The money was meant for a wedding. Sandeep Nailwal had borrowed about $15,000 for it, and instead he put it into Bitcoin at roughly $800 a coin. He later called the move very risky. That sentence, from a Cointelegraph Magazine profile, says more about him than any valuation.
He was born in 1987 in Ramnagar, a Himalayan foothill village with no electricity, and at about four his family moved to Delhi. They landed in the poor neighbourhoods on the east bank of the Yamuna, which he has described as the Bronx of New York. His father struggled with alcohol and gambling and earned perhaps $80 to $90 a month, much of it lost. School fees went unpaid. Nailwal recalls being made to stand outside the school, and calls it traumatic.
They landed in the poor neighbourhoods on the east bank of the Yamuna, which he has described as the Bronx of New York.
At 10 he began looking after his baby brother after an accident, which he says ended his childhood. As a teenager he sold pens from a friend's shop at a markup and tutored other students. He could not afford the coaching that IIT entrance demanded, so he took a loan and studied computer engineering at MAIT in Delhi. An MBA, a job at Deloitte and another at Welspun Textiles followed.
Then came the failed things. A GPS-based cargo optimiser. A B2B project platform. A B2B services marketplace he ran full time for about a year before deciding it would never grow the way he wanted.
What almost nobody remembers is that he had heard of Bitcoin in 2013 and dismissed it. Only after it endured did he change his mind, and that wedding money went in. In 2016 he started Scope Weaver, a blockchain services firm, and became a regular voice on local Ethereum forums. There he met a programmer, Jaynti Kanani, who pushed him to fund his own ideas.
Ethereum clogged in 2017. They and Anurag Arjun chose to build a scaling layer, raised $30,000 in seed funding and launched Matic Network in early 2018. The first two years ran on about $165,000. They delayed the token sale until they had a product, a decision Nailwal later regretted. A $500,000 Chinese fund commitment collapsed when Bitcoin fell, and the treasury, held in Bitcoin, lost half its value.
The rescue was a $5.6 million Binance Launchpad sale after eight months of due diligence. In February 2022, renamed Polygon, it raised $450 million led by Sequoia Capital India. JPMorgan ran a live trade on it in November 2022. Then the hard years: a stolen 801,601 MATIC in 2021 and 60 layoffs in February 2024.
The boy made to stand outside a school gate for unpaid fees now runs one of India's most visible global crypto projects. What he took from the gate, he has suggested, was a clear idea of the man he did not want to be.