Connect with us

Published

on

From his childhood living in a ghetto on the east bank of the Yamuna river in Dehli to launching the $6-billion Polygon blockchain, Sandeep Nailwal has an incredible rags-to-riches tale.

Now happily ensconced in the futuristic, air-conditioned cityscape of Dubai, he tells Magazine he was born in a farming village in 1987 with no electricity called Ramnagar in the foothills of the Himalayas.

His parents married as teenagers and then packed up home when Nailwal was just four to try their luck in Dehli. They wound up in the poor settlements on the east banks of the river, often dismissively referred to as Jamna-Paar.

“Imagine the Bronx in New York,” Nailwal says. “It was like a tier-three area. Even now, when you go there is a very kind of ghetto-ish area.”

An image of part of the Jamna-paar area in Dehli
An image of part of the Jamna-Paar area in Dehli. (thecitizen.in)

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.

The Oscar-winning film ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ was renamed in India. Crore equates to 10 million rupees. (Amazon)

Nailwal didn’t attend school until he was five, in a country and period where many schools accepted children as young as two and a half, mainly because his parents didn’t know any better.

“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.”

He waves at an ordinary-sized room behind him in Dubai, saying the school was “almost the same size” with 20 kids crammed in. Home life wasn’t much better.

“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.”

Sandeep Nailwal
Sandeep Nailwal. (Polygon)

Also read: ZK-rollups are ‘the endgame’ for scaling blockchains: Polygon Miden founder

Experiences like that in his formative years helped Nailwal understand the kind of man he didn’t want to be and forge his determination to succeed. Now the head of his own family, with a young child named Adi, he says becoming a dad made him reflect on how he hopes to do things better than his own father. But the conversation takes a surprising turn when Nailwal reveals he was actually thrust into a paternal caring role, looking after his baby brother when he was just 10.

“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 got his start in business as a teenager, selling pens from a friend’s shop at a decent markup in school and tutoring other students. After he graduated, he hoped to take an insanely competitive engineering exam for the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) but couldn’t afford the extra tuition he needed to get an edge among “1 million students fighting for around 5,000 seats.”

He ended up getting accepted into the tier-two MAIT college in Dehli 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.”

Sandeep Nailway in Cointelegraph Top 100 2023
Sandeep Nailway in Cointelegraph Top 100 2023. (Cointelegraph)

During his university degree, his talents in data analysis saw him get a gig working on electorate analysis work for the regional BJP party — now India’s ruling party. After a short stint in the workforce after university, he returned to study at the National Institute for Training in Industrial Engineering (now the Indian Institute of Management) to get his MBA, where he met his 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. And nobody would give a home loan to a 27-year-old with intermittent income from a fledgling business.

But Harshita one day said, “You will never be happy this way,” he recalls. “She said, ‘I don’t care about my own house; we can stay and rent.’ That was a very big burden away from me.”

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



Bitcoin revolution

Instead, 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.”

Converted, he was desperate to get “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 says 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 Ethereum’s full programmability. “I was like this is the thing, this is the thing I want,” he says.

Matic founders
Sandeep Nailwal and Anurag Arjun in the early days of Matic. (Twitter)

Throwing himself into the space, Nailwal 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 made the blockchain all but unusable.

Also read: Ethereum is eating the world — ‘You only need one internet’

Kanan suggested they work on fixing Ethereum’s scaling problems by developing the layer-2 Plasma technology proposed by Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Poon in August that year, 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. The project was bootstrapped on the smell of an oily rag. All up, he says, the Matic Network survived for its first two years on $165,000 of total funding.

Matic Network nearly dies

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.”

Read also


Features

How to prepare for the end of the bull run, Part 1: Timing


Features

US enforcement agencies are turning up the heat on crypto-related crime

“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.”

Shortly before his marriage, 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.

His wedding and wife posted on Facebook
His wedding to his wife Harshita Singh. (Facebook)

“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.’”

Pic from wedding
His wedding to his wife Harshita Singh. (Facebook)

Binance is actually diligent

Toward the end of 2018 and early 2019, the opportunity came up to raise funds in an initial exchange offering on Binance Launchpad. While the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission thinks Binance is a bunch of cowboys who will accept any old bus pass as Know Your Customer verification, Nailwal says the exchange’s due diligence was possibly too diligent.

“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.”

That marked a turning point for Matic, which survived the 2020 pandemic market crash and grew from fewer than 1,000 daily users at the end of that year to surpass Ethereum’s user numbers with 550,000 in October 2021. It also flipped Ethereum’s transaction numbers that year, too. Rebranding as Polygon, it surged from a market cap of $87 million at the start of 2021 to almost $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 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.”

Look out for part two, which tells the story of how Polygon became one of the key players in the space and Nailwal’s plans to make it a top-3 project. 

Andrew Fenton

Andrew Fenton

Based in Melbourne, Andrew Fenton is a journalist and editor covering cryptocurrency and blockchain. He has worked as a national entertainment writer for News Corp Australia, on SA Weekend as a film journalist, and at The Melbourne Weekly.

