Read Part 1 here: Slumdog billionaire: Incredible rags-to-riches tale of Polygons Sandeep NailwalGrowing up in poverty in a Delhi ghetto with an alcoholic father and an illiterate mother, Sandeep Nailwal has always had a fire in his belly to achieve something better. He wants to go big or go home middling success is not an option. I am not doing something small, he tells Magazine. Okay, we build some network, and it has a token. It does well for one cycle and then fades into the dawn, and I make a few million dollars for myself and retire or whatever this was not the plan. We were very clear that we will build this, we will grow the community, and well make it one of the biggest projects in the space. And thats why, in his mind, Polygon formerly Matic Network is yet to truly succeed, despite nudging a $19-billion market cap at one point and joining the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization (its currently No. 13 with a $6-billion market cap). Being in the top 10, top 15 projects brings no satisfaction to me. Its very clear in my mind that I want Polygon to have that kind of impact which Ethereum and Bitcoin have had. We have to go to the top three projects in the space. And thats only when I would say that OK Polygon has made it. Part 1 of this feature told the story of Nailwals rise from grinding poverty to going all-in on Bitcoin with $15,000 hed borrowed to fund his wedding and the difficult early days of Matic Network, where the threat of running out of funds was ever-present. By mid-2019, Matic Network had raised $5 million in a Binance initial exchange offering to keep itself afloat and had launched the alpha version of its Ethereum layer-2 sidechain. But it was slowly becoming clear that the Plasma technology it was pursuing was not the answer the market was looking for. Ideas around scaling had begun to change, and Plasmas shortcomings (TLDR: complicated, better at transferring assets than running smart contracts) had seen it lose favor. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, the research-oriented Plasma Group decided to ditch the framework altogether in favor of building an Optimstic rollup and renamed the project Optimism in early 2020. But the Matic Network white paper had outlined a Plasma-based solution with fraud proofs and a proof-of-stake checkpoint layer, and the team was determined to follow through and build it in 2019 and 2020, despite waning interest in the tech. Illustration of Sandeep Nailwal within the framework of the NFT top 100 Blockchain person project by @Minterest I will post on Behance the whole project on Monday! pic.twitter.com/09rTXRABnA — Dlanid (@DlaniD) January 8, 2022 Mainnet market crash and resurrection Just as the project was gearing up to launch its mainnet in May 2020, a worldwide pandemic and the March Black Thursday market crash intervened. Around 70% was wiped off the already paltry sub-3-cent price of MATIC within the space of 10 days. With fears of a new Great Depression gripping the world, Matic Networks future again looked in doubt. Suddenly, everything felt like it will go to zero. That shock was there for two to three months. We survived that, but what we realized is that, you know, we started with Plasma technology, and now plasma is dead. And now we are launching our mainnet. People are, like, Plasma is dead; there is no interest from the community. Nailwal says the team came to two conclusions. The first is theyd try and get as many developers and builders as possible. This was a success, as they launched their Ethereum layer 2 just in time for DeFi Summers ludicrous gas fees on layer 1. Sandeep Nailwal at Token2049. (X) The second conclusion was to never again put their eggs in one basket. We realized that we need to be multichain; we cant be relying on one particular technology, he says. Long-term Ethereum community insider Mihailo Bjelic was also thinking about a multichain future and joined the project to become something of a bridge to markets and communities from which the team felt excluded at the time. Nailwal says the projects roots in India meant it had a low profile in the Western world, where some considered it to be just like another internet scam.  