ByCoinGape
Sandeep Nailwal:- In a big update coming from the Polygon co-founder himself, Sandeep Nailwal has stepped into the role of CEO of Polygon Foundation.
The foundation oversees the blockchain’s multiple entities including Polygon Labs, Polygon Grants & Ecosystem Funds and provides support and funding for for Polygon’s blockchain protocols.
While making the announcement, Sandeep Nailwal said, “I have always stayed away from moving into the CEO role however Polygon now needs clear direction.”
This is evident as in the past two years, three co-founders of the project has left the company leaving Sandeep as the sole co-founder still associated with the project. The latest instance occurred on May 24 when Polygon co-founder Mihailo Bjelic stepped down from the board of Polygon Foundation citing “he can no longer contribute to Polygon to the best of my abilities.”
Sandeep Nailwal has been serving as the Executive Chairman of Polygon Labs from July 2023, overseeing strategic priorities and community engagement.
In May 2024, he additionally took on the role of Chief Business Officer, driving growth of Polygon’s zero-knowledge (ZK) toolkit (Polygon CDK) and its AggLayer interoperability protocol.
In the X post announcement, Sandeep Nailwal – with the new addition of CEO role – announced his key focus areas as Polygon Pos and Agglayer and made 5 major announcements:
1. Polygon’s PoS’ sole focus will now remain on stablecoin payments and RWAs. The blockchain is already under Gigagas testnet aimed at pushing its network capacity beyond 1,000 transactions per second by early July.
2. He announced July 30 as the roll-out date of Agglayer v0.3 – Polygon’s zero-knowledge-powered interoperability protocol designed to make multiple blockchains feel like a unified network.
3. A separate ZK research effort by spinning out Polygon Zisk under Jordi Baylina.
4. shifting focus from institutional setups to user centric Polygon.
5. Initiate educational campaigns to ensure everyone is aware of the upgrade of MATIC to POL.
MATIC officially became POL on September 4, 2024, when Polygon Labs executed the network-level ticker migration on the Polygon PoS chain.
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It is interesting to note that in late 2017, Nailwal had played a major role with fellow engineers Jaynti Kanani and Anurag Arjun to create Matic Network. The aim was to solve Ethereum’s scalability bottleneck. The project raised initial funding, developed a sidechain-based proof-of-stake solution, and conducted its first token sale in early 2019.
As the ecosystem diversified, Matic Network rebranded to “Polygon Technology” in February 2021 to reflect its broader ambition of being “Ethereum’s Internet of Blockchains.”
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This move by Sandeep Nailwal comes with the growing need for Polygon to differentiate itself from other Ethereum Layer-2 solutions particularly Optimism, Arbitrum and Newcomers like zkSync.
At the same time, daily active addresses on Polygon have declined nearly 40 %, and total value locked (TVL) growth has stagnated around $934 million which is far behind competitors such as Base and Arbitrum.
They have captured significant developer mindshare with their optimistic rollups and aggressive fee-reduction strategies. This adds further pressure on Polygon to innovate quickly lest risk losing ecosystem projects.
Further, the POL token has slid roughly 47 % from its December 2024 highs, hitting a five-year low earlier this year. Over the past year, it has slide by 65%.
However, while making the announcement, Polygon CEO Sandeep Nailwal said “excited to see several large market makers coming back to the table in recent days.” He attributed this to SEC dropping its investigations and lawsuits related to MATIC as a security.
Thus, with the new Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal, it remains to be seen how the market and ecosystem reacts in near future.
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