One of India's first crypto billionaires: Polygon co-founder entered the industry because of a book

Interviewee: Anurag Arjun (@anuragarjun), Founder of AvailProject, Co-founder of Polygon

Original article by: Emily (@cl_lyt), SmartDeer

"If you have a million dollars and someone comes to borrow money from you, would you lend it to him? If this person is your good friend, someone you know well, you might lend it. But if this is just the 50th person you've met this year and you don't know him well, would you consider lending?" In answering how to popularize blockchain, Anurag Arjun, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of the blockchain project Polygon, asked me this question. Polygon is a top ten blockchain public chain project by market capitalization, and Anurag is one of the first crypto billionaires in India. (Note: Based on Polygon's recent market capitalization, Anurag is now a millionaire in dollars.)

My answer might be the same as many others: I probably wouldn't lend.

After hearing this expected answer, Anurag smiled and continued to explain that there is a fundamental issue of trust here. If you don't know him and can't trust him, you naturally wouldn't lend him money. However, in reality, when everyone deposits money in the bank, that money is also lent out by the bank to someone you completely don't know and don't trust.

The distributed storage and accounting characteristics of blockchain allow you to break free from roles like banks and enable interactions between individuals without the need for a trust foundation. Everyone can see everything happening on the chain, creating a "Trustless World."

Building a Trustless World has been Anurag's belief since he entered the blockchain industry in 2017. Polygon (formerly Matic Network) is Anurag's first entrepreneurial project in the blockchain industry, currently valued at about $7 billion, and he is also listed among the first crypto billionaires in India.

Born into a middle-class family, Anurag, who now possesses billions in wealth, did not "lie flat" to "enjoy life," but chose to start from scratch again, developing his new project Avail, a modular blockchain project focused on data availability, aimed at providing developers with the ability to build customizable and scalable applications.

If Elon Musk's ultimate goal is to promote human progress through energy transformation and interstellar exploration, then Anurag's ultimate goal is to build a decentralized trustless world. He believes that blockchain-based Web3 technology will change some existing operational logic in the future, just as the internet has changed people's lifestyles.

A Night Reading "Mastering Bitcoin"

In 2017, Anurag began his second entrepreneurial venture, at which point he did not fully understand blockchain technology. His entrepreneurial direction was to provide cash flow-based loan services and financial technology solutions related to Goods and Services Tax (GST).

In a shared workspace, he met Jaynti Kanani, who was also just starting his entrepreneurial journey. Both young men, with similar technical backgrounds and experience in the fintech industry, hit it off, discussing their entrepreneurial ideas and the possibility of collaboration. "At that time, he wanted to bring me into his company, and I wanted to bring him into my startup."

Jaynti's entrepreneurial direction was centered on blockchain technology, providing expansion and infrastructure for existing blockchain networks. At that time, Jaynti had already earned some income through cryptocurrency and believed it was a very promising field.

This was not Anurag's first encounter with the concept of blockchain. A year before meeting Jaynti, the central bank of India wanted Anurag's team to research the possibility of using blockchain for inter-bank accounting to avoid lending fraud caused by unsynchronized ledgers, such as borrowing money from two banks using the same proof. However, before Anurag could report back after his research, the project was halted by the central bank.

These two mutually appreciative individuals found themselves in a stalemate, unable to convince each other, and the breakthrough came from a book—"Mastering Bitcoin." This book is widely regarded as an authoritative guide to learning about Bitcoin and blockchain technology, detailing how Bitcoin works, its history, and its underlying technologies, including blockchain, cryptography, and the decentralized nature of the Bitcoin network.

After Anurag got this book, he stayed up all night: "I still remember finishing the whole book in one night."

Before reading this book, Anurag only knew that blockchain could be used for inter-institutional accounting, but this book made him realize that it is a technology that does not require any centralized institution, representing a complete innovation: "To me at that time, Bitcoin felt like magic; it cleverly combined cryptoeconomics and cryptography. In this system, you don't need to fully trust a single individual but rely on a permissionless network composed of many participants. These participants join the network, run nodes, operate mining software, and effectively maintain the network."

The three founders of Polygon, Anurag is on the far left

"Before that, no technology could operate without a trusted entity," Anurag believes that the technology of Bitcoin itself is very clever, and its birth during the 2008 financial crisis is also of great significance. "After reading this book, I felt that this technology contained infinite possibilities, and it became my opportunity to enter the industry."

Navigating Bull and Bear Markets to Build Products

Anurag joined Jaynti to co-found Polygon (formerly Matic Network) in 2017. That year, the cryptocurrency market was in a bull market, with Bitcoin rising from less than $1,000 at the beginning of the year to nearly $20,000 at its peak, becoming a wealth code for some traders. Countless young people, hoping for financial freedom, flocked in, trading around the clock: "At that time, many people were trading 24 hours a day, while our team was one of the few focused on writing code."