Also read: Beyond crypto Zero-knowledge proofs show potential from voting to finance In early 2021, Matic Network rebranded as Polygon to highlight the change in direction. At the time, Nailwal told Cointelegraph the idea was to become Polkadot on Ethereum and to add Optimistic rollups, zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups and StarkWare-style Validiums alongside the PoS network. But Nailwal says they quickly realized that Optimistic rollups were at best an intermediate solution that wouldnt be able to scale up to have 50 chains working in the ecosystem. With ZK, you can imagine a world with […] 100,000 chains; each of them has 1,000 transactions per second (TPS); all of them combined together could be tens of millions of TPS in the whole network. And the architecture will still survive and keep scaling. Infinite scalability, unified liquidity and that is the main point for why we bet on ZK because ZK is the endgame for blockchain scaling. LOL pic.twitter.com/VrzFbeD5m7 — Sandeep Nailwal | sandeep. polygon (@sandeepnailwal) September 10, 2023 Polygon bull-run fever At the dawn of 2021, MATICs market cap was just $87 million. By mid-year, it had surged to almost $14 billion, and it was nearly $19 billion by years end. Thats in no small part due to its surging user numbers and ability to scale Ethereum. At the end of 2020, it had fewer than 1,000 daily active users, but by October that year, it had surpassed Ethereum for the first time with 566,000 users in a day and had flipped ETHs daily transactions, too, thanks to high gas fees on the L1. Suddenly, the founders were very wealthy individuals, and the project itself had the funds to embark on a major acquisition spree. In August, it snapped up the entire Hermez network for 250 million MATIC. The project became Polygon Hermez, an Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible ZK solution focused on decentralization and a proof-of-efficiency consensus. In December, it spent another $400 million in MATIC to buy the Mir team of ZK-proof experts to build Polygon Zero (ZK recursive scaling). And the acquisitions kept coming. Nailwal goes to Harvard Business School, as part of a case study about technologies that will shape the world. (Miss Polygon Twitter) We reached out to all of them. We said, You want to work with us? And I think at that point in time, whatever was like number three, number four, number five, like we acquired all of them, because number one, number two did not come with us. (But) the talent in number three, four, five teams is super, super good. The venture capital seemed to think the new plan was a winner, with Polygon raising another $450 million in early 2022, selling MATIC tokens in a raise led by Sequoia Capital India and including Tiger Global and Softbank Vision Fund. The advantages of having multiple teams taking different approaches became pretty clear. We initially kept them completely autonomous so they could pursue their own research, and they collaborated with each other. Due to that collaboration, suddenly, we got a ZK EVM, which people have thought is four or five years away. Read also Features Unstablecoins: Depegging, bank runs and other risks loom Features Tim Drapers ‘odd’ rules for investing in success He says the ZK EVM took just 12 months to develop because of the cross-pollination of ideas between these teams. Other ZK flavors developing under the Polygon umbrella include Miden (a StarkWare-like system with its own virtual machine) and Nightfall (Optimistic rollups meet zero-knowledge cryptography). Polygon Miden founder Bobbin Threadbare explains why he choose not to build a zkEVM, but to instead aimed for the stars to "expand Ethereum."@bobbinth @0xPolygonLabs @0xPolygonhttps://t.co/or6Ka8YIyY — Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) April 11, 2023 Bets each way on ZK, JavaScript is for midwits The other big advantage of having multiple teams building different solutions is it doesnt force Polygon to make the same hard choices other projects have had to make. For example, StarkWare is betting that the additional performance provided by its Cairo virtual machine will make up for the fact that its much harder to port existing Ethereum projects over to StarkEx. Sandeep as a Blockchain Buddies NFT. Most of the other projects zkSync, Linea, Scroll, etc. are making the opposite bet that less performance but easier compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine will attract projects and see their solutions win market share. Polygon is the only team with bets each way, with Polygon Miden following StarkWare with a ZK-optimised virtual machine. For his part, Nailwal thinks EVM will win in the short term, but other solutions will come into their own in the years ahead. I almost feel like EVM is like JavaScript right? he says. I remember when I was in first or second year of my engineering college JavaScript was considered to be a programming language of the midwits! But today, JS is everywhere; maybe 80% of the web is powered by JavaScript. So, EVM kind of has those effects no matter how much you say, These are the problems. Nailwal adds, however, Our plan is a 10-year-long plan. So, we have the ZK EVMs, we have Polygon Zero, but we also have Polygon Miden, which we believe is highly performant, has privacy features inbuilt […] and it will support all the programming languages. Miden founder Bobbin Threadbare told