Source: "When Shift Happens", Youtube
Compiled by: Felix, PANews
From the storeroom where his ancestors worked as servants, Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal struggled his way to build a blockchain company with a market cap of $30 billion. Sandeep Nailwal works 18 hours a day, dedicated to making Polygon a global payment platform for companies like Stripe. Below are the highlights of the interview from the "When Shift Happens" podcast, compiled by PANews.
Host: Your team says you always reply instantly, no matter the time of day. Do you sleep very little?
Sandeep: Yeah, I mean, I do sleep, but my mind is always on Polygon, online 24/7.
Host: What's your usual daily routine like?
Sandeep: My schedule is a bit reversed. I have a three-and-a-half-year-old son, and I work on US time, so I only really start getting busy after 2 PM, working until 11-12 midnight, and going to sleep around 2 to 2:30 AM. Sometimes my son wakes up at 7 or 7:30 AM, so I get up to play with him. So I often only get 4 or 5 hours of sleep.
Host: I previously interviewed Tether CEO Paolo, who said he has slept only 5 hours a night for 11 years and wakes up every hour to check notifications.
Sandeep: Paolo is steering a much bigger "ship." I have a good relationship with him; he's an amazing, and also super crazy, person. He is completely immersed in his vision. I've never seen a team as small as Tether's where everyone is so deeply committed to the blockchain spirit. They genuinely want a personal, sovereign monetary system. So I'm not at all surprised by their huge success now.
Host: What do you believe is your mission?
Sandeep: My mission is what I always say: sovereign individuals. Many people in the crypto space want to build monetary systems. It should be a free, individual monetary system where people can manage their wealth as they wish. What I truly want is complete individual sovereignty: not just money. Money is actually a product of civilization, and civilization is built on the layer of "controlled violence," meaning law and order. Now we're working on global currency, Bitcoin... but to achieve a truly borderless world, money alone is not enough; you need to decentralize this "controlled violence" layer as well.
This sounds sci-fi, but it's actually starting to become feasible. In the future, there could be drone and robot police forces, controlled by a completely decentralized AI, not by any single company or government. Imagine a 'super brain' controlled collectively by all people, with its own constitution dedicated to protecting everyone's safety. This would truly break down borders, and individuals would achieve real freedom. That's why I co-founded Sentient AI; the other three co-founders are working on it full-time. I'm too busy with Polygon, but this is my deepest goal: to align AI with human interests and ultimately achieve external governance and control.
It sounds like science fiction, but once Polygon and the entire crypto industry become more stable, I will invest more time. Crypto is just now entering its truly practical stage. DeFi is a practical track, but 70-80% of lending is leveraged speculation. Now stablecoins and cross-border payments are starting to rise. I've been in this career for 8 years and want to do it for another 10-15 years, see it become completely mainstream, and then see what to do next.
Host: So who are you, really?
Sandeep: I am a global citizen who wants complete sovereignty. I am very law-abiding and hope everyone else is too, but everyone should have the right to "exit." I can even imagine 20, 30, 40 years from now, you could have your own small space pod, take off to脱离 all systems, and wander alone in the solar system. Then you would need a monetary system not controlled by any single government and a neutral police system, guarded collectively by humanity and awakened AI at that time (including AI itself), allowing everyone to live by their own rules. So I'm very serious about freedom, perhaps also related to me being from India—many people don't know that the core value of Indian civilization for thousands of years has been freedom.
Host: What exactly happened in your life that made you so hungry for success?
Sandeep: I've been thinking about this question a lot. I had a really tough childhood, as I've said on many podcasts. The India of my childhood was almost a third-world country. My maternal and paternal grandfathers were both servants for wealthy families; that's how they met, and later decided to have their children marry, which led to my parents. I was always among the top students in school, respected everywhere, but coming home was a completely different world.
I didn't dare bring friends home until I was 21 or 22, not wanting them to see what my home was really like. Five people crammed into one room, plus a small kitchen. No living room, no bedroom, just one room. We lived in a temporary storage room built on the roof of someone else's two-story house; the owner rented it to us to earn some extra money. Summers were like a steamer. When I was five or six, my grandfather was still alive. The master he served passed away, leaving a large hotel, and my grandfather became the caretaker. Sometimes when the master's family wasn't around, grandfather would take me to play, and I naively thought this big house was my home. I came back and boasted to my little friends, saying this was my house. Maybe from then on, I had this 'never give up' drive. I always said from a young age: I must become a big shot, never settle for small things, and never accept failure. But I had no idea how to succeed, and everyone laughed at me.
Host: How did you get involved in blockchain and cryptocurrency?
Sandeep: As I've said before, I didn't start because of Bitcoin. I saw Bitcoin several times and thought it looked like a pyramid scheme, so I ignored it. It wasn't backed by anything, how could it have value?
But around late 2016 or early 2017, when I first read the Ethereum whitepaper and Vitalik's blog, I was deeply moved. They had created a computer run collectively by countless people, owned by no one, and always online. My immediate second thought was, what if you could write complex business logic on this computer, and no matter what happens, it executes exactly as written? I thought then that this was something that would truly change the world. So I started getting seriously involved, and here I am now.
Host: In the 8 years since Polygon launched, what was the most difficult moment?
Sandeep: Several times in the first year and a half, we almost couldn't make payroll. December 2019 was the worst. Woke up to find someone had shorted MATIC (it was called MATIC then) massively, the price dropped 70% in a day, and the whole internet was calling me a scammer. But those were just single events. The hardest period is always now—for Polygon, it's always now that is the most difficult.
Host: Why did Polymarket need to be built on blockchain?
Sandeep: This is a very good question. Many of its competitors don't put market data on-chain. If two platforms have similar user experiences, one is blockchain-based: you own your content, funds, followers; the other is centralized, then the answer is obvious, people will definitely choose the more open one. Now, Polymarket has achieved network effects. It has verifiability, transparency, and credibility. No matter who competes, Polymarket can maintain its dominant position long-term.
Host: But why specifically the Polygon chain?
Sandeep: In 2020, Polygon was the fastest-growing blockchain at the time, and Ethereum was extremely expensive. Choosing Polygon was related to the network effects of blockchain.
Host: Why is the intersection of AI and blockchain so important for humanity's future?
Sandeep: Blockchain is a payment platform, AI is an intelligence platform; technically, they have no direct relation. But the key point is: AI is the greatest centralizing force in human history, and the only technology currently pushing for decentralization of power is cryptocurrency.
Host: Why are you so invested in charity?
Sandeep: Everyone experiences pain in life. After that, there are two choices: first, I suffered, so you all should suffer too; second, I suffered, so I want others to suffer less. I choose the second, purely for my own happiness.
Related reading: Polygon Latches Onto a New Big Player, Neo-bank Revolut Chooses Its Tech Stack to Drive Crypto Payments
