Sandeep Nailwal’s story is an incredible rags-to-riches tale, from a childhood in the slums on the east bank of the Yamuna River in Delhi to launching the $6 billion Polygon blockchain. Now happily living in the futuristic air-conditioned cityscape of Dubai, he told the magazine that he was born in 1987 in a rural village called Ramnagar in the foothills of the Himalayas, where there was no electricity.

His parents married as teenagers and packed up their bags to try their luck in Delhi when he was four. They ended up in the impoverished settlement on the east bank of the river, often referred to disparagingly as Jamnapal.

Nerwall's childhood was not easy. He grew up in a poor area where cattle roamed the streets, illegal guns were prevalent, and knives were considered the best tool. He did not go to school until he was five years old because his parents did not understand the importance of education. Despite the family's financial constraints, he did not have a good time in school and was often punished by standing at the school gate for not paying tuition.

Such experiences helped Nerval shape his values ​​and strengthen his determination to succeed. Now the head of a family with a son, and a father, he reflects on how he hopes to surpass his father. Nerval revealed that he actually started taking care of his little brother at the age of ten, a responsibility that changed the trajectory of his life.

He started his business as a teenager, earning money by selling pens at school and tutoring other students. After graduation, he hoped to attend the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), but unable to afford the extra tuition, he ended up enrolling at Delhi's Tier II MAIT College, taking out loans to pursue a degree in computer science and engineering.

Nerwal was determined to succeed, his dream was either to become the CEO of a global company or to start a revolutionary internet business like Facebook. During college, he started working and later got a job doing voter analysis for a regional political party. After college, he returned to the National Institute of Industrial Engineering Training for his MBA, where he met his wife Harshita Singh.

Although Nerwall worked at Deloitte and Welspun Textiles, quickly rising to the position of e-commerce technology leader, he never stopped working on entrepreneurial projects. He would work a full day and then go home to continue working on projects such as a GPS-based delivery optimization system for freight vehicles or a project-managed B2B service platform.

In his last month at work, he borrowed $15,000 to pay for his wedding and then went full-time into the B2B services market, but he soon realized that expansion in this area wasn’t going as smoothly as he had hoped.

Nerwall wanted to get into "deep tech" and initially considered artificial intelligence, but later abandoned the field because it was beyond his mathematical ability. So he turned his attention to Bitcoin, an area of ​​interest, especially when Bitcoin began to attract some media attention when it was about to halve in 2016.

Although he initially thought Bitcoin was some kind of Ponzi scheme, after studying it for a while, he decided to get involved and converted his $15,000 wedding loan into Bitcoin, despite his difficult financial situation at the time.

He became active in the blockchain space, founding a blockchain services startup called Scope Weaver and becoming a moderator on a local Ethereum forum, where he met a programmer named Jaynti "JD" Kanan, who suggested he use his $400,000 Bitcoin stash to invest in his startup.

Initially, Nailwal was not enthusiastic, but then Ethereum began to become overwhelmed during the 2017 bull run, especially when CryptoKitties transaction fees surged 600%, making Ethereum almost unusable. Kanan suggested using the second-layer Plasma technology to solve Ethereum's scaling problem, and Nailwal agreed and helped raise $30,000 in seed funding to develop the product. Anurag Arju became another co-founder, and Matic Network was officially launched in early 2018. The project persisted in the most difficult times, relying on the total

A total of $165,000 in funding was spent over the first two years.

However, during the collapse of Bitcoin and crypto markets, Matic Network almost died. The team decided not to conduct a token sale before having a product because they thought they were not ready. This decision made them miss the opportunity to raise a large amount of funds until they had a product, and the market was no longer as good as before. This made Nerwall very distressed because he should not have tied the company's finances to speculation.

However, in late 2018 and early 2019, Matic Network had an opportunity to raise funds for its first exchange on Binance Launchpad. They were eventually approved and raised $5.6 million, which was an important turning point for Matic. Subsequently, the project experienced the market crash in 2020, but Polygon managed to survive and achieve huge growth. Now, Polygon has become one of the most successful and richest people in the cryptocurrency industry, but Nerval is far from satisfied. He hopes that Polygon can have a significant impact like Ethereum and Bitcoin.