Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal has publicly questioned his “loyalty to Ethereum,” a rare and unflattering display of self-deprecation across the ecosystem that drew an immediate response from key contributors, investors, and ultimately Vitalik Buterin himself. The quest was sparked. The exchange, which has unfolded on
Is the Ethereum Foundation a ‘shit show’?
“After reading this post from Peter, I realized it was time for me to speak out, too,” Nailwal wrote, referring to core developer Péter Szilágyi’s decision on October 19 to publish a letter he had sent to EF management about 18 months ago. Nailwal, who counts Ethereum and Buterin as his entry point and inspiration, said his long-standing moral loyalty to Ethereum has come at a personal and corporate cost: “Although I/we have never received direct support from EF or the Ethereum CT community, in fact the opposite is true. However, I believe in Polygon’s valuation, “I have always felt a moral loyalty to Ethereum, even though it probably costs billions of dollars.”
Nailwal's criticism is cultural and financial. “The Ethereum community as a whole has been a bullshit show for quite some time,” he wrote, adding that repeated public crises have left key contributors “questioning what they are doing here.” He urged his friends, including AkshayBD (Chief Marketing Officer of the Solana Foundation and co-founder of SuperteamDAO), to declare Polygon L1 and “get out of this circus,” despite the community's “socialist behavior” despite its contributions “because of some arbitrary 'technical definition.' Claimed to be trolling Polygon.
He argued that the market structure punishes Polygon for rejecting the L1 label. “It is widely believed that if Polygon had decided to call itself L1, it would probably be worth two to five times more than it is now,” he said, pointing to a now widely discussed comparison. “If you think about it, the value of Hedera Hashgraph an L1 is higher than Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Scroll combined.”
According to Nailwal, classification disputes have real-world implications for recognition and index inclusion. He argued that “Polygon PoS effectively relies on Ethereum, while Katana, XLayer, and dozens of other chains in the Polygon ecosystem are true L2.” However, “the Ethereum community ensures that Polygon will never be considered L2 and will not be included in the market-recognized Ethereum Beta.” He added that a “prominent Polygon stakeholder” scolded “you can’t get Polygon from GrowthPie, which refuses to list the Polygon chain,” and attributed Polymarket’s success to “Ethereum,” even though “Polygon itself is not Ethereum.”
Despite the frustration, Nailwal said he would once again try to renegotiate technical and social agreements on expansion. “I'm going to make a final push to revive the whole L2 story. Please bear with me for a few more weeks.” He said, “Ethereum is a democracy. In any democratic system, everyone eventually gets dissatisfied. But in the long run, it's still the only system that truly works.”
The thread drew immediate response from prominent builders. Andre Cronje, who said he spent “over 700 ETH on deployment and ETH infrastructure” during his Ethereum days, explicitly questioned EF's support priorities. “I tried contacting EF, but no response, no BD support, no grants, no support, no retweets,” Cronje wrote. Comparing his experience to Fantom's Sonic ecosystem, he said he was “confused” to see the team there receiving BD support, grants, TVLs, audits and marketing, and asked: “If not the core builders Peter & geth, and the loudest L2 supporters (Sandeep and Polygon), then where does it go?”
Tommy Shaughnessy of Delphi Ventures explained this problem as a lack of compensation for irreplaceable talent. “The Ethereum Foundation should pay developers like professional athletes. (…) The Ethereum Foundation is basically paying people to walk away. The best developers should be paid like professional athletes.”
Vitalik Buterin reacts
Buterin personally thanked Nailwal and Polygon for their contributions a few hours later, while also providing technical direction. “We sincerely appreciate @sandeepnailwal’s personal contributions and @0xPolygon’s incredibly valuable role in the Ethereum ecosystem,” he wrote, adding that he was grateful for Polygon’s Polymarket hosting role, and its initial and resource-intensive bet on the ZK-EVM proof (“Jordi Baylina team participation”), infrastructure for proof aggregation via AggLayer, “an application that requires a high level of scalability.”
In response to Polygon's key technical question of whether security guarantees can and should be strengthened by modern zero-knowledge proofs, Buterin argued that the market has evolved toward a separation of concerns between L2 operators and ZK proof experts.
“It is very difficult to be both the best L2 and the best ZK team. They are very different skill sets,” he wrote, citing standalone ZK providers, urging Polygon to “take any off-the-shelf ZK technology, which is now significantly better, and apply it to the PoS chain to get full phase 1 and subsequent phase 2 guarantees on Ethereum L1.”
He emphasized how far the economy has moved. “It has been proven that the cost is around $0.0001/tx.” And many of the L2 team said, “I am very surprised when I tell you the latest numbers… the latest ZK-EVM and live projects like @Lighter_xyz debunk the idea that ZK is not viable at hyperscale.”
At press time, ETH was trading at $3,873.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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