Sandeep Nailwal's father earned about $80 to $90 a month, and school fees often went unpaid. At 10 he began caring for his baby brother after an accident. He could not afford IIT coaching, so he took a loan to study computer engineering at MAIT in Delhi.
He put about $15,000 borrowed for his wedding into Bitcoin at roughly $800 a coin. In 2016 he founded Scope Weaver, and in 2017 he started the Matic idea with Jaynti Kanani, Anurag Arjun and Mihailo Bjelic, after Ethereum congestion made apps unusable.
Matic Network launched in early 2018. The team renamed it Polygon in February 2021 and bought Hermez for $250 million that year. In February 2022 it raised $450 million in a token sale led by Sequoia Capital India, with Tiger Global and SoftBank Vision Fund. In November 2022 JPMorgan made a live trade on Polygon.
The network also had setbacks. A December 2021 vulnerability led to the theft of 801,601 MATIC. In February 2024 it laid off 60 staff, about 19 percent. In September 2024 the MATIC token was migrated to POL.