 
 
Sandeep Nailwal has slammed the Ethereum community for downplaying Polygon’s contributions to the wider network. The Polygon co-founder joins a list of industry experts hitting the network hard this week over emerging issues. While the blockchain remains under fire, ETH enthusiasts pointed to the gains made over the last decade.
Polygon Deserves Ethereum Recognition
In a recent social media post, Nailwal protested against the treatment of Polygon by the Ethereum community. According to him, the Ethereum layer 2 network has made several contributions, many of which have gone unnoticed. The potential of Ethereum drew Nailwal to crypto as he sought to build a new ideal financial ecosystem, unlike many who backed Bitcoin.
Nailwal noted that over the years, he has received direct support from the Ethereum Foundation, yet he still feels a strong sense of loyalty despite the cost.
“NGL, I’ve started questioning my loyalty toward Ethereum. I did not come into crypto because of Bitcoin but because of Ethereum. I also have a lot of gratitude toward @VitalikButerin — someone I looked up to as an ideal for how things should be built in this world. Though I/we never got any direct support from the EF or the Ethereum CT community — in fact, the reverse.”
Furthermore, he pointed to a lack of a reward system where founders question what they do in the ecosystem. This has made other devs taunt him for not walking away and pivoting Polygon to a layer 1 network. Blockchain developer Akshay leaned toward Polygon in the early days before contributing to Solana due to the socialist nature of the Ethereum ecosystem.
 
“At worst, people have started questioning my fiduciary and moral duty toward Polygon. It’s widely believed that if Polygon ever decided to call itself an L1, it would probably be valued 2–5× higher than it is today. Like, think about it, Hedera Hashgraph an L1, is valued higher than Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Scroll combined,” he added.
In a swift reaction, Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin acknowledged Polygon’s contribution to the network, pointing to the largest prediction network and the CryptoRelief program. Buterin added that Polygon has hosted several applications in need of high scalability and built the required infrastructure for proof aggregation. Nailwal’s comments followed a similar criticism from Peter Szilagyi, an Ethereum insider. Szilagyi slammed the network’s growing centralization concerns.