From his humble beginnings growing up in a disadvantaged neighborhood on the east bank of the Yamuna River in Delhi, to spearheading the development of the multi-billion dollar Polygon blockchain, Sandeep Nailwal's journey is truly inspirational.

Slum Life

Now situated in the futuristic and air-conditioned cityscape of Dubai, he shares with Magazine that he was born in a farming village called Ramnagar in 1987, which was located in the foothills of the Himalayas, had no access to electricity.

At a young age, his parents made the decision to relocate to Delhi in search of better opportunities. Settling in underprivileged settlements on the eastern banks of the river, often referred to as Jamna-Paar, they faced numerous challenges.

Nailwal compares the living conditions to the Bronx in New York, describing it as a tier-three area. Even to this day, the area retains a ghetto-like ambiance.

He remembers lots of cows roaming the roads and illegal guns, though he says knives were the weapon of choice. "When stuff needs to be done, then knife is the best tool,"he says of the attitude.

Nailwal didn't attend school until he was five. On the other hand, other children were accepted in schools as young as two and a half, and this was due to his parents not knowing any better, according to him.

"My father and mother both were kind of like illiterate people; they did not even realize that the kid should be sent to a school after three years or whatever. So, somebody in my area who used to have a small school said: 'Why is your kid not going to school?' And then I started going to school.”

Stepping Up

"My father became an alcoholic and got into gambling. So, he would make like $80 to $90 a month, and out of that, generally many times, he would lose all of it," says Nailwal. As a result, the family was often behind on paying the school's monthly fees, "so they will make you stand outside, and it's basically a very traumatic experience as a kid.”

During his formative years, Nailwal encountered experiences that shaped his understanding of the kind of man he aspired not to become. Now, as the head of his own family and a father to his young child Adi, Nailwal's journey takes on a profound meaning.

Fatherhood has prompted him to reflect on his own upbringing and has sparked a strong desire to improve upon it. Nailwal also reveals that he was thrust into a paternal caring role at the tender age of 10, when he found himself responsible for his baby brother's well-being.

"I would say in a way, my first son is my own brother," he says, his voice becoming thick with emotion. "So, basically, when he was very young, he met with an accident at that point in time. So, I would say that's where my childhood ended basically because I had to take care of him.”

Young Entrepreneur

Nailwal's first step into entrepreneurship was when was just a teenager, selling pens from a friend's shop at a decent markup in school and tutoring other students. After graduation, Nailwal hoped to take an insanely competitive engineering exam for the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) but he couldn't afford the extra tuition.

Subsequently, he ended up getting accepted into the tier-two MAIT college in Delhi and took out a loan to put himself through a computer science and engineering degree.

Supremely ambitious and possibly a tad overconfident, he saw his future going down two possible paths based on two notable role models: Either join a company and work his way up to become "global CEO" like PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi or start up a revolutionary internet business like Mark Zuckerberg did with Facebook.

"I was inspired by all this hype around Facebook in 2004, 2005," he says, recalling the intense media coverage of Zuckerberg in India at the time. "I said to myself — and it was very stupid at that time — like I want to build my own Facebook. That's why I chose computer science.”

During his university degree, Nailwal showcased his exceptional skills in data analysis while working on electorate analysis projects for the regional BJP party, which is now India's ruling party. After a brief stint in the workforce, he decided to pursue higher education and enrolled at the esteemed National Institute for Training in Industrial Engineering, now known as the Indian Institute of Management, where he crossed paths with his future wife, Harshita Singh.

Although a highly regarded employee at Deloitte, and then Welspun textiles, where he was quickly promoted to head of technology for e-commerce, Nailwal never stopped working on his own projects. He’d spend all day at work, then go home and work on projects like a GPS-based system to optimize cargo vehicle deliveries or a B2B service platform for project management.

Nailwal says he felt he wasn't able to pursue a startup full-time, as he felt cultural pressure and a responsibility to get his family out of the one-bedroom rental they were in and into their own home. But nobody would give a home loan to a 27-year-old with intermittent income from a fledgling business.

In his last month of work, he borrowed $15,000 so he could afford to pay for a wedding, and then started to work on the B2B services marketplace full time, which he ran for a year until he realized it it would never achieve the ambitious scale he envisioned.

Impact of Bitcoin

Nailwan did not stop there as he looked to get into "deep tech," first considering then abandoning AI as it was beyond his mathematical abilities. Bitcoin was starting to get some press at that time due to the upcoming halving in 2016.

Nailwal had heard about Bitcoin back in 2013 but initially wrote it off as "some sort of Ponzi scheme.”After discovering it had lasted the distance, he thought it worthy of further investigation. Reading the "beautifully written" white paper, he realized:

"Oh, this is big -this is the next revolution of humanity."

