Why Sandeep Nailwal Is Betting on Himself as Polygon CEO

Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal is charting a new course for the network, backing a singular leadership model as essential to its future.

In an interview with Cointelegraph, Nailwal said the shift away from board-led governance isn’t just a structural change but a strategic response to inefficiencies that have slowed Polygon’s momentum.

On June 11, he announced he would take over as CEO of the Polygon Foundation, describing the decision as necessary to bring “clear direction and focused execution” to the project’s next chapter.

Now under his sole leadership, the Ethereum scaling project will sunset its zkEVM chain and focus on real-world assets (RWAs) and stablecoin payments through Polygon PoS while using its AggLayer to pursue its dream of building the internet of blockchains.

Nailwal on the “servitude mentality” driving Polygon

In January, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stirred debate by declaring sole authority over decisions regarding the Ethereum Foundation’s leadership.

“It’s exactly the same, except I said that I am the director,” Nailwal told Cointelegraph, referring to his own role.

After Polygon’s rise in 2021 and 2022, the project sought to “institutionalize” by mirroring the structures of large companies. The Polygon Foundation was overseen by a board — a model that has now been dissolved, leaving Nailwal as the sole decision-maker.

“Things were definitely taking a lot of time. Decisions that should’ve been made in two weeks were sometimes taking two months,” he said.

Nailwal said streamlining decision-making doesn’t mean abandoning empathy. He still has what he calls a “servitude mentality,” a leadership style shaped by his upbringing. Both of his grandfathers were servants in a wealthy household, where they met and arranged the marriage of his parents.

“I think that history gave me this ingrained tendency to keep everyone happy, and I still feel that way. When someone’s happy, you get a dopamine hit — every human does — but in my case, it’s deeper.”

He credits this instinct with helping build Polygon’s early community. Nailwal was one of the few founders of a top-tier protocol who personally engaged with retail users, often replying to messages on Telegram himself. Only recently has he put up guardrails on his personal accounts.

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“With retail, if the token’s up, they’re happy. If it’s not, they’re angry,” he said. “It took me two or three rounds of that cycle to realize I can’t pour all my energy into it.”

According to Nailwal, the crypto industry is evolving, too — moving away from valuing theoretical research, like early zero-knowledge proof development, and toward rewarding real-world traction and revenue.

“Everybody thought that eventually will happen, but I think recently it has started happening more than before,” he said

Polygon’s zkEVM sunset and RWA drive

Following Nailwal’s announcement, questions have surfaced about the health of zkEVM, which is set to be phased out by 2026. Once known as Hermez Network and acquired in 2021 for 250 million MATIC (POL) (now POL and worth about $250 million at the time), zkEVM was Polygon’s bid for Ethereum equivalence.

“It launched with a lot of fanfare because all the research; people were like, ‘This is beautiful.’ Vitalik [Buterin] and everybody said that this is amazing,” Nailwal claimed. 

“But when the end-users came to use it, it fell short of expectations in terms of the experience. We did not incentivize a lot of user growth in zkEVM for the longest time,” he added.

Assets locked on zkEVM have dropped from over $35 million in July 2023 to just $2.75 million. The chain has struggled to generate fees and has reportedly operated at a loss, according to DefiLlama data.

With zkEVM fading, Polygon’s attention turns to its PoS chain and AggLayer infrastructure. PoS still hosts over $1 billion in total value locked, ranks among the top chains for non-fungible token (NFT) transactions and is home to roughly $1 billion each in USDC (USDC) and Tether’s USDt (USDT).

Though the NFT market has collapsed, Nailwal said meaningful NFTs will continue to endure. He compared speculative NFTs to memecoins, saying the “hype phase” has passed, clearing space for higher-quality projects. He added that the underlying NFT technology remains a key player for tokenizing assets, which can either be fungible or non-fungible.

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“NFT technology will absolutely be used in tokenization and in broader RWA applications,” he said.

“Our focus on actual NFTs — not the speculative, fake ones — has paid off. It’s now very clear that stablecoin payments and tokenization are going to be the two big use cases.”

Polygon’s bet on these two blockchain use cases aligns with global trends. The US Senate passed the GENIUS stablecoin bill on June 17 as global discussions on regulation intensify. Meanwhile, RWAs are drawing institutional interest, including from BlackRock, which runs its tokenized money market fund across multiple chains, including Polygon.

Polygon’s road to 100,000 TPS

Polygon tried to fit into the institutional trend by forming a board after raising $450 million in a 2022 investment round that included Sequoia Capital, SoftBank and Tiger Global. 

But it is now back to the zero-to-one startup phase. Nailwal dismantled the board in pursuit of streamlined execution. But with zkEVM on its way out and the industry’s attention shifting fast, the burden of proof now rests squarely on whether singular leadership can deliver real-world results.

“We need to get back to actual product building. Your product has to be good, and people should be willing to pay for it,” Nailwal said. 

For him, that also means his evolution as a leader — from keeping everyone happy to looking out for Polygon’s best interests.

“That will make some people, both in our community and outside, unhappy. But we don’t have any other choice,” he added.

Nailwal and Polygon are betting it all on its “Gigagas” roadmap, which aims to scale its network to 100,000 transactions per second. That matches modern rivals that are scaling their networks or launching faster blockchains.

So far, the community reaction to Nailwal claiming sole leadership of Polygon has been mixed. Some praise his wartime CEO stance, while others point to the costly zkEVM detour.

Still, Nailwal believes that a faster decision-making process is what the moment demands: “Life gave me a chance to play at the global level. I have to be that 25-year-old kid again who was ready to go all in.”

Whether that bet on himself pays off will likely become clear by the end of the year, as the network races to hit its TPS milestone and prove its relevance in a maturing crypto ecosystem.

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