Sandeep Nailwal - The End of Old Money - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Little bit about me like I I come from India very very uh from a fairly uh underprivileged background uh you know lived my entire life while where my father was making like $80 a month and uh you know no access to the financial world and all that. lucky you know due to education loans from public banks in India I could study engineering and then uh you know did my MBA also and uh also wanted to start a business uh did not have the ability to do it my wife uh you know begged me that okay go and do this we can live on a rented house uh you know forever don't worry and I was eventually able to reach somewhere and crypto basically changed my life and you know we we we we I I I was lucky to be a part of this polygon uh journey and I did that for some of you guys who don't know I am uh sep founder and CEO of uh polygon um but then this story is you know you would have like probably 1 billion people out of 1.5 billion maybe much more than that maybe 1.4 four billion have the similar kind of story. So nothing is unique.

Polygon story is but fairly unique that uh Polygon has been building in the crypto space since very early days 2017 I would say where literally nobody knew what exactly these smart contracts are going to enable and here we are today where blockchains are going mainstream with payments and RWAs and which are essentially smart contracts and and and it's going like really uh going for the mass adoption and polygon is being optimized for that. Um you know we are trying to build the obviously the decentralized money rails for everyday people and enterprises and here are some of the stats. We are you know very shortly we are going the gig gas mode which is roughly means 5,000 TPS u you know in the next 1 to 2 months we already at around 1,000 TPS and uh and then probably like in next 6 months we should be uh somewhere around uh uh you know from 5,000 we we we plan to go to within one next one year probably to 100k and more we are coming up with very interesting vb block blob which we say validator elected block producers. So the block producers can produce very fast blocks and all that. Why we are doing all of this?

Because some of the numbers on the stable coin side you would see that and many people especially the crypto people don't know that uh polygon is actually doing amazingly well on these stable coin payments. We are the number one blockchain for USDC payments uh by daily active users even bigger than base uh which is which is supposed to be the home of USDC uh in some form and USDT also uh we are the number three blockchain in terms of the number of uh daily uh active users and you know we have um I think like $3 billion of stable coin in supply in supply generally it's top three daily active users and 530 million plus unique addresses but that doesn't matter point is daily active addresses uh and especially uh people doing the P2B transactions P2B transactions really really big um and some of the larger you know enterprises and DAPs that you know like poly market uh I just heard uh from Shuo who's here like about her team going uh crazy on uh courtyard which is Pokemon NFT cards and all that so some of the iconic apps are being built on polygon and that's why when I was talking about the TTS what we see is um why we need like a you know much bigger amount of TPS and all that is that uh some of these enterprises some of these companies which are building on polygon are really going uh mega scale and we probably might need to build specialized payment rails also right you know where maybe like we are even contemplating priority lanes for payments right in the in the blockchain like which has not been done uh you know that much before. So specific use cases, specific changes in the public blockchains, specific features for uh for such use cases. So that's why like we need a larger bandwidth where we can say that okay you know uh 10,000 TPS of that is reserved only for XYZ payments right so so that's that's the thing and uh then some of the large institutions like you know from Franklin Templeton to uh bank of Santandere and you know from JP Morgans to uh the the Singapore mass here to grab many of them are connected to uh you Polygon. You can literally pay here uh for grab uh using Polygon uh today and the and and and basically like some of the things that are in the works are on the tokenizations are side are absolutely huge.

We have like few uh people coming in, few partners coming in which have trillions of dollars of asset like literally some of the biggest names in the in in the world. And uh on the stable coin uh what I wanted to say is that one interesting stack stat I told you that on USDC we are the number one blockchain daily active uh users USDT number three but u for uh u you know on the on the non USD stable coins uh polygon has like 60 to 70% uh market share and if you include non-USD non- euro we have the 90% uh market share so literally Some time back even Japanese yencoin was integrated and launched with polygon as being one of the base chains. Philippines pesos is we are the the primary blockchain. Uh your uh Indonesia's IDRX uh we are one of the primary blockchains and you know same for the Brazilian uh uh stable coin. So and then we have some view big geographies uh we which we know are are going to launch their stable coin.

So we are doing pretty strong on the stable coins and payment side. And then we have our uh product called a layer which is essentially trying to connect multiple blockchain seamlessly and trustlessly where you know these these uh these payments can scale horizontally. So on polygon poss we are growing the TPS where on one single uh you know block space we can grow the TPS but then if people want specialized block spaces they can launch their own chains and that's what I was talking talking that you know we have like three to four really large uh global players uh doing some really interesting stuff with us hopefully in the coming days it will come out. Yeah. So that's that's all about Polygon.