Continue Reading

Politics

EU digital product passports won’t solve food fraud, but blockchain can

Published

on

By

EU digital product passports won’t solve food fraud, but blockchain can

EU digital product passports won’t solve food fraud, but blockchain can

Opinion by: Fraser Edwards, co-founder and CEO, Cheqd

Brutal honesty has its place, especially when confronting discomfort, so here’s one that can’t be sweetened with honey: 96% of imported honey in the UK is fake! Tests found that 24 of 25 jars were suspicious or didn’t meet regulatory standards. 

Self-sovereign identity (SSI) can fix this. 

The UK Food Standards Agency and the European Commission both urge reform to tackle this concern by creating a robust traceability database within supply chain networks to ensure consumer transparency and trust. Data, however, is not the problem. The issue is people tampering with it. 

This is not the first time products have been revealed to be inauthentic, with the Honey Authenticity Network highlighting that one-third of all honey products were fake in 2020, a fraudulent industry amounting to 3.4 billion euros ($3.65 million) of counterfeit goods entering the EU in 2023, as reported by the European Commission.

What is EMA, and how does it affect honey?

Economically motivated adulteration (EMA) involves intentionally substituting valuable ingredients for less expensive products such as sweeteners or low-quality oil. This practice leads to severe economic and health complications — and, in some cases, disease — due to the poisonous additives from substitute products.

The adulteration often involves creating an ultra-diluted blend containing minimal nutritional value, and counterfeiters call it… honey.

Fraudsters dilute the product with high fructose corn syrup or increase the thickness with starch or gelatine. These adulterants closely mimic honey’s chemical profile, making it extremely difficult to detect with traditional tests such as isotope ratio mass spectrometry. Fake honey lacks the essential enzymes that give real honey its flavor and nutrients. To make matters worse, honey’s characteristics vary based on nectar sources, the harvest season, geography and more. 

Some companies filter out pollen content, a key identifier of a honey’s geographical origin, before exporting it to intermediary countries like Vietnam or India to further obfuscate the process. Once this is done, the products are brought to supermarket shelves and labeled with false certifications to command higher prices. This tactic exploits the fact that many regulatory bodies lack the means to verify every shipment.

The hidden cost of food fraud

The supply chain is profoundly fractured, as a jar of honey passes six to eight key points in the supply chain before it arrives on the shelves in the UK. Current practices make authenticity verification extremely difficult. Coupled with the inefficient paper-based bureaucracy that makes it hard to track origin obscuration attempts in intermediary countries, we cannot reliably determine the true extent of food fraud.

One Food and Drug Administration (FDA) estimate suggests that at least 1% of the global food industry, potentially up to $40 billion per year, is affected — and it could be even higher.

Recent: What is decentralized identity in blockchain?

Fraudulent practices don’t just harm consumers — they destroy beekeepers’ livelihoods, flooding the market and destroying profitability for legitimate traders. Ziya Sahin, a Turkish beekeeper, explained the frustration with food fraud regulation:

“Our beekeepers are angry, and they ask why we’re not doing something to stop it. But we have no authority to inspect,” he said. “I’m not even allowed to ask street sellers whether their honey is real.”

While there’s a growing appetite for more reliable testing and stricter enforcement, solutions are lagging. The EU’s latest attempt to fix this? Digital product passports are designed to track honey’s origins and composition, but they are already being criticized as ineffective and easy to manipulate, ultimately leaving the door open for fraud to continue.

EU passports are an ineffective solution 

The European Union’s Digital Product Passport aims to tackle this by enhancing traceability and transparency in its supply chains. By 2030, all goods in the EU must have a digital product passport containing detailed information on the product’s lifecycle, origins and environmental effects. 

While the idea sounds promising, it fails to recognize the extent to which fraudsters can forge certificates and obscure origins by passing products through intermediary countries alongside officials who turn a blind eye.

At the core of this issue is trust. Despite history showing that these rules can and will be bent, we rely on governments to implement laws and regulations. Technology, on the other hand, is agnostic and doesn’t care about money or incentives.

This is the fundamental flaw of the EU’s approach — a system built on human oversight that is vulnerable to the corruption these supply chains are already known for. 

Self-sovereign identity (SSI) for products

Many people are already aware of the scalability trilemma, but the trust triangle is a key concept in SSI that defines how trust is established between issuers, holders and verifiers. It makes fraud much more challenging because every product must be backed by a verifiable credential from a trusted source to prove it’s real.

Issuers, like manufacturers or certification bodies, create and sign verifiable credentials that attest to a product’s authenticity. The holder, typically the product owner, stores and presents these credentials when required. Verifiers — such as retailers, customs officials or consumers — can check the credentials’ validity without relying on a central authority. 

Verifiable credentials are protected by cryptography. If someone tries to sell fake products, their missing or invalid credentials will immediately reveal the fraud.

Government reforms must extend beyond current regulatory oversight and explore the approach outlined in the trust trilemma to safeguard supply chains from widespread adulteration and fraud.

SSI provides the underlying infrastructure necessary to reliably track the identity of products across multiple bodies, standards and regions. By enabling tamper-proof, end-to-end traceability in every single product — whether a jar of honey or a designer handbag — SSI ensures sufficient validators confirm the data is correct to tackle fraud and obfuscation attempts.

