PANews reported on November 26 that according to Cryptoslate, Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron attributed the Polygon network's difficulty in gaining wider adoption in the field to racial prejudice against its co-founder Sandeep Nailwal. In a post published on the X platform on November 25, Boiron hinted that Nailwal's Indian ancestry led to prejudice and hindered the recognition of Polygon, even though it has been widely used throughout the blockchain industry. He wrote: "If Sandeep was not Indian, Web3 would have accepted Polygon on a large scale, rather than treating it as a second-class citizen even when Polygon's proof of stake is more commonly used than all blockchains combined."
When a user in the cryptocurrency community argued that Indians have held important positions in major global tech companies, Boiron responded that geography also plays a role. He pointed out that Indians in Western countries like Sreeram Kannan of EigenLayer face much less prejudice than those working in India. Meanwhile, the broader Web3 community remains divided on the issue. Some users believe that the challenges faced by Polygon stem from competition from the emerging Ethereum Layer2 network or the network's own strategies, rather than bias.
