I Want To Put India On World Blockchain Map: Polygon Cofounder Sandeep Nailwal

Polygon, an Indian cryptocurrency platform that aims to provide faster and cheaper transactions on the Ethereum blockchain, has a strong developer ecosystem from the country. According to Sandeep Nailwal, Cofounder at Polygon, his aim is now to put India on the world blockchain map amid the uncertainties around crypto regulation.

“I have a personal mission to put India on the blockchain map. In the past, I gave small grants to blockchain and crypto startup founders in India to help them build and scale. I am quite bullish on them,” Nailwal told Nitin Sharma, General Partner and Global Blockchain Lead at Antler, at The Crypto Summit by Inc42 Plus and CoinSwitch Kuber. 

“We didn’t want to build an air castle that nobody uses, so we built developer-friendly systems and invested in education. We wanted developers to adopt us and not just create a fancy platform,” he added.

Today, Polygon’s native token Matic has crossed a market cap of over $10 Bn and is among the top 20 crypto coins globally. Polygon is a layer 2 scaling project created by Jaynti Kanani, Nailwal, Anurag Arjun, and Mihailo Bjelic in 2017. It was created to function as an alternative to Ethereum’s blockchain or to create ‘sidechains’ along Ethereum’s network to overcome some of its issues. 

According to Nailwal, Polygon is not only focused on Defi but is also going high on gaming and NFTs (non-fungible tokens).

“There are nearly 495 Difi and 1,000 NFT (non-fungible tokens) projects going on our platform. If 10 blockchain-based games are currently being developed around, 5-6 will surely be on the Polygon platform,” he informed.

On questions on how he navigated crypto uncertainties in India, he said: “We ensured that there was no crypto element in the Indian entity, because we knew that the government might come after this sector. Amid the uncertainties in India, We kept the Indian entity and the Singapore entity separate; we paid developers in India in INR and not tokens”.

“We are a global company with operations in the US, India, the UAE and Switzerland. Still, a lot of engineering talent is coming from India. We fill leadership roles from India who then go on to hiring more talented engineers from India,” he noted.

US-based investor and entrepreneur Mark Cuban recently invested an undisclosed amount in Polygon. Polygon’s native token Matic has crossed a market cap of over $10 Bn and is among the top 20 crypto coins globally.

Polygon claims adoption across 250+ apps, almost 76 Mn transactions and almost 790,000 unique users. 

“For me, Layer 1 of Blockchain is like a single-decker bus and less people can onboard it. Layer 2 which we provide is like a double-decker bus that can accommodate more developers on decentralised Ethereum. The user activity is very organic on Polygon and several of them keep coming back on our platform to build new projects,” Nailwal said.