Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, talked with us about the past and future of Polygon, one of the most popular layer 2 blockchains on the market. He also shared his vision on which markets he believes will embrace blockchain technology in the near future and ends with some advice to all future Web3 founders. If you didn’t get a chance to listen to the podcast (or even if you did) we have recapped some of the insightful points he made below.

“What if we can run complex business computations in this decentralized setting?” That is the question Sandeep asked himself after learning about blockchain. He has definitely put in the hours to get from that point to where Polygon is today. Polygon started out as Matic, but when their focus evolved, they knew they would have to rebrand.

Sandeep considers blockchain and the metaverse “a fundamental shift [in] how human beings can interact with each other.” 

With the rebranding of Matic to Polygon, Sandeep and the Polygon team aim to be ‘approach agnostic.’ “That means we will choose, or we will pick up whatever approach becomes mainstream. We will try to build these networks which allow developers to build on these chains, and we will focus on building the production-ready chains and build the ecosystem efforts…around those.”

“Later on, … I think somehow the government applications will become a very important sector because blockchains provide this immutability, accountability and transparency to the application.” Sandeep goes on to say how “there is this enterprise platform called Cargo X, which produces and stores these shipping related documents in Egypt. They use Polygon Network to have their document IDs and things like that.” 

“Similarly, in India [the] government of Maharashtra, which is like a very big state probably has the population two thirds of the entire United States, like that big state in terms of population, they are storing their vaccination records or their this RT PCR tests, related COVID tests related records on-chain on Polygon.” He explains that one of the biggest things holding back adoption in areas is that the laws and regulations, such as GDPR, haven’t quite caught up with where blockchain is at. Once privacy and identity concerns are solved, there will be nothing holding big enterprises back.

“Let's say in three to five years from now, if we are still talking about which blockchain is the best blockchain on layer one or layer two, the whole industry has failed as a collective. … Blockchain should be invisible.” 

He goes on to say that user experience layers, such as Venly, and apps need to be what people are talking about, not specific protocols and specific infrastructure. When you make a phone call, you don’t care about which cellular network the call is being transferred through. The end-users don’t need to think about how things are happening. And that’s what Sandeep says we should all be aiming for with Web3. 

We also asked Sandeep for some words of wisdom for other Web3 developers, he gave us these two excellent tips: 

1. “You should be directly appearing to the community.” 

Sandeep firmly believes that it is critical for founders to talk directly to the communities they are building in order to answer questions, manage concerns, and share their passion for the project. This is the biggest key to growing an engaged community.

2. “Start building very formidable and fairly incentivized, second layer leadership within your project.”

Leaders can’t do everything, they need to delegate so that things get done well and on time. Building a great leadership team is not only integral to a strong company but sharing the stress and workload of a new company is also critical to maintaining good physical and mental health. 

Interested in getting involved with blockchain? Check out what positions Polygon and Venly are looking to fill!