Magazine earlier this year that the Miden VM will enable users to do things like run high-quality video games and generate ZK-proofs on their home PCs they can send into the network. What they are doing, it gives me goosebumps, Nailwal says. But Miden will start blossoming in around one year. By that time, we, as the Polygon community, need to win the ZK EVM. He hints that a new token and airdrop are being considered to help with this. Sandeep Nailwal explains ZK rollups and why they are superior to Optimistic rollups. pic.twitter.com/QXrF0eEX97 — Today In Polygon (@TodayInPolygon) September 11, 2023 Ethereum upgrades to turbocharge Polygon L2s Ethereums next big upgrade, EIP-4844, which is supposed to happen sometime before the end of the year, introduces proto-danksharding to make life easier for rollups, which Nailwal says is welcome but not a game changer. I think some estimates were saying up to 200300 TPS only for the rollups. So, not a huge advantage, but its going to reduce the (gas) cost of the transactions. Full danksharding, which is several years away, according to the Ethereum Foundation, however, will multiply that improvement by the number of shards, currently expected at around 64. So, you can imagine that 64 multiplied by 200. So, there will be, like, you know, 12,000 TPS, all the rollups can support. In June this year, the project unveiled its Polygon 2.0 roadmap to become the Value layer of the internet. The vision is for a network of ZK-powered L2s that will seem like using a single chain to users thanks to a cross-chain coordination protocol. Builders can knock up their own ZK-powered L2 chain in a flash using Polygons Chain Development Kit. Im thrilled to announce our Chain Development Kit (CDK) a software suite that empowers builders to launch their own fully-featured ZK-powered L2s.Polygon CDK is the evolution of Supernets. Now builders can easily customise and deploy their own appchains, with added features pic.twitter.com/bxphLzZCIc — Sandeep Nailwal | sandeep. polygon (@sandeepnailwal) August 29, 2023 The existing PoS blockchain will become a Validium, which is one approach to dealing with the data availability problem of how to affordably store stuff on Ethereum. The roadmap will also see MATIC tokens upgraded to a new token called POL (short for Polygon) and introduce the controversial concept of restaking, which enables token stakers to earn additional rewards by helping secure other networks. The POL token is basically the hyper-productive, third-generation token. You can validate on multiple chains, and you can validate for multiple roles: You can be an aggregator, you can be a sequencer, you can be a data availability provider, and you can be a prover. So, with the same token, you can actually stake on multiple layers. Sandeep Nailwals AMA on Reddit. Restaking is controversial in the Ethereum community, with critics arguing it could turn into an unstable house of cards. But Nailwal says POL will be natively integrated into the ecosystem rather than added by third parties on top, as with Ethereums EigenLayer, which will mitigate the risks. With Polygon, risk-taking is more enshrined in the protocol; this is part of the protocol; this is how the protocol behaves, he says. If youre a validator and you are running 100 chains, and of those 100 chains you falter or you do fraud on one chain, you get slashed from all of them, he continues, adding hes not sure EigenLayer could implement that especially when they are building on top of something. I think there are a lot of nuances where ours is much simpler and easier to do. Learn More: To delve deeper into @0xPolygon 2.0 and Sandeep Nailwal's vision, explore the Polygon 2.0 roadmap, read the POL white paper, and stay tuned to Polygon Labs Blog and social channels for updates! The future of Web3 is here. Source: https://t.co/9rAJm09Hei pic.twitter.com/kkePkCKVub — Azraiel (@Azraiel1201) September 23, 2023 Polygon 2.0 is like the internet of money For Nailwal, the ultimate aim of Polygon 2.0 is to evolve crypto networks in the same way the internet evolved. The forerunner of the internet was ARPANET in the 1970s, then the invention of TCP/IP in 1983 allowed multiple networks to connect, forming an inter-network, which grew into the internet thanks to additional technologies like the Domain Name System and the World Wide Web. Its interconnectivity of all the networks, he says. This is exactly what you see is happening on blockchains. Its very hard to move your money trustlessly from one chain to another; you use these bridges, which get hacked all the time. Thats why Polygon 2.0 is not only about having infinite scalability […] But it should also make sure that that value that is being created on these hundreds of thousands of chains also is connected and seamlessly movable. As per