When asked why he didn't become a trader, Anurag admitted that he wasn't good at trading. He had traded in traditional financial markets for six months and lost money. Since entering the blockchain industry in 2017, he has hardly bought any cryptocurrency, focusing more on investing in startups: "I care more about the product and technology itself, specifically how to increase the usability of blockchain technology."

If the birth of Bitcoin made decentralization possible, then the birth of Ethereum enriched the decentralized ecosystem. Bitcoin is a pure accounting network, while Ethereum provides developers with the foundation to create and run decentralized applications. Polygon was created on the basis of Ethereum, aiming to solve major issues such as high transaction fees and slow processing speeds on the Ethereum network.

This sounds very practical, and indeed many projects have been incubated today, but at the beginning of their entrepreneurial journey, they were an unknown and untrusted Indian team. At that time, the mainstream perception of Indian teams in the crypto space was that they were "scam projects that exploit investors," and no major investment institutions were willing to invest in the team. Their first funding came from family and friends, totaling only $200,000.

To make matters worse, in the second year of their startup (2018), the crypto market entered a bear market, making fundraising even more difficult.

"At that time, we approached over seventy investors, and not a single one was willing to invest in us," Anurag recalled. "Finally, one investor was willing to invest, and we even chased him to his vacation spot, but the next day Bitcoin suddenly dropped to $3,000, and the investor immediately withdrew his investment commitment."

This may have been the hardest year for Polygon; at its worst, the company couldn't pay employees' salaries for the next month. Anurag was not afraid of the bear market but was afraid of "letting down the good team he had gathered." Ultimately, a friend from the crypto space lent the team $50,000, which "saved" them.

Funding was not the only issue. Because they were relatively unknown, attracting developers to enter the ecosystem was also not easy. As a founder, Anurag personally stepped in to help developers in the ecosystem solve bugs, even if their project's underlying code was not well written: "At that time, there were probably hundreds of such groups helping developers. As long as the other party showed any interest in our network, we would reach out and provide support personally."

Since users came from all over the world, this customer service-like work was extremely time-consuming, almost every day from dawn to dusk. Anurag did not feel tired because the team desperately needed users: "We could have done a nine-to-five job, but this is the path we chose."

This down-to-earth, grassroots strategy helped Polygon accumulate early users. By the end of 2020, Anurag was still personally answering user questions, joking that "perhaps it's because we are Indians."

Do Something Big

On March 16, 2023, Anurag posted a series of tweets on Twitter, officially announcing his departure from Polygon and that he would focus all his energy on the new project Avail, which was spun off from Polygon. Avail is a modular blockchain project aimed at providing developers with the ability to build customizable and scalable applications, starting from foundational architectural design.

Existing foundational networks like Ethereum do not handle data availability satisfactorily. Although some teams are working on improvements in this area, the cost and time to change for a network that already has over 3,000 projects and a large amount of data are significant, requiring at least three to five years.

"Blockchain development won't wait for you for five years," Anurag said. "And we are fortunate to start from scratch, separating consensus, security, data availability, and execution to build a network that emphasizes data availability from the ground up, bringing more convenience to on-chain developers."

The idea for Avail was born in 2020, personally led by Anurag, and established within Polygon. Now, more than half a year after becoming independent from Polygon, Avail has completed two rounds of internal testing, and the final round of the testnet has been launched, with audits for the official launch already underway.

In this new entrepreneurial journey from zero to one, Anurag also demonstrated his viewpoint through action: not all blockchain projects are scams that exploit investors.

When faced with the sharp question of "the bad reputation of the crypto space," Anurag pondered for a moment and pointed out that all technologies go through a chaotic phase in their early stages. From the early portal websites to today's blockchain and AI, all technologies have seen so-called scam projects at their inception, but projects that are committed to doing solid work will eventually be recognized. Just like the former Amazon and today's Ethereum.

Currently, the early-stage blockchain technology is still very "difficult to use," and it is quite challenging for developers to truly develop applications on the blockchain. Although Anurag is confident that blockchain will change people's lifestyles in the future, he does not have a very specific vision of what blockchain apps will look like.

He likes to compare the current blockchain to early mobile apps. When mobile phones first appeared, developers could not have imagined that people would later be able to take photos, hail taxis, or even conveniently video chat with people across the ocean through mobile apps. All of these were created based on the gradual upgrading of infrastructure.

Building a more suitable infrastructure for developers, allowing more developers to enter the ecosystem for development, is what Anurag, an Indian entrepreneur who has started three businesses and has been known by everyone around him for wanting to "do something big" since college, needs to focus on at this stage.