From his childhood living in a ghetto on the east bank of the Yamuna River in Delhi to starting the $6 billion Polygon Blockchain, Sandeep Nilwal has an incredible rags-to-riches story.
Now happily settled in the futuristic, air-conditioned urban landscape of Dubai, he told the magazine that he was born in 1987 in an unelectrified farming village in the foothills of the Himalayas called Ramnagar.
His parents married when he was a teenager and Nilwal moved to Delhi to try his luck when he was just four years old. They wound up in slums on the east bank of the river, often called Jamna-par.
“Imagine the Bronx in New York,” Nilwal said. “It was like step-three. Even now when you go there is a very ghetto-ish environment.
He remembers many cows roaming the streets and illegal guns, but he says the knife was the weapon of choice.
Nailwal did not go to school until he was five years old, in a country and time where most schools accepted children under the age of two and a half, mainly because his parents did not know any more.
“Both my father and mother were illiterate. They didn't even realize that the child had to be sent to school after three years. So, a guy who lived in a small school in my neighborhood said, ‘Why doesn't your child go to school?' And then I started going to school.
In Dubai, he waved in an ordinary-sized classroom behind him, crammed with 20 children “almost the same size” as the school. Home life was not much better.
“My father became an alcoholic and started gambling. So, he would earn $80 to $90 a month, and out of that, generally, he would lose it all. As a result, the family often fell behind in paying the school's monthly fees, “so they make you stand out, and it's basically a horrible experience as a child.”
Also Read: ZK-rollups are the ‘endgame' for blockchains scaling: Polygon Miden founder
Nilwal's experiences in his formative years helped him to understand the person who did not want to be such a person and to be determined to succeed. Now the manager of his own family, he says being a father to a little boy named Addie has made him reflect on his hopes of doing things better than his father. But the conversation takes a surprising turn when Nelwal reveals that he stepped into the role of father at the tender age of 10, taking care of his baby brother.
“In a way, my firstborn is my own brother,” he said, his voice strained with emotion. “So, basically, at a very young age, he had an accident at that time. So basically I say my childhood is over because I have to take care of him.
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Nilwal started his career as a teenager, selling pens from a friend's shop, doing well in school and tutoring other students. After graduation, he hoped to take the insanely competitive engineering exam for the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), but he couldn't afford the extra tuition he needed to make it big among “1 million students fighting for about 5,000 seats.”
He eventually got accepted into a tier-two MAIT college in Delhi and took out a loan to pursue a degree in computer science and engineering.
Extremely ambitious and perhaps overconfident, he saw his future as coming down two paths based on two main role models: join a company and work his way up to become a “global CEO” like PepsiCo's Indra Noi, or start a revolutionary Internet business like Mark Zuckerberg. As he did on Facebook.
“In 2004, 2005, I was inspired by all this buzz around Facebook,” he recalls of Zuckerberg's intense media coverage in India at the time. “I said to myself – and it was very stupid at the time – I want to build my own Facebook. That's why I chose computer science.”
His expertise in data analysis during his university degree saw him work on voter analysis for the regional BJP party – now India's ruling party. After a brief stint in the workforce after university, he returned to the National Institute for Training in Industrial Engineering (now the Indian Institute of Management) to earn an MBA and met his wife, Harshita Singh.
Although he was a highly regarded employee at Deloitte and then Welspun Textiles and quickly rose to head of e-commerce technology, Nilwal never stopped working on his own projects. He spends all day at work, then goes home and works on projects like a GPS-based system for cargo vehicle deliveries or a B2B service platform for project management.
Nelwal says he felt unable to pursue a full-time career as a start-up because he felt the pressure of culture and the responsibility to move his family out of their one-bedroom rental and into their own home. And no one would give a home loan to a 27-year-old with a steady income from a startup business.
But Harshita said one day, “You will never be happy this way,” he recalls. She said, ‘I don't care about my house; We can rent later. This was a heavy burden taken away from me.
In his last month of work, he borrowed $15,000 to pay for a wedding one day, then started working full-time on a B2B services marketplace.He ran for a year until he realized he would never make it. The way he wants.
Bitcoin revolution
Instead, he wanted to get into “deep tech,” initially abandoning AI because it was beyond his math skills. Due to the upcoming halving in 2016, Bitcoin started getting some press at that time.
Nilwal had heard about Bitcoin in 2013 but initially wrote it off as “some Ponzi scheme”. After realizing that he had kept his distance, he thought it deserved further investigation. Reading the “beautifully written” white paper, he realized:
Oh, this is big – this is the next revolution of mankind.
Turns out, he really wanted to get “skin in the game”, and in the next three months, he gave a $ 15,000 wedding loan to Bitcoin for $ 800. In retrospect, it was a very risky move given the finances of the time.