SSI also empowers consumers to independently verify products without relying on third-party databases. Buyers can scan the product to authenticate its origin and history directly via the cryptographic certifications confirmed by the validators to further reduce the risk of misinformation even if it reaches the shelves. This would also help reduce corruption and inefficiencies, as many checks are made on paper, which can be easily altered and is a slow process.

As honey fraud methods continue to expand, so do these products’ harm to consumers and local businesses. Steps taken to tackle these methods must thus also broaden. The EU’s Digital Product Passports aim to improve traceability; but unfortunately, they fall short of fraudsters’ sophistication. Implementation of SSI is a necessary step to effectively address the extent fraudsters take to ensure their product arrives on shelves.

Opinion by: Fraser Edwards, co-founder and CEO, Cheqd.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Continue Reading

Politics

Environment secretary defends green policies – after Sir Tony Blair says net zero is ‘doomed to fail’

Published

on

By

Environment secretary defends green policies - after Sir Tony Blair says net zero is 'doomed to fail'

The environment secretary has defended the government’s net zero agenda after Sir Tony Blair said phasing out fossil fuels was “doomed to fail”.

The former prime minister said the approach to transitioning to a green economy wasn’t “working” and was “inadequate” in a report published yesterday by the Tony Blair Institute.

But speaking to Sky News’ Wilfred Frost on Breakfast, Steve Reed said the government was “moving away from sticking plaster solutions towards doing what’s right for the future of the economy, and for the future of households”.

Politics latest: Minister defends closure of Scotland’s only crude oil refinery

He said transitioning to a green economy was necessary for the UK to take back “control of our own energy supply” especially in light of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

In his foreword to the report, Sir Tony called the whole strategy of transitioning to a green economy “unrealistic”.

“Present policy solutions are inadequate and, worse, are distorting the debate into a quest for a climate platform that is unrealistic and therefore unworkable,” he wrote.

More on Environment

“Too often, political leaders fear saying what many know to be true: the current approach isn’t working.”

Asked whether he believed Sir Tony was right to say the focus shouldn’t be on using less fossil fuels but on using methods such as carbon capture, Mr Reed conceded that “we’ll still be using fossil fuels… for some time to come”.

Read more:
How the climate fight is coming into your home
Drivers ‘confused’ by transition to electric vehicles

He added: “For many decades to come. The transition is so, so transition isn’t gonna happen overnight.”

Shadow environment secretary Victoria Atkins told Sky News that Sir Tony’s message should prompt a “rethink” in government.

“If even Tony Blair doesn’t agree with the Labour government, then that is quite a clear message. I would imagine to them that they have got to rethink this.”

Continue Reading

Politics

SEC drops investigation into PayPal’s stablecoin

Published

on

By

SEC drops investigation into PayPal’s stablecoin

SEC drops investigation into PayPal’s stablecoin

PayPal says the US Securities and Exchange Commission has abandoned its investigation into the payment giant’s US-dollar stablecoin.

PayPal said in an April 29 regulatory filing that the SEC concluded its investigation into PayPal USD (PYUSD) and wouldn’t be taking any action.

The company said it received a subpoena from the SEC’s Division of Enforcement over its stablecoin in November 2023. 

“The subpoena requests the production of documents. We are cooperating with the SEC in connection with this request,” PayPal stated at the time.

In its latest filing, the firm said the SEC notified it in February that the agency “was closing this inquiry without enforcement action.”

PayPal has said its stablecoin is 100% redeemable for US dollars and “fully backed” by dollar deposits, including short-term treasuries and cash equivalents. 

However, the stablecoin has struggled to gain momentum in a crowded market dominated by rivals Tether and Circle. PYUSD has a market capitalization of just $880 million, less than 1% of Tether’s (USDT) $148.5 billion.

PayPal’s stablecoin has seen better growth this year with a 75% increase in PYUSD circulating supply since the beginning of 2025, according to CoinGecko. It remains down 14% from its peak supply of just over $1 billion in August 2024. 

SEC drops investigation into PayPal’s stablecoin
PayPal USD market capitalization. Source: CoinGecko

Earnings on PYUSD, Coinbase partnership

That growth could be bolstered by a company announcement on April 23 introducing rewards for PYUSD in a new loyalty offering that will enable US users to earn 3.7% annually for holding the asset on the platform. 

Meanwhile, on April 24, PayPal announced a partnership with Coinbase to increase the adoption of PYUSD. 

“We are excited to drive new, exciting, and innovative use cases together with Coinbase and the entire cryptocurrency community, putting PYUSD at the center,”  said Alex Chriss, PayPal President and CEO.

Related: PayPal to offer 3.7% yield on stablecoin balances: Report

The payments giant also reported robust first-quarter earnings and the completion of significant share repurchase activities. 

The firm beat Wall Street estimates, earning $1.33 per share in the first quarter, topping analyst expectations of $1.16. Revenue rose 1% from a year before to $7.8 billion. 

Magazine: Bitcoin $100K hopes on ice, SBF’s mysterious prison move: Hodler’s Digest

Continue Reading

Trending