Uh you know we started as the side chain L2 whatever and then you know we found a lot of BMF and now we want it to be the the fundamental payment rails of of Polygon. Uh I see. So okay I'm done with the presentation. Now the reverse you know like this is the part I'm most excited about. So uh oh Renee actually left.

So I I can ask Rene is here. H the hard question for you like you know all of these payments are going to happen. Shuio is also there. Shuio the all of these you are also building a massively giga scale uh blockchain and the gas fees is still very very low right on on these blockchains. How do you expect the these blockchains to make onchain revenue?

How much onchain revenue? How will the revenue will come?

Am I getting a cameo in the top? Cello. I want to give a big shout out on uh you know Cello. Cello. They are like really really huge.

I know that the crypto only talks about the tokens which are you know pumping and whatever doing crazy stuff but Cello is like really doing amazing work on the uh Africa side. I we see like uh daily active uh users only one chain that constantly in our analytics keeps coming up up is like the isello because they are going like absolutely crazy on Nigeria. So where is the revenue will come?

I mean right back at you. I mean no you guys are doing awesome work. Look, I think um I see pay payments as the basic plumbing, right? And obviously volumes are going to grow massively orders of magnitude and so I think there is more money to be made as sort of infrastructure for that but then it's also all the value added um you know services around it right so the the better plumbing

yeah see that's why I asked the question because I have the better answer for that you know

hey go

the better answer for that is that that the uh that visa actually uh we have been doing looking into the visa uh revenue uh Renee, so visa bas No, no, no. I'm just telling the answer that uh Visa basically has $230 billion in uh you know yearly revenue. Out of that $17 million revenue comes which they market as data processing fees which is a pure like I think they charge 11 bits or 11 cents you know for every transaction. It's 11 cent fees is the base fees and that fees is essentially the transaction fees. So on blockchains if we keep scaling to these levels and of course like you know 11 cents is a very high fees for a blockchain transaction but even if we even if we do like uh I would say two orders of magnitude cheaper than that even then and obviously that scale needs to be there but you can actually still make like 170 $200 million in revenue which 99% of the blockchains are not making that itself is a pretty good uh good revenue.

So I hope that you know the blockchains like Cello, Polygon and all that who have a lot of these P2P payments and you have a lot of payment applications which are integrating into uh some of our products. uh these transaction fees revenues will keep growing even though right now they look small and obviously as Rene said that you know some other things like payment is the basic plumbing and then you have uh other kind of defy and other things you can have revs and whatnot but even that data processing fees itself which is the transaction fees is not that that small of course right now there is huge competition so everybody's undercutting the fees would be like on most of the chains is 01 or 019 9 but you know as the incumbents get more entrenched I expect the fees to go to be like at least.1 cents.1 cents so that that's what we are you know I I expect question to you I have only two minutes Jamal like you know question to you is what what's your uh point of view on these regional stable coins like I know you are very focused on Jamal is actually from polygon payment expert But he's been like you know from bridge to all the top payment companies that you know today and become legendary. Uh he's been a part of them especially early teams.

What about the regional stable coins? Do we have the mic? So what are you seeing on the regional stable coins?

Uh I think regional stable coins are incred. Should I come up there? I'll come up there. Come come. I think obviously we've seen USDC and USDT dominate the markets which is great but I think there's a long tale of underserved and under underprivileged people underbanked people that don't have access to financial services.

I think those are the most important. I think that unfortunately right now they just don't have volume and demand. But I think that's going to change dramatically in the next six months and we're starting to see a lot more traction in FX and crossber payments and remittances and things like that. Use cases that actually solve people's problems which are amazing and I think non-USD stable coins and good liquidity for that is the key building block that we need to be able to do that.

Yeah. And and I think like you know what people are not realizing on these regional stable coins is the local political uh uh you know kind of configurations that most of these geographies are now realizing at varying degrees that there is a huge amount of dollarization happening of these economies. So I was uh recently in India I think now previously the the government has been very anti-stable coin and all that but now they are able to see it from a different point of view that even though we are anti-stable coin but the USDT stable coins and USDT USD based stable coins are already changing the habits of of their users. Same thing is for Korea also. Korea even though Korea's heavily restricted everything and they have a very local market upbeat and all that everybody knows but then there also the governments are now realizing that the dollarization is happening and they will lose complete control.

Same thing we are hearing from the government in Philippines. So I expect the regional stable coins not right now because it takes time because it's regulatory based but in 6 to 12 months you will see regional stable coins as one of the bigger themes emerging into the payments. And I'm and my time is over. So, thank you everyone. Thanks for your uh attention.