Conversation with Polygon Founder: Overcoming Poverty and Building a $30 Billion Market Cap Crypto Company

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Source: When Shift Happens, Youtube

Compiled by: Felix, PANews

Fighting from his ancestors as servants’ storage rooms, Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal built a $30 billion blockchain company. Working 18 hours a day, Sandeep Nailwal is working on building Polygon into a global payment platform for companies like Stripe. The following is a summary of the interview with the “When Shift Happens” podcast compiled by PANews.

Moderator: Listen to your team, no matter what time of day, you always come back in seconds, do you sleep very little every day?

Sandeep: yes, I mean, I do sleep, but my mind is always on Polygon, 24 hours a day.

Moderator: What is your usual routine?

Sandeep: My schedule is quite upside down. I have a three-and-a-half-year-old son who works on US time, so I don’t really get busy until after 2pm, working until 11-12 midnight and going to bed from 2 to 2:30 am. Sometimes my son wakes up between 7 and 7:30 in the morning and gets up to play with him. So I often only sleep for 4 or 5 hours.

Moderator: I previously interviewed Tether CEO Paolo, who said that he has only slept 5 hours a night for 11 years and wakes up every hour to read notifications.

Sandeep: Paolo is in charge of a bigger ship. I have a good relationship with him, he is a super good and crazy person. He was completely immersed in his vision. I’ve never seen a team as small as Tether, but everyone is so committed to the spirit of blockchain. They really want a personal, sovereign monetary system. So I’m not surprised that they’re so successful now.

Moderator: What do you think is your mission?

Sandeep: My mission is what I always call sovereign individuals. 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 the complete sovereignty of the individual: not just money. Money is actually a product of civilization, and civilization is built on “controlled violence”, that is, the layer of law and order. Now we are engaged in global currencies, bitcoin… But to achieve a truly borderless world, money alone is not enough, you need to decentralize the layer of “controlled violence”.

It sounds sci-fi, but it’s already starting to become viable. In the future, there can be drones and robotic police forces, controlled by a completely decentralized AI, not by any company or government. Imagine a ‘superbrain’ controlled by all of humanity, with its own constitution dedicated to keeping everyone safe. In this way, the border is truly broken, and the individual can gain true freedom. That’s why I went to co-found Sentient AI, and the other three co-founders are doing it full-time, and I’m too busy at Polygon, but that’s my deepest goal, to align AI with human interests, and ultimately achieve external governance and control.

It sounds like sci-fi, but I’ll invest more when Polygon and the crypto industry as a whole become more stable. Now that crypto has just entered the real practical stage, DeFi is considered a practical track, but 70-80% of borrowing is leveraged speculation. Now stablecoins and cross-border payments have begun to rise. I’ve been in this business for 8 years and want to do it for another 10-15 years to see what to do next when it becomes completely mainstream.

Moderator: So who are you?

Sandeep: I am a global citizen who wants full sovereignty. I am very law-abiding and hope that everyone will abide by the law, but everyone should have the right to “quit”. I can even imagine that in 20, 30, 40 years you can have your own small capsule and take off if you want to get out of all the systems and wander around the solar system alone. At that time, a monetary system and a neutral policing system were needed, where humans and awakened AI would work together to protect all life (including the AI itself), so that everyone could live according to their own rules. So I am very serious about freedom, which may also have something to do with my background in India - many people don’t know that the core value of Indian civilization is freedom, and it has been like this for thousands of years.

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

Sandeep: I’ve been thinking about this question for a long time. I was really bitter as a kid, I’ve said it on many podcasts before. When I was a child, India was almost a third world country. My grandfather and grandfather were both servants of rich families, and they met there, and later decided to let their children marry, so I had my parents. I was always in the top of my grade in school and was respected wherever I went, but once I got home, it was a completely different world.

I didn’t dare to bring my friends home when I was 21 or 22 years old, I didn’t want them to see what my family was like. A family of five was crammed into that room, plus a small kitchen. There is no living room, no bedroom, just one room. We lived in a temporary storage room on the roof of someone else’s house, and the owner wanted to earn some rent before renting it to us. Summer is as hot as a steamer. When I was five or six years old, my grandfather was still alive, and the owner of the house he served died, leaving behind a large hotel, and my grandfather became the caretaker. Sometimes when no one came to the master’s house, my grandfather would take me to play, and I naively thought that this big house was my home. Come back and brag to your friends, saying that this is my home. Maybe from that time on, I had a sense of ‘not admitting defeat’ in my heart. I have said since I was a child: I must be a big man, never make small troubles, and do not accept failure. But I had no idea how to succeed, and everyone laughed at me.

Moderator: How did you get involved in blockchain and cryptocurrency?

Sandeep: I said before that I didn’t start with Bitcoin. I saw Bitcoin several times and thought it was like a pyramid scheme, so I just ignored it. It has no endorsement, how can it be valuable?

But in late 2016 or early 2017, when I first read the Ethereum whitepaper and Vitalik’s blog, I was very moved to create a computer run by countless people, but no one could own it unilaterally, and it was always online. The second thought was, what if I could write complex business logic on this computer and execute it word for word, no matter what happened? I thought it was something that would really change the world. So I started really getting involved, until now.

Moderator: What has been the most difficult moment in the 8 years since Polygon launched?

Sandeep: In the early years and a half, I almost ran out of paychecks. December 2019 was the worst, when I woke up in the morning and found that someone had shorted MATIC (then called MATIC), and the price of the currency fell by 70% in one day. The hardest period has always been now – and for Polygon, it will always be the hardest now.

Moderator: Why is Polymarket built on the blockchain?

Sandeep: This is a very good question, many of its competitors’ market data is not on the chain at all. If the user experience of the two platforms is similar, one is based on blockchain: you have your own content, funds, and fans; The other is centralized, the answer is obvious, everyone must choose the more open one. Today, Polymarket has achieved a network effect, which boasts verifiability, transparency, and credibility, allowing Polymarket to maintain its dominance for a long time, no matter who competes.

Moderator: But why Polygon Chain?

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

Moderator: Why is the intersection of AI and blockchain so important for the future of mankind?

Sandeep: Blockchain is a payment platform, and AI is an intelligent platform, and there is no direct relationship between technology. But the key is this: AI is the largest centralized force in human history, and the only technology currently driving the decentralization of power is cryptocurrency.

Moderator: Why are you so invested in charity?

Sandeep: Everyone will experience pain in their lives, and then there are two options: one is that I have suffered, and you all have to eat; second, I have suffered hardships, so let everyone suffer less. I choose the second one, purely for my own pleasure.

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