Polygon Labs co-founder Sandeep Nailwal assumes new ZK role

Establishing the new role, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal will increase focus on growing ZK solutions, including Polygon CDK.

Polygon Labs, a company behind the Ethereum-linked blockchain network Polygon, is doubling down on zero-knowledge (ZK) solutions with a new key structural change.

On May 29, Polygon Labs formally announced a new expanded role for its co-founder and executive chairman, Sandeep Nailwal, as chief business officer (CBO).

To establish the new role, Nailwal will increase focus on growing Polygon-developed tools related to ZK-proofs — cryptographic techniques that allow one party to prove awareness of a specific value to another without disclosing the actual value.

Nailwal will particularly work with Polygon CDK, a ZK-based software toolkit designed to enable developers to create new layer-2 (L2) chains on Ethereum and transition between chains.

The executive will also build the foundation for developer and tech integrations of the two-component decentralized protocol AggLayer, which launched in February 2024.

Nailwal’s formal appointment as CBO follows several months of overseeing strategy and execution as executive chairman during the past two years at Polygon. The announcement notes that the transition is now almost complete and operationalized under CEO Marc Boiron.

“Sandeep’s day-to-day execution on the most important projects remains invaluable to us,” Boiron said. He mentioned that Nailwal has been actively engaged with developers and enterprises throughout his career in the industry, including since the inception of the Polygon network.

“Polygon Labs is in the midst of building incredible, transformational technology that will provide developers and enterprises with countless opportunities to scale quickly and securely while having access to liquidity,” Nailwal said.

Related: Layer-3 network Degen Chain hasn’t produced a block in 53 hours

Launched in 2017, Polygon is a blockchain platform that aims to create a scalable multi-chain blockchain system compatible with Ethereum.

Operating on the Ethereum blockchain, Polygon offers scaling technologies to ease congestion, accelerate transaction speed and remove other adoption complexities.

With ZKs and L2s, blockchain developers can significantly enhance scalability by processing transactions away from the main Ethereum blockchain.

For example, some Ethereum L2 protocols saw a 99% drop in transaction fees following the network’s Dencun upgrade in March, while the mainnet Ethereum network was overly congested.

Magazine: Historic turning point for crypto, Ethereum ETFs, FIT21, Trump: Hodler’s Digest, May 19-25