the official list posted by US Federal Reserve Bank @federalreserve, @0xPolygon is Rank 2 after Ethereum on Tokenization/RWAs12 – Ethereum5 – Polygon1 each on few other blockchains pic.twitter.com/JwCXX9WVdd — Sandeep Nailwal | sandeep. polygon (@sandeepnailwal) September 21, 2023 He says the interoperable layer will enable value to flow between L2 chains, as well as Ethereum and potentially other layer-1 chains as well in the future if they join in. So, with this Polygon 2.0, we can achieve the same characteristics as the web has, he says. The Web3 network, whichever will win, should have infinite scalability and seamless transfer of value between these chains. Thats why Polygon 2.0 architecture has got a lot of critical acclaim. Read also Features Powers On… Why arent more law schools teaching blockchain, DeFi and NFTs? Features Exoduses and Ex-Communications: Blowing Off Steemit with Andrew Levine Future for Polygon and Sandeep Nailwal Even as the founder of a multibillion-dollar blockchain and living in luxury in Dubai, Nailwal still feels unsatisfied, as if he has yet to make the impact he feels he should. He looks up to world changers like Mark Zuckerberg, Satoshi and Vitalik Buterin a truly remarkable man. So, mere wealth is not enough. He wants to make a lasting impact. Ive never felt that Polygon has made it, he says. That part is very relentless in my mind, like there is no middle ground like this. I think Bitcoin, Ethereum only can say that they have made it nobody else, no other protocol can say that theyve made it; they can die in a matter of six to 12 months. So, Nailwal wont be happy until the Polygon ecosystem truly deserves to stand along Bitcoin and Ethereum as the bedrock of the entire industry We have to go to the top three projects in the space, he says.Read Part 1 here: Slumdog billionaire: Incredible rags-to-riches tale of Polygons Sandeep Nailwal Subscribe The most engaging reads in blockchain. Delivered once a week. Email address SUBSCRIBE

From his childhood living in a ghetto on the east bank of the Yamuna river in Dehli to launching the $6-billion Polygon blockchain, Sandeep Nailwal has an incredible rags-to-riches tale. Now happily ensconced in the futuristic, air-conditioned cityscape of Dubai, he tells Magazine he was born in a farming village in 1987 with no electricity called Ramnagar in the foothills of the Himalayas. His parents married as teenagers and then packed up home when Nailwal was just four to try their luck in Dehli. They wound up in the poor settlements on the east banks of the river, often dismissively referred to as Jamna-Paar. Imagine the Bronx in New York, Nailwal says. It was like a tier-three area. Even now, when you go there is a very kind of ghetto-ish area. An image of part of the Jamna-Paar area in Dehli. (thecitizen.in) He remembers lots of cows roaming the roads and illegal guns, though he says knives were the weapon of choice. When stuff needs to be done, then knife is the best tool, he says of the attitude. The Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire was renamed in India. Crore equates to 10 million rupees. (Amazon) Nailwal didnt attend school until he was five, in a country and period where many schools accepted children as young as two and a half, mainly because his parents didnt know any better. My father and mother both were kind of like illiterate people; they did not even realize that the kid should be sent to a school after three years or whatever. So, somebody in my area who used to have a small school said: Why is your kid not going to school? And then I started going to school. He waves at an ordinary-sized room behind him in Dubai, saying the school was almost the same size with 20 kids crammed in. Home life wasnt much better. My father became an alcoholic and got into gambling. So, he would make like $80 to $90 a month, and out of that, generally many times, he would lose all of it, says Nailwal. As a result, the family was often behind on paying the schools monthly fees, so they will make you stand outside, and its basically a very traumatic experience as a kid. Sandeep Nailwal. (Polygon) Also read: ZK-rollups are the endgame for scaling blockchains: Polygon Miden founder Experiences like that in his formative years helped Nailwal understand the kind of man he didnt want to be and forge his determination to succeed. Now the head of his own family, with a young child named Adi, he says becoming a dad made him reflect on how he hopes to do things better than his own father. But the conversation takes a surprising turn when Nailwal reveals he was actually thrust into a paternal caring role, looking after his baby brother when he was just 10. I would say in a way, my first son is my own brother, he says, his voice becoming thick with emotion. So, basically, when he was