offset its carbon footprint and foster an industrywide movement. The crypto industry has been battered with backlash regarding its energy consumption. According to data from its website, ​​60,953 tons of carbon were eliminated from the Polygon network’s annual CO2 footprint by the Ethereum Merge. 

Around the same time, Polygon launched its “Supernet chains,” which Sandeep said was an effort to boost the protocol’s goal of bringing mass adoption to Web3. Polygon secured several notable collaborations and partnerships in 2022, including with Adobe, Disney, Meta, the NFL, Nubank and Starbucks. Reddit’s digital collectibles were also made possible via the Polygon network. Robinhood also selected Polygon as its network of choice for the launch of its new Web3 wallet. In August, as part of the mass adoption effort, Nailwal raised $50 million for his Web3 fund, Symbolic Capital, which focuses heavily on investing in Web3, gaming and NFTs.

Nailwal’s 2023:

Polygon and, by extension, Nailwal had an action-packed 2022 on top of all the chaos that ensued in the market. 2023 will likely be similar in terms of development. As the network said in a blog post, “2023 is all about building.” One thing Polygon will continue building in 2023 is zero-knowledge rollups, a DeFi scaling solution where multiple off-chain transactions are combined into one on-chain transaction. On Polygon, this helps to remove the need to verify individual transactions via miners on the Ethereum mainnet. The Polygon zkEVM, a product that combines the scalability of zero-knowledge proofs with Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility, is targeted to release to the mainnet in Q1. 

Additionally, Nailwal’s accelerator program has already wrapped up its first cohort, which featured 13 graduating companies in the DeFi, gaming and infrastructure sectors of the crypto industry. Some of those companies included Blinkmoon, Meta Apes, Cubist and Davos Protocol. In its annual report, Polygon said it would place a significant emphasis on supporting builders on the network this year: “We are ready to usher in the exponential growth of the Polygon ecosystem in 2023.” While 2022 may have been the “breakout” year for Polygon, this next year has a comparable forecast.