Since his awakening, he was desperate to get his "skin in the game" and, over the next three months, tipped the $15,000 wedding loan into Bitcoin at $800 a piece. Looking back, he said it was an insanely risky move given his finances at the time.

"The level of FOMO I had, it would have been exactly the same if I was one year late. And I would have done the same thing at $20,000. Yeah, and I would have lost all that money, and it would have been really, really problematic for me.”

But as a builder, he wanted blockchain to be about more than just payments, which led him to Ethereums full programmability. "I was like this is the thing, this is the thing I want," he says.

Nailwal then founded a blockchain services startup called Scope Weaver in 2016 and became well-known as a moderator on local Ethereum forums. That's where he met a "hardcore programmer" named Jaynti “JD” Kanan, who kept suggesting he spend his $400,000 Bitcoin stash investing in his startup ideas.

Initially, Nailwal wasn't keen, but then Ethereum started to struggle with its own popularity during the 2017 bullrun, most notably after a 600% increase in transaction fees from CryptoKitties which made the blockchain all but unusable.

Kanan suggested they work on fixing Ethereum’s scaling problems by developing the layer-2 Plasma technology, which helped offload transactions to faster and less crowded side chains. Nailwal agreed and helped raise $30,000 in seed funding to build a product, with Anurag Arju joining as another co-founder and Matic Network officially launching in early 2018.

Despite limited funding, the Matic Network survived for its first two years on $165,000 of total funding.

Struggles of Mactic Network

Having watched endless projects raise millions with vaporware initial coin offerings, the team was determined not to launch a token sale until they had a product. They would come to regret this decision bitterly. Launching directly into the great crypto market crash of early 2018, the ICO market was strong for a few months after but petered out by the time their runway was growing short.

"We kind of ignored that opportunity," he says. "Which was really, really painful later on. We had this huge opportunity of raising $10 million. We left it; we did not do it. And now we have no money to build. I remember that one time I had to almost beg one of the other founders of one project from India to grant us $50,000 so that we can run for three more months.”

Before his wedding, Nailwal traveled to pitch to a Chinese fund that seemed keen to invest $500,000 in the struggling project. He recalls being delighted two days before his marriage, with a house full of guests, that everything was going to be OK.

"Everybody's happy, and I'm also content that we will get $500,000 now (for Matic Network), and suddenly, Bitcoin goes from $6,000 to $3,000. That fund after that simply said, 'No, we will not invest now because we were going to invest 100 BTC; now the value is half, so we are not investing.'"

Even worse, the project's treasury was still in Bitcoin and had also halved in value.

"That was a very traumatic experience for me around that point because I should not have speculated on this money, which is the company's Treasury," he says, meaning that he should have cashed out or turned it into stablecoins.

"So, I was really angry at myself, and this thing went away. By that time, we had like seven, eight, 10 people [in Matic]. They are also [attending] my marriage, and we are enjoying it and all that but deep down, I know that 'shit, we might not have this team in the next two, three months.'"

Binance is Actually Dilligent

In 2018 and 2019, there was an opportunity to raise funds on Binance Launchpad through an initial exchange offering. Nailwal believes that Binance's due diligence was possibly too diligent, despite the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission's concerns about the exchange's verification process.

"Nobody believed that there could be a protocol coming from Indian co-founders. And there were two or three projects which turned out to be scams, and everybody was very wary," he says. Matic ended up going through eight months of evaluation before getting the nod to raise $5.6 million in $300 lots to the winners of a ballot.

Nailwal says, "At that point in time, $5 million was a very good amount. If Binance had said, 'You can raise $1.5 million or $1 million,' we would even settle for that because we had a struggle for survival. But once we launched on Binance, things became much better.”

This marked a significant turning point for Matic, as it not only weathered the market crash of 2020 but also experienced remarkable growth. At the end of that year, Matic had fewer than 1,000 daily users, and by October 2021, it surpassed Ethereum in terms of user numbers, boasting 550,000 users.

It also outperformed Ethereum in transaction volume and as part of its rebranding efforts, Matic changed its name to Polygon and witnessed an astonishing surge in market capitalization. Starting the year with a market cap of $87 million, Polygon's value grew exponentially, reaching nearly $19 billion by the end of 2021.

Following this success, Nailwal emerged as one of the most affluent and accomplished individuals in the cryptocurrency industry. However, his ambitions and aspirations remained insatiable.

"Being in top 10, top 15 projects brings no satisfaction to me. It's very clear in my mind that I want Polygon to have that kind of impact which Ethereum and Bitcoin have had.”