very young, he met with an accident at that point in time. So, I would say thats where my childhood ended basically because I had to take care of him. Welcoming Sandeep Nailwal, The Founder of the best infrastructure platform that has come from India ever in this space, Matic Network. From NYC Blockchain Week to Consensus, Matic is making India proud! #IDF #IndiaDappFest #BlockchainedIndia #blockchain pic.twitter.com/TdillHhvZw — Akshay Aggarwal (@howdy_akshay) June 8, 2019 Young entrepreneur Nailwal got his start in business as a teenager, selling pens from a friends shop at a decent markup in school and tutoring other students. After he graduated, he hoped to take an insanely competitive engineering exam for the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) but couldnt afford the extra tuition he needed to get an edge among 1 million students fighting for around 5,000 seats. He ended up getting accepted into the tier-two MAIT college in Dehli and took out a loan to put himself through a computer science and engineering degree. Supremely ambitious and possibly a tad overconfident, he saw his future going down two possible paths based on two notable role models: Either join a company and work his way up to become global CEO like PepsiCos Indra Nooyi or start up a revolutionary internet business like Mark Zuckerberg did with Facebook. I was inspired by all this hype around Facebook in 2004, 2005, he says, recalling the intense media coverage of Zuckerberg in India at the time. I said to myself and it was very stupid at that time like I want to build my own Facebook. Thats why I chose computer science. Sandeep Nailway in Cointelegraph Top 100 2023. (Cointelegraph) During his university degree, his talents in data analysis saw him get a gig working on electorate analysis work for the regional BJP party now Indias ruling party. After a short stint in the workforce after university, he returned to study at the National Institute for Training in Industrial Engineering (now the Indian Institute of Management) to get his MBA, where he met his wife, Harshita Singh. Although a highly regarded employee at Deloitte, and then Welspun textiles, where he was quickly promoted to head of technology for e-commerce, Nailwal never stopped working on his own projects. Hed spend all day at work, then go home and work on projects like a GPS-based system to optimize cargo vehicle deliveries or a B2B service platform for project management. Nailwal says he felt he wasnt able to pursue a startup full-time, as he felt cultural pressure and a responsibility to get his family out of the one-bedroom rental they were in and into their own home. And nobody would give a home loan to a 27-year-old with intermittent income from a fledgling business. But Harshita one day said, You will never be happy this way, he recalls. She said, I dont care about my own house; we can stay and rent. That was a very big burden away from me. In his last month of work, he borrowed $15,000 so he could afford to pay for a wedding one day, and then started to work on the B2B services marketplace full time, which he ran for a year until he realized it would never scale up the way he wanted. Bitcoin revolution Instead, he looked to get into deep tech, first considering then abandoning AI as it was beyond his mathematical abilities. Bitcoin was starting to get some press at that time due to the upcoming halving in 2016. Nailwal had heard about Bitcoin back in 2013 but initially wrote it off as some sort of Ponzi scheme. After discovering it had lasted the distance, he thought it worthy of further investigation. Reading the beautifully written white paper, he realized: Oh, this is big this is the next revolution of humanity. Converted, he was desperate to get skin in the game and, over the next three months, tipped the $15,000 wedding loan into Bitcoin at $800 a piece. Looking back, he says it was an insanely risky move given his finances at the time. The level of FOMO I had, it would have been exactly the same if I was one year late. And I would have done the same thing at $20,000. Yeah, and I would have lost all that money, and it would have been really, really problematic for me. But as a builder, he wanted blockchain to be about more than just payments, which led him to Ethereums full programmability. I was like this is the thing, this is the thing I want, he says. Sandeep Nailwal and Anurag Arjun in the early days of Matic. (Twitter) Throwing himself into the space, Nailwal founded a blockchain services startup called Scope Weaver in 2016 and became well-known as a moderator on local Ethereum forums. Thats where he met a hardcore programmer named Jaynti JD Kanan, who kept suggesting he spend his $400,000 Bitcoin stash investing in his startup ideas. Initially, Nailwal wasnt keen, but then Ethereum