Interview with the founder of Polygon: Escaping poverty and building a $30 billion crypto company

Source: "When Shift Happens" , YouTube

Compiled by: Felix, PANews

Starting from humble beginnings working in a family's storeroom, Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal has built a $30 billion blockchain company. Working 18-hour days, Nailwal is dedicated to transforming Polygon into a global payment platform for companies like Stripe. The following is an excerpt from an interview on the podcast "When Shift Happens," compiled by PANews.

Host: Your team says you always reply instantly, no matter what time of day. Do you get very little sleep?

Sandeep: Yes, I mean, I do sleep, but my mind is always on Polygon, online 24/7.

Host: What is your usual daily routine like?

Sandeep: My sleep schedule is pretty erratic. I have a three-and-a-half-year-old son, and my work hours follow US time, so I don't really start working until after 2 PM, and I work until 11 or 12 at night, and then I don't go to sleep until 2 or 2:30 AM. Sometimes my son wakes up at 7 or 7:30 AM, so I get up to play with him. So I often only get 4 or 5 hours of sleep.

Host: I interviewed Tether CEO Paolo before. He said that he has only slept 5 hours a night for the past 11 years, and he has to wake up every hour to check the notifications.

Sandeep: Paolo is heading a much bigger "ship." I'm very close to him; he's an incredibly talented and incredibly passionate person. He's completely immersed in his vision. I've never seen a team as small as Tether, yet everyone is so unwavering in their belief in the spirit of blockchain. They genuinely want a personal, sovereign monetary system. So I'm not surprised at all by their current success.

Host: What do you consider your mission to be?

Sandeep: My mission is what I've always said: sovereign individual. Many people in the crypto space want to build a monetary system. This should be a free, personal monetary system where individuals can dispose of their wealth as they please. What I really want is complete individual sovereignty: not just money. Money is actually a product of civilization, and civilization is built on "controlled violence," that is, on the level of law and order. Now we're working on global currencies, Bitcoin… but to achieve a truly borderless world, money alone isn't enough; you also need to decentralize the layer of "controlled violence."

This sounds like science fiction, but it's actually becoming a reality. In the future, we could have drones and robotic police forces, controlled by a completely decentralized AI, not by any single company or government. Imagine a 'super brain' controlled by all of humanity, with its own constitution dedicated to protecting everyone's safety. This would truly break down national borders, allowing individuals to achieve genuine freedom. That's why I co-founded Sentient AI. The other three co-founders are working on it full-time; I'm too busy at Polygon. But this is my deepest goal: to align AI with human interests, ultimately achieving external governance and control.

It sounds like science fiction, but I'll invest more once Polygon and the entire crypto industry become more stable. Crypto is only just entering a truly practical phase. DeFi is a practical sector, but 70-80% of lending is leveraged speculation. Stablecoins and cross-border payments are only just beginning to emerge. I've been in this business for eight years and want to continue for another 10-15 years, seeing how it becomes fully mainstream before deciding what to do next.

Host: So who exactly are you?

Sandeep: I am a global citizen who desires complete sovereignty. I am very law-abiding and hope everyone else will, but everyone should have the right to "escape." I can even imagine that 20, 30, or 40 years from now, you can own your own small spaceship, take off whenever you want to break free from all systems, and wander alone in the solar system. At that time, a monetary system not controlled by any single government and a neutral policing system will be needed, jointly protected by humans and awakened AI to safeguard all life (including AI itself), allowing everyone to live according to their own rules. So I take freedom very seriously, which may also be related to my Indian heritage—many people don't know that the core value of Indian civilization is freedom, and it has remained so for thousands of years.

Host: What happened in your life that made you so hungry for success?

Sandeep: I've been thinking about this for a while. My childhood was really tough, as I've mentioned in many podcasts. India when I was a child was practically a third-world country. My maternal and paternal grandfathers were servants in a wealthy family; that's where they met and later decided to arrange a marriage between their children, which led to my parents. I was always among the top students in my grade and was respected wherever I went, but going home was a completely different world.

When I was 21 or 22, I didn't dare bring friends home. I didn't want them to see what my house was like. Five people were crammed into one room, plus a small kitchen. There was no living room, no bedroom, just one room. We lived in a makeshift storage room on the roof of someone else's two-story house; the owner rented it to us to earn some rent. In the summer, it was like a sauna. When I was five or six, my grandfather was still alive. The owner he served passed away, leaving behind a large hotel, which my grandfather became the caretaker. Sometimes, when no one from the owner's family came, my grandfather would take me to play there. I naively thought that the big house was my home. I would come back and brag to my friends, saying that this was my home. Maybe it was from that time that I developed a stubborn streak. From a young age, I said: I must become a great person, I will never stumble, and I will never accept failure. But I had absolutely no idea how to succeed, and everyone laughed at me.

Host: How did you get involved with blockchain and cryptocurrency?

Sandeep: As I've said before, I didn't initially get into the industry because of Bitcoin. Several times when I saw Bitcoin, I thought it was a pyramid scheme and ignored it. It has no backing whatsoever, so how could it possibly have value?

But when I first read the Ethereum white paper and Vitalik's blog in late 2016 or early 2017, I was deeply moved. They had created a computer that could be run by countless people, yet no one could own it unilaterally, and it was always online. My second thought was, what if we could write complex business logic on this computer, and it would execute it flawlessly no matter what happened? I believed then that this was something that would truly change the world. So I began to truly delve into it, and I'm still doing so now.

Host: In the eight years since Polygon was launched, what has been the most difficult time?

Sandeep: In the first year and a half, we almost couldn't pay salaries several times. December 2019 was the worst. I woke up one morning to find that someone had shorted MATIC (then called MATIC) massively, and the price dropped 70% in one day. The whole internet was calling me a scammer, but those were just isolated incidents. The most difficult period has always been now—for Polygon, now is always the most difficult.

Host: Why is Polymarket built on the blockchain?

Sandeep: That's an excellent question. Many of its competitors' market data isn't even on-chain. If two platforms offer similar user experiences, one is blockchain-based—where you own your content, funds, and followers—while the other is centralized, the answer is obvious: everyone will choose the more open one. Polymarket has already achieved network effects; it possesses verifiability, transparency, and credibility. Regardless of who competes, Polymarket can maintain its dominant position in the long term.

Host: But why Polygon Chain in particular?

Sandeep: In 2020, Polygon was the fastest-growing blockchain, while Ethereum was extremely expensive at the time. The reason for choosing Polygon is related to the network effect of blockchain.

Host: Why is the intersection of AI and blockchain so important for the future of humanity?

Sandeep: Blockchain is a payment platform, and AI is an intelligence platform; they are technically unrelated. But the key point is: AI is the largest centralized force in human history, while the only technology currently driving the decentralization of power is cryptocurrency.

Host: Why are you so dedicated to charity?

Sandeep: Everyone experiences pain in life, and then there are two choices: one is that I've suffered, so you all have to suffer too; the other is that I've suffered, so I want to make sure you suffer less. I chose the second one, purely for my own happiness.

Related reading: Polygon partners with a new giant: Revolut, a new bank, chooses its technology stack to drive crypto payments.