Who Is Sandeep Nailwal and How the Polygon Founder Is Building Open-Source AI

Sandeep Nailwal took full control of the Polygon Foundation and became its CEO in June 2025, describing himself in the announcement as the largest holder of POL and the person who had dedicated his life to the network from the beginning. That move consolidated one of the most influential careers in crypto under a single operator. What makes Nailwal worth understanding in 2026 is not only the scaling network he built, but the direction he has pointed his money and attention since then.

He co-founded an open-source artificial intelligence project called Sentient, backed by an $85 million seed round, with the stated goal of becoming the Linux Foundation of AI. That is an unusual bet for an engineer known for Ethereum infrastructure, and it says a lot about how he reads the next decade. Here is who Nailwal is, how he built Polygon, why he is now chasing open-source AI, and what his track record suggests about where he goes next.

Who Sandeep Nailwal Actually Is

Nailwal is an Indian-born engineer and entrepreneur who came up through the software services world before crypto, not through venture capital or finance. He holds a master's degree in engineering and spent his early career building backend systems, which shaped a founder who talks like a builder rather than a marketer. His public persona leans hard into personal freedom and self-reliance, and his profiles list him as an "Absolute-Individual-Freedom Maximalist," a phrase that reads as a mission statement more than a bio.

That framing matters because it connects his three main projects. Polygon exists to make Ethereum cheap and fast enough for ordinary users. His philanthropy exists to route capital around slow institutions. And his AI work exists to keep the most powerful technology of the era out of the hands of a few large companies. The through-line is decentralization of control, applied to money, to aid, and now to intelligence. You can trace that logic through his public writing and his Crunchbase profile, which reads as a series of attempts to hand power back to individuals.

How Nailwal Built Polygon Into an Ethereum Scaling Giant

Nailwal co-founded the project that became Polygon in 2017, originally under the name Matic Network, alongside Jaynti Kanani and Anurag Arjun. The problem they attacked was simple to describe and brutal to solve. Ethereum was congested and expensive, and no consumer application could survive fees that spiked to tens of dollars per transaction. Polygon offered Ethereum Layer 2 scaling that let developers move activity off the main chain while keeping its security, which turned a research problem into a product millions of people actually used.

The token side of the story is where his 2024 and 2026 work concentrates. Polygon migrated its MATIC token to POLin 2024, repositioning it as the coordination and staking asset for a wider stack of chains rather than a single sidechain token. The network runs an aggressive burn model that removes POL from supply as activity grows, creating deflationary pressure that ties token value to real usage. On top of that, Nailwal has pushed the "Open Money Stack," a framework aimed at onchain payments and stablecoins moving at card-network speed, backed by hard forks that lift throughput toward far higher transaction targets.

The pattern across those years is worth noticing. Nailwal rarely announces a finished vision. He ships an imperfect version, watches how people use it, and reshapes the roadmap around real behavior. That habit is what carried Polygon from a sidechain workaround to a payments and settlement network.

The Pivot to Open-Source AI With Sentient

In January 2024, Nailwal co-founded Sentient with Pramod Viswanath, a Princeton engineering professor, and Himanshu Tyagi, a scientist at IISc Bangalore. The project raised an $85 million seed round co-led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Pantera, and Framework, an investor list that signals both crypto and traditional venture conviction. The pitch is direct. Advanced AI is concentrating inside a handful of large companies, and Sentient wants to build the open, community-owned counterweight, positioning itself as the "Linux Foundation of AI."

The technical idea borrows from what Nailwal already knows. Sentient uses crypto rails to reward the people who contribute models, data, and compute, so that an open model can stay open without a single company owning the economics. His stated goal is to make sure the benefits of AI are distributed to the people who build it rather than captured by whoever controls the largest data center. Coverage of the round from The Block and India's Inc42 framed it as a serious attempt to challenge closed AI labs rather than a token play. For readers tracking the broader category, Sentient sits next to other crypto-AI networks, and comparisons to Bittensor come up often given the overlap with its TAO incentive model and the wider debate around AI agents in crypto.

The Philosophy and Philanthropy Behind the Founder

Nailwal's most famous act outside of code came during India's second COVID wave. He founded CryptoRelief, a crypto-native emergency fund that raised money for oxygen, hospitals, and supplies faster than most traditional channels could move. The fund became global news when Vitalik Buterin donated roughly $1 billion in SHIB tokens to it, an amount so large it could not be responsibly deployed inside India's charitable and regulatory limits.

What Nailwal did next defines how he operates. Rather than sit on the windfall, CryptoRelief returned about $190 million of the donated SHIB proceeds to Buterin, who used it to launch the Balvi program, an open-source biotech effort focused on airborne-disease research and clean indoor air. Returning nine figures of crypto is not the instinct of someone optimizing for personal control, and it fits the same freedom-and-openness philosophy that runs through his other work. The reporting on that return treated it as one of the more responsible episodes in a space not known for restraint.

Why Sandeep Nailwal Matters Now

Nailwal matters in 2026 because he sits at the intersection of the two narratives driving the most capital in technology, which are crypto payments infrastructure and open artificial intelligence. Most founders are strong in one of those. He has a shipped, widely used network on one side and a well-funded, credibly staffed lab on the other. When one person controls both a settlement layer and an open-AI project, the two can reinforce each other in ways that neither could alone.

His CEO consolidation of the Polygon Foundation also removed the ambiguity that had surrounded Polygon's leadership for years. Investors now know exactly who owns the roadmap, and that person is the single largest POL holder, which aligns his incentives tightly with the token. For traders, that clarity is a signal worth weighing. Founder alignment does not guarantee price performance, but a distracted or absent leadership team is a real risk that Polygon no longer carries.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who founded Polygon?

Polygon was co-founded in 2017 as Matic Network by Sandeep Nailwal, Jaynti Kanani, and Anurag Arjun. Nailwal became CEO of the Polygon Foundation in June 2025 and is the network's largest individual POL holder.

What is Sentient and how is Nailwal involved?

Sentient is an open-source AI project Nailwal co-founded in January 2024 with Pramod Viswanath and Himanshu Tyagi. It raised an $85 million seed round led by Founders Fund, Pantera, and Framework, and aims to be the open, community-owned alternative to closed AI labs.

Why did Nailwal return $190 million in SHIB?

His CryptoRelief fund received about $1 billion in SHIB from Vitalik Buterin during India's COVID crisis, far more than it could responsibly deploy under local rules. CryptoRelief returned roughly $190 million, which funded the Balvi open-source biotech program.

Is POL the same as MATIC?

POL is the successor to MATIC, which migrated to the new token in 2024. POL serves as the staking and coordination asset across Polygon's broader stack of chains, and the network burns a portion of supply as activity grows.

Bottom Line

Nailwal is one of the few operators in crypto with a proven scaling network behind him and a credible open-AI project in front of him, and in June 2025 he removed any doubt about who steers Polygon. Watch three things from here. Watch if the Open Money Stack turns POL's burn model into real, sustained supply reduction as payment volume grows. Watch if Sentient ships an open model that developers actually adopt rather than a whitepaper. And watch how tightly he links the two, because a founder who controls both settlement rails and an open-AI network has optionality that almost no one else in the space holds. His history says he builds first and explains later, so the products, not the pitches, are where to keep your attention.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always conduct your own research before making trading decisions.