started to struggle with its own popularity during the 2017 bullrun, most notably after a 600% increase in transaction fees from CryptoKitties made the blockchain all but unusable.Also read: Ethereum is eating the world You only need one internet Kanan suggested they work on fixing Ethereums scaling problems by developing the layer-2 Plasma technology proposed by Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Poon in August that year, which helped offload transactions to faster and less crowded side chains. Nailwal agreed and helped raise $30,000 in seed funding to build a product, with Anurag Arju joining as another co-founder and Matic Network officially launching in early 2018. The project was bootstrapped on the smell of an oily rag. All up, he says, the Matic Network survived for its first two years on $165,000 of total funding. It's #ThrowbackThursday!Rewinding to August 2018, we delve into an insightful discussion with Sandeep Nailwal, CEO of Polygon Labs, who foresaw the potential of $MATIC in its infancy.Sandeep's foresight was evident as he led conversations on crypto interoperability way back pic.twitter.com/k2hGBmn2wO — Token Metrics (@tokenmetricsinc) September 14, 2023 Matic Network nearly dies Having watched endless projects raise millions with vaporware initial coin offerings, the team was determined not to launch a token sale until they had a product. They would come to regret this decision bitterly. Launching directly into the great crypto market crash of early 2018, the ICO market was strong for a few months after but petered out by the time their runway was growing short. We kind of ignored that opportunity, he says. Which was really, really painful later on. Read also Features Blockchain games arent really decentralized but thats about to change Features Inside the Iranian Bitcoin mining industry We had this huge opportunity of raising $10 million. We left it; we did not do it. And now we have no money to build. I remember that one time I had to almost beg one of the other founders of one project from India to grant us $50,000 so that we can run for three more months. Shortly before his marriage, Nailwal traveled to pitch to a Chinese fund that seemed keen to invest $500,000 in the struggling project. He recalls being delighted two days before his marriage, with a house full of guests, that everything was going to be OK. His wedding to his wife Harshita Singh. (Facebook) Everybodys happy, and Im also content that we will get $500,000 now (for Matic Network), and suddenly, Bitcoin goes from $6,000 to $3,000. That fund after that simply said, No, we will not invest now because we were going to invest 100 BTC; now the value is half, so we are not investing. Even worse, the projects treasury was still in Bitcoin and had also halved in value. That was a very traumatic experience for me around that point because I should not have speculated on this money, which is the companys Treasury, he says, meaning that he should have cashed out or turned it into stablecoins. So, I was really angry at myself, and this thing went away. By that time, we had like seven, eight, 10 people [in Matic]. They are also [attending] my marriage, and we are enjoying it and all that but deep down, I know that shit, we might not have this team in the next two, three months. His wedding to his wife Harshita Singh. (Facebook) Binance is actually diligent Toward the end of 2018 and early 2019, the opportunity came up to raise funds in an initial exchange offering on Binance Launchpad. While the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission thinks Binance is a bunch of cowboys who will accept any old bus pass as Know Your Customer verification, Nailwal says the exchanges due diligence was possibly too diligent. Nobody believed that there could be a protocol coming from Indian co-founders. And there were two or three projects which turned out to be scams, and everybody was very wary, he says. Matic ended up going through eight months of evaluation before getting the nod to raise $5.6 million in $300 lots to the winners of a ballot. Nailwal says, At that point in time, $5 million was a very good amount. If Binance had said, You can raise $1.5 million or $1 million, we would even settle for that because we had a struggle for survival. But once we launched on Binance, things became much better. Sandeep Nailwal from Matic Network! @maticnetwork @sandeepnailwal #MaticNetwork #PoweredByMatic $Matic #BTC pic.twitter.com/NOEpWiNqFB — My Key (@mikey_bto) May 2, 2020 That marked a turning point for Matic, which survived the 2020 pandemic market crash and grew from fewer than 1,000 daily users at the end of that year to surpass Ethereums user numbers with 550,000 in October 2021. It also flipped Ethereums transaction numbers that year, too. Rebranding as Polygon, it surged from a market cap of $87 million at the start of 2021 to almost $19 billion by the end of the year. Nailwal was now one of the richest and most successful people in the cryptocurrency industry. But he wasnt satisfied, by a long shot. Being in top 10, top 15 projects brings no satisfaction to me. Its very clear in my mind that I want Polygon to have that kind of impact which Ethereum and Bitcoin have had. Look out for part two, which tells the story of how Polygon became one of the key players in the space and Nailwals plans to make it a top-3 project.  Subscribe The most engaging reads in blockchain. Delivered once a week. Email address SUBSCRIBE