“The level of FOMO I had would have been the same if I had delayed a year. And I would do the same for $20,000. Yes, and I would have lost all that money, and it would have been a real problem for me.
But as a developer, he wanted the blockchain to be more than just payments, which led to the full Ethereum program. “That's the way it is, that's what I want,” he said.
Throwing himself into the space, Nilwal founded a blockchain service startup called Scope Weaver in 2016 and became famous as a moderator on local Ethereum forums. That's when he met a “hardcore programmer” named Genty “JD” Kanan, who was using his $400,000 Bitcoin stash to invest in his startup ideas.
At first, Nilewal wasn't enthusiastic, but Ethereum began to struggle with its own popularity during the 2017 bullrun, especially after a 600% increase in transaction fees from CryptoKitties made the blockchain obsolete.
Also Read: Ethereum Is Eating The World – ‘All You Need Is The Internet'
Kanan proposed in August to fix Ethereum's scaling problems by developing the layer-2 plasma technology proposed by Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Pon, which helped to download transactions faster and on congested sidechains. Nilwal agreed and raised $30,000 in seed funding to build the product, with Anurag Arju as another co-founder, and Matic Network officially launched in early 2018. The project was engulfed by the smell of greasy cloth. In total, Matic Networks survived the first two years with $165,000 in total funding.
Thursday is #throwback!
Back in August 2018, we got into an insightful conversation with Sandeep Nailwal, CEO of Polygon Labs, who foresaw the potential of $MATIC in its infancy.
Sandeep has shown foresight as he leads talks on crypto interoperability… pic.twitter.com/k2hGBmn2wO
— Token Metrics (@tokenmetricsinc) September 14, 2023
Matic Network is almost dead
After watching endless projects raise millions through Steam's initial coin offerings, the team decided not to launch a token sale until it was in production.
They regretted this decision. In the year Starting directly into the great crypto market crash at the beginning of 2018, the ICO market was strong after a few months, but their runway was short-lived.
“We overlooked this opportunity,” he said. “It was really painful afterwards.”
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“We had a great opportunity to raise $10 million. We gave it up; we didn't do it. And now we have no money to build. I remember one time we begged one of the founders of a project from India to give us $50,000 so we could compete for three more months.
Shortly before his marriage, Nilwal traveled to a Chinese fund that was interested in investing $500,000 in a wrestling project. Two days before the wedding, he recalls a house full of guests, excited that everything would be fine.
“Everybody's happy, and I'm satisfied that now we'll get $500,000 (for Matic Network) and suddenly Bitcoin goes from $6,000 to $3,000. After that, that fund simply says, ‘No, we're not going to invest now because we're going to invest 100 BTC. Now it's half the price, so we're not investing.'”
To make matters worse, the project's treasury was still in bitcoin and its value had halved.
“It was a terrible thing for me around that point, because I didn't have to guess about this money, which is the treasury of the company,” he said, which means that he had to withdraw money or convert it to a stable coin.
“So, I was really mad at myself, and this thing went away. We had like seven, eight, 10 people at that time. [in Matic]. And they are. [attending] My marriage, and we're enjoying it, and I know, except deep down, I'm like, ‘Funny, we might not have this team in the next two, three months.'
Binance is really diligent.
In the year In late 2018 and early 2019, an opportunity arose to raise funds through an initial exchange offering on Binance Launchpad. While the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission thinks Binance is a bunch of cattle that accepts any old bus pass on Know Your Customer authentication, Nilwal says the exchange's due diligence was very diligent.
“Nobody believed there could be a protocol from Indian co-founders. And two or three projects turned out to be scams, and everyone was very wary,” he says. Matich went through an eight-month evaluation period to raise $5.6 million in $300 lottery tickets for the lottery winners.
“At that time, $5 million was a very good amount,” says Nilwal.
“If Binance had said, ‘You can raise $1.5 million or $1 million,' we would have agreed to that because we were fighting for survival. But once we started on Binance, things got a lot better.
That's a big change for Matich, which survived the 2020 pandemic market crash and grew by less than 1,000 daily users, surpassing Ethereum's user base of 550,000 in October 2021. . Rebranded as Polygon, It has grown from a market value of $87 million at the beginning of 2021 to $19 billion by the end of the year.
Nailwal was now one of the richest and most successful people in the cryptocurrency industry. But he wasn't satisfied, by a long shot.
“Being in the top 10, top 15 projects does not give me satisfaction. It's very clear in my mind that I want Polygon to have the impact that Ethereum and Bitcoin have created.
Check out part two, which tells the story of Polygon, one of the main players in the space, and Nelwal's plans to make it a top-3 project.
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Andrew Fenton
Based in Melbourne, Andrew Fenton is a journalist and editor covering cryptocurrency and blockchain. He has worked as a film journalist for News Corp Australia, SA Wind and national entertainment writer for Melbourne Weekly.
Follow the author @andrewfenton
