Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has said that Polygon and Sandeep Nailwal have significantly advanced the ecosystem. He noted that adopting zero-knowledge (ZK) solutions for the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) chain would enhance Layer-2 security guarantees. This statement was made on X.
“I really appreciate both Sandeep’s personal contributions and Polygon’s immensely valuable role in the ethereum ecosystem,” said Buterin. “Polygon put a lot of resources into ZK-EVM proving early on, both by bringing in Jordi Baylina’s team and through other efforts, and greatly helped in moving the space forward. Sandeep put a lot of his personal effort into CryptoRelief, which has made large contributions to biomedical infrastructure and research inside India. Personally, I hope that at some point soon Polygon can just pick up off the shelf ZK tech that has now gotten quite good and apply it to the PoS chain to get full stage 1 and later stage 2 guarantees from the ethereum L1.”
As of October 2025, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal publicly criticized the Ethereum community and the Ethereum Foundation for not acknowledging Polygon’s contributions to scaling. This sparked a debate over whether the network should be considered a full-fledged Layer 2 or merely a sidechain. According to ForkLog, Nailwal said the Ethereum community “refuses to recognize Polygon as a full-fledged L2 solution” despite its contributions.
Recent benchmarks for zero-knowledge proof cost and throughput indicate advancements in ZK-rollups by late 2025. For instance, zkSync Era achieved approximately $0.01 per transaction cost, while StarkNet claims peak throughput of up to 4,200 transactions per second (TPS) with about $0.003 per transaction cost, according to AInvest as of October 15, 2025.
Security and stage-guarantee comparisons show that Polygon’s PoS chain is classified as an ‘Other/EVM-compatible sidechain’ with Total Value Secured (TVS) around $3.6 billion as of 2025. In contrast, production ZK-rollups like zkSync or StarkNet adopt validity-proof security models and higher stages of decentralization, highlighting security differentiation across stacks according to L2BEAT.
Vitalik Buterin is a Canadian-Russian programmer who co-founded Ethereum in 2014 and remains a key researcher in its development. Beyond cryptocurrency, his philanthropic efforts include the Balvi Philanthropic Fund which donated $15 million in USD Coin (USDC) to the University of California San Diego for open-source airborne-disease research, according to U.C. San Diego news from March 2023.
Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain platform founded in 2015 with the mission to be global programmable money and smart-contract infrastructure. Its governance is community-based via improvement proposals and upgrades. The roadmap for 2025 emphasizes features like PeerDAS (data-availability sampling) and blob parameter upgrades to enable scalable Layer-2 ecosystems according to Ethereum.org.
