Vitalik's Post Appreciating Sandeep and Polygon's Contribution to the Ethereum Ecosystem

On October 21st, Vitalik Buterin published an article on the X platform, highly praising Polygon and its co-founder Sandeep Nailwal. He stated that they have played a crucial role in the Ethereum ecosystem. Vitalik mentioned that Polygon made early and significant investments in ZK-EVM research and development, drove the technical implementation of the Jordi team, and built infrastructure such as AggLayer. He also commended Sandeep for his contribution to public health in India through the CryptoRelief project and his voluntary return of $190 million in SHIB donations, enabling the Balvi open-source pandemic response project to move forward. Vitalik expressed the hope that Polygon would directly adopt mature ZK technology in the future to provide complete security for its PoS chain. Previously, Polygon CEO Sandeep Nailwal responded to Ethereum core developer Péter Szilágyi's open letter and bluntly stated that he had begun to "doubt his loyalty to Ethereum." He mentioned that Polygon has never received support from the Ethereum Foundation or core team but has instead been marginalized for a long time, stating that the Ethereum community has long been in chaos. Sandeep pointed out that if Polygon were to declare itself as an L1 chain, its valuation might increase by 2-5 times. However, the Ethereum community neither acknowledges Polygon as an L2 nor is willing to include it in the "Ethereum Beta" narrative. Despite this, he said he would still take a "last gamble" to revive the L2 narrative and emphasized that "Ethereum remains the only sustainable democratic system in the long run."