The market has already entered the first phase of a major rally, with the number of people buying crypto trickling upward which is expected to accelerate early next year, say the heads of Australia’s largest crypto exchanges. Independent Reserve CEO Adrian Przelozny told Cointelegraph he expects market activity to see an uptick in early 2024 and is hiring to build infrastructure before that happens. “We’re just doing everything we can to get ready for a bull market because we know that when the bull market comes, it happens very fast,” he said. “You need to make sure you have the processes, people, and infrastructure in place so when your business triples overnight, you can handle it.” “I think the next two years are going to be good. Strap yourselves in.” BTC Markets chief Caroline Bowler said market conditions had grown more bullish over the year, with a general recovery that kicked off in January. Bowler added while the trajectory of market gains hadn’t exactly been linear, the industry-wide growth in both asset prices and tech applications were reasons to be confident. “The current deployment of ‘dry powder,' an influx of new users, and an uptick in trading volumes further support our assessment that we are in the early stages of a bull market.” Tommy Honan, Swyftx’s product strategy head, said his exchange had begun to see an uptick in buying activity and is moving quickly to shore up direct debit functionality — a recent pain point for Australia’s crypto scene as Australia’s ‘Big Four’ banks have limited or outright banned deposits to some exchanges. Honan ruled out fear of missing out — FOMO — as the reason for the activity uptick, instead highlighting that market fundamentals had become more attractive to investors who took the sideline during the bear market. “All our indicators are flashing green at the moment. We’re seeing a significant number of customers come back to the market after periods of inactivity during the bear market. The market is waking up, but the truth is no one knows where we’re at in the cycle.” Kraken Australia managing director Jonathon Miller was on the side of caution and said it can be difficult to tell what phase the market is in. “There’s a common misconception that the crypto markets are either in a bull market or bear market. In reality, there’s a large gray area between these two,” he said. Miller admitted that compared to this time last year, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic, specifically looking to next year’s Bitcoin halving and Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade, which he believes is already starting to pique attention from institutional and retail investors “The expanding institutional appetite for crypto assets is often underlooked. Yes, the markets are currently focused on ETF filings for Bitcoin and Ether, but in the last year, we’ve seen a revival of interest from many institutional clients looking for exposure to this emerging asset class,” he added. Binance Australia general manager Ben Rose didn’t want to make the call on whether a bull market had arrived but noted new registrations and trading activity on the Australian arm of Binance had increased in recent months. Rose said Binance Australia was focused on educating users ahead of a potential rally and ensuring users avoid FOMO buying. “We asked a lot of exiting customers about the reasons they got into crypto, and a quarter of them said that seeing others succeed with crypto was the main reason. That’s the single biggest driver. So FOMO in crypto is a real thing,” he explained. Rose said the key to retaining users throughout the next potential market surge was ensuring that people didn’t get trampled during a market frenzy. “Price is one thing that will unlock interest, but you want people to be able to onboard in a sustainable and responsible way so it’s not just a one-off,” he said. “Sure price might be the reason they first look at crypto, but ultimately they’re in there because they understand the benefits of it and it becomes part of how they manage finances.” Magazine: Slumdog billionaire — Incredible rags-to-riches tale of Polygon’s Sandeep Nailwal