Polygon co-founder steps down, will contribute ‘from the sidelines’

Jaynti Kanani, the co-founder of Polygon, announced that he has stepped back “from the day-to-day grind” on the project for the first time in six years.

In an Oct. 4 X (formerly Twitter) thread, Kanani said he planned to focus “on new adventures” while contributing to Polygon “from the sidelines”. He, along with software engineers including Sandeep Nailwal, Anurag Arjun, and Mihailo Bjelic helped found the Matic network in 2017, which was later rebranded to Polygon.

“Man this makes me emotional,” said Nailwal in response to the announcement. “What a ride we’ve had together brother. But its just the start for Polygon, i wish we could’ve done more for longer together in this crazy journey that is Polygon. But hey, you got to do what you got to do.”

After kickstarting Polygon in 2017, around 6 months back, I decided to step back from the day-to-day grind.

I’m more confident in Polygon’s bright future and passionate community. I’ll be focusing on new adventures while still cheering and contributing to Polygon from the…

— Jaynti Kanani (JD) (@jdkanani) October 4, 2023

Related: Polygon co-founder: $1B bet on ZK-rollups paying off

Polygon’s website listed 10 co-founders of the protocol, some of whom are still involved in various side projects on the platform. Arjun departed Polygon in March with the spin-off of blockchain data availability protocol Avail.

Polygon Labs has begun accepting improvement proposals aimed at transitioning the network to Polygon 2.0 since plans were announced in June. The new ecosystem will use zero-knowledge proofs and be made up of four protocol layers focused on staking, interop, execution and proving. At the time of publication, developers were still working on “bringing Polygon 2.0 to life”.

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