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Without a doubt, one of the most exciting technological innovations this decade has seen is the evolution of blockchain. Since its inception, it has revolutionized digital commerce, technology and brought about the possibility of near-instant financial transactions. The global economic model is undergoing a huge transformation and being one of the frontrunners in technology, the Indian entrepreneurship industry is adapting blockchain technology. Here are four entrepreneurs from India who are leveraging the power of blockchain.
Sandeep Nailwal, Co-Founder and COO of Matic Networks
Nailwal co-founded Matic Network in 2018 and worked with his team to make it a global leader in blockchain space with a $200 million market cap. Today, Matic Network is one of the fastest growing DApps (decentralized applications) platforms enabling tonnes of applications utilization of blockchains in their business models and creating community-centric businesses.
Coming from a top B-School in India, Nailwal has been involved in multiple ventures ranging from health and fitness, retail e-commerce to productized B2B services. This has given him a breadth of experience which has been instrumental in the success of his efforts. He has been working with various government institutions (especially in India), helping them utilize blockchain technology in a way that creates a more corruption-free, transparent, efficient and inclusive environment for our billion-people strong country. He, along with the Matic Network team, are widely regarded as the ones who have fuelled the Indian blockchain developer ecosystem to its current heights due to continuous efforts in building the blockchain development community in India with hackathons, developer grants, mentorship, investments, etc.
Matic is a leading layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum. It aims to provide mass adoption ready infrastructure to DApp developers and is recognized as the protocol project that put India on the global blockchain leadership map. It is one of the fastest-growing DApps platform on the blockchain.
Ish Goel, Founding Member of PlotX
Goel, a TEDx Speaker, has been an entrepreneur for fourteen years now. He entered the blockchain ecosystem back in 2016, won the London Blockchain Week Hackathon in 2017, and served as the CTO of Nexus Mutual for three years. A renowned name in the Indian blockchain circuit, Goel is now one of the founders at PlotX.io, Ethereum’s first AMM-driven prediction market protocol.
PlotX is a DeFi prediction market protocol. It provides traders with an alternative for gaining exposure to crypto assets other than market buying; instead they can enter prediction markets, where they can earn yield for correctly determining how a particular asset will move. PlotX raised $2.7 million in a token sale that concluded in September 2020 and is headed for a main net launch in October. The PlotX sale was oversubscribed fifteen times. Nearly 10,000 predictions have been made using 4,000 kETH by over 2,400 unique addresses on the PlotX Alpha since August 2020.
Siddhartha Dutta, Founder and CEO of Marlin Labs
A computer science graduate from IIT-Bombay, Dutta began his blockchain journey in 2014, quitting his job at Microsoft and moving to Singapore to join a fledgling research project at the National University of Singapore. At the height of the scaling debate, the team developed the first implementation of a sharded blockchain called Zilliqa reaching a market capitalization of over $1.4 billion.
Dutta now spends his time between San Francisco and Bangalore leading a growing team of engineers and researchers from MIT and IITs solving networking challenges plaguing Web 3. The layer-0 protocol, Marlin Protocol incentivises the P2P layer to scale blockchains and improve user experiences. Marlin is backed by leading venture capitalists, angels and exchanges in the blockchain world including Electric Capital, Binance and Michael Arrington.
Hrishikesh Huilgolkar, Founder and CEO of Razor Network
Huilgolkar had worked as a data scientist and product manager before discovering Bitcoin and Ethereum at the end of 2015. He found the technology fascinating and decided to work as a blockchain developer in 2016. Since then he has worked with various companies as a blockchain developer, including ConsenSys who he helped develop a novel state channel scalability solution. He also made open source contributions to projects such as the Ethereum and Raiden network.
Razor Network is a decentralised oracle network with a focus on maximum game-theoretical security, complete decentralization, and being fully without permission. Razor achieves this while still being fast and practical for decentralized finance. Razor network uses a sliding court mechanism where any result of the oracle can be disputed iteratively. This can thwart any attack that can occur on the oracle.