Polygon Foundation names co-founder Sandeep Nailwal as CEO in a strategic shift

Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder and CEO, Polygon Foundation

In yet another restructuring at L2 blockchain platform Polygon, co-founder Sandeep Nailwal has been named the chief executive officer (CEO) of Polygon Foundation, the parent of Polygon Labs and other related entities.

Until now, Polygon Foundation was run through a consensus of a group of co-founders. In May, co-founder Mihailo Bjelic, an active developer at Polygon who was on board of the foundation, stepped down.

As the CEO, Nailwal wants to focus on a long-term strategy, overseeing key ecosystem initiatives, and ensuring that the Polygon Foundation “decisively steers the project to exponential growth”, increased focus and delivery of greater value to Polygon ecosystem, including users, applications, and POL stakers.

“This renewed control marks the beginning of a strategic push for Polygon to reclaim its position at the forefront of Web3,” the blockchain company said in a statement.

Nailwal’s immediate plan includes driving a product-first approach to launch a full-featured Agglayer, a roadmap to evolve Polygon PoS into the high-throughput GigaGAS chain capable of supporting over 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) for payments and real-world assets, the statement said.

He will be looking at the expansion of the Agglayer Breakout Program, sunset of Polygon zkEVM and renewed market maker engagement to support POL and ensure robust liquidity across DEXs (decentralised exchanges), CEXs (centralised exchanges), and other trading venues.

“Together, these moves signal a clear shift from a more passive chapter in Polygon’s history to a focused and ambitious founder-led vision for the future,” the company said in a statement.

Agglayer is the trustless interoperability protocol developed by Polygon Labs. Polgyon PoS is payment gateway from crypto to real-world finance, which already has over $271 million in tokenized assets are live, including products from BlackRock, Apollo’s ACRED, JPMorgan, and Hamilton Lane.

Given the increased focus on Polygon PoS, Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta will be deprecated in 2026.

Zk protocol, or zero-knowledge proof, is used in cryptography as a verification method between a prover and a verifier during transactions.

“At our beginnings, Polygon was all about bold execution and big goals. During 2021-23, we made a real effort to institutionalize the project by onboarding some amazing people as Co-founders, set up a board and had a period of intense tech research and exploration. Now, it is time to again move fast, aggressively and with full conviction and focus,” Nailwal said.

“…With focused leadership, this is the moment to scale the next chapter of Polygon.”

Leadership changes over the years

Polgygon was started in 2017 by Nailwal, Jaynti Kanani and Anurag Arjun. Kanani and Arjun left the startup in March 2023 after a leadership reshuffle and went on to start their next ventures.

In an interview in October 2023, Nailwal told Moneycontrol, “For me, it's been a very mission-focused thing and where I want to take Polygon. Right now, we have like 10 co-founders. Anurag (Arjun) and JD (Kanani) had built generation one of Polygon, which was a side chain.”

“But now the world is moving to zk (zero-knowledge proof) and the other co-founders we have are the zk experts. So, technologically, they contribute more over there. JD and Anurag might not have been the most suitable persons to contribute to zk internally,” he had said.

Polygon Labs had appointed former chief legal officer Boiron as the CEO, who continues to lead the organisation’s strategic vision and drive execution.

Mudit Gupta is the chief technology officer, a highly regarded engineering leader, and Ryan Niedzialek, a longtime Polygon Labs executive, is now the chief operating officer, overseeing business development, partner enablement, and core operational functions.

In 2022, Polygon (Matic Network) raised $450 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital India with participation from more than 40 major venture capital firms. Tiger Global, SoftBank, Galaxy Digital, Republic Capital, Makers Fund,  Steadview Capital, Elevation Capital among others also participated in the round through the token sale.