Polygon co-founder addresses criticisms the project is just as bad as Solana

Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal went on the defense against “ecosystems who are feeling defeated & jealous.”

The comment was motivated by a tweet from Mert Mumtaz, the co-founder, and CEO of Helius Labs, who pointed out Polygon had received more VC money than Solana and had used the funding to “pay people to use the chain and acquire companies.”

Polygon has received over 130M more in funding than Solana

Polygon uses the money to pay people to use the chain and acquire companies

Solana uses it to improve the tech and build the community and has *thousands* of more nodes

do with this information what you will pic.twitter.com/ZOG6vs63hR

— mert | Helius (, ) (@0xMert_) December 6, 2022

Helius creates application programming interfaces (APIs) to simplify on-chain data for Solana developers. The idea behind this is to make Solana project development quicker and more efficient.

Polygon is worse than Solana, claims Mumtaz

Since the FTX collapse, the narrative around Solana has taken a big hit.

Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) had backed Solana to usurp Ethereum. This extended to SBF developing the SOL-based Serum DEX to bolster the chain’s reach and appeal.

Bankruptcy filings show the exchange held $982 million worth of SOL on its balance sheet. However, the recently appointed CEO John Ray III, who was brought in to “clean up” the company, said the complete failure of corporate controls he inherited meant he lacked confidence in the accuracy of the financial statements.

Mumtaz thought it relevant to point out Polygon had received $50 million from FTX’s sister company Alameda, yet does not suffer the same put-downs as Solana.

What’s more, on the primary criticisms leveled at Solana, including its conflict of interest via VCs and centralization issues, the situation is much worse when the same arguments are applied to Polygon, said Mumtaz.

it's absurd that somehow Solana gets painted as the centralized VC chain while Polygon literally has 1) 10x the VC involvement 2) has thousands of less validators 3) can literally be stopped by the core team at any time 4) still has much less TPS while being 100x more centralized

— mert | Helius (, ) (@0xMert_) December 6, 2022

Nailwal disagrees

In response to Mumtaz, Nailwal said “Polygon won” not because of wielding VC money to buy favor; instead, it “won” because of the “power & pull of Ethereum.”

He said that entities want to build on Ethereum, “not on half-baked L1s.” Put simply, Polygon’s attraction boils down to it providing access to the Ethereum chain.

Addressing the matter of VC influence, Mailwal said investments were made at a time when Polygon was valued at $8 billion. This meant VCs controlled around just 5% of the MATIC token supply.

The thread ended with Nailwal conceding that no ecosystem is perfect. But he prefers to focus on improving and encouraging others, rather than bad-mouthing the competition.

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