Four Engineers, One Token: The Polygon Founders and the Money Behind Web3 Gaming's Favourite Chain

In May 2021, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin sent a pile of meme coins worth $1.02 billion on paper to a Covid relief fund that an Indian engineer had set up with a single tweet. The engineer was Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, and that moment says a lot about how much money, and how much responsibility, ended up in the hands of the four people who started the network.

Polygon is not a game, but it became one of the most-used networks for blockchain games and their NFTs. This is the story of its founders and the fortune that came with it.

Four engineers and a scaling idea

In 2017, four software engineers, Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, Anurag Arjun and Mihailo Bjelic, launched the Matic Network, a way to make Ethereum transactions cheaper and faster. Three of them were Indian; Bjelic is Serbian. It was an unglamorous problem, and in 2017 it was exactly the right one: CryptoKitties had just shown that a single popular game could clog Ethereum for everyone.

In February 2021, Matic rebranded as Polygon Technology. That year, as NFT games boomed and Ethereum fees soared, Polygon became the cheap alternative that studios and brands reached for. The token, MATIC, ran up close to $3 in late December 2021.

The $450 million round

The founders' biggest money moment came in February 2022. Polygon raised $450 million by selling MATIC tokens to investors in a round led by Sequoia Capital India, with Tiger Global and SoftBank Vision Fund taking part. It was one of the largest crypto raises of that year, and it left the project with a war chest just as the market turned.

None of the founders has a verified personal net worth from Forbes or Bloomberg, and their token holdings are not publicly broken down. What is clear is that the project they started had become one of the most valuable networks in crypto, and that the founders held a large share of its early token allocation.

Gaming was a big part of the pitch. In March 2023, Polygon partnered with Immutable to bring zero-knowledge technology to web3 games, an alliance between two of the field's best-funded companies (read the Immutable founders' story).

A billion-dollar donation

The India Covid Crypto Relief Fund is where Nailwal's story becomes unusual. He launched it in April 2021 as India's second wave hit, asking the crypto community for help and promising to take full responsibility for transparency.

Then Buterin sent about 50.7 trillion SHIB, a meme token he had been given, worth $1.02 billion at the time. The market was far too thin to sell at that price. The trading firm Wintermute sold it in tranches and raised about $464 million in USDC, still one of the largest crypto donations ever. In January 2023, Nailwal shifted the remaining $274 million towards upgrading healthcare in India. Later reporting by DL News questioned how slowly the money had reached charities, a reminder that crypto fortunes are harder to spend well than to make.

Where the four founders are now

The founding team has slowly scattered:

• Anurag Arjun stepped away to lead Avail, a Polygon spin-off that became independent.
• Jaynti Kanani also stepped back from Polygon Labs in the following years.
• Mihailo Bjelic announced on 23 May 2025 that he was leaving the Polygon Foundation board and winding down his day-to-day role.
• Sandeep Nailwal went the other way: in June 2025 he became CEO of the Polygon Foundation, promising a sharper focus on the network's core products.

The company also shrank. In February 2024, Polygon Labs laid off 60 people, about 19% of its staff, and in September 2024 MATIC was migrated to a new token, POL.

WGC's take

The Polygon founders made their money the way most crypto founders do: by holding the token of a network that suddenly everyone needed. They are also a good reminder that "blockchain gaming money" often ends up in infrastructure, not games. The studios that built on Polygon in 2021 mostly struggled; the network kept going.

Token prices are highly volatile. Nothing in this article is investment advice.