In our Blockchain Trailblazers Series, we turn our spotlight on Mihailo Bjelic, the Serbian co-founder of Polygon.

Polygon is a blockchain infrastructure provider focused on improving Ethereum’s scalability. Polygon or traditionally the Matic Network has funnelled all its sources and financial might to building up its ecosystem, especially as of 2020. 

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The IT guy who fell down the rabbit hole

Aiming to create an open source network accessible to any from the first moment, Sandeep Nailwal, Mihailo Bjelic and their friends have been persistently working to improve the network, mature the code, and resolve problems without giving up on this ideal. 

Mihailo Bjelic was born at the end of 1990s in a mountain village in Serbia in the Former Republic of Yugoslavia. 

Having spent his childhood and teen years in Nova Varos, Mihailo grew up in a trauma-inducing period of heavy economic crises and internal struggles in former Yugoslavia. He very early recognized the need for a global asset resistant to inflation.  

His High School interest in Maths and technology continued with his University studies, leading him to seek a degree in IT at the University of Belgrade. 

After graduation, before getting involved in crypto, he worked as an IT specialist in 3 startups he either established alone or was a partner.  

In an interview with Morgan Chittum of the Business Insider, he remarked, “I fell down the rabbit hole and I wanted to commit my life to this”.

Having met with crypto in 2013, Bjelic has been a follower of the Ethereum Network since its inception in 2015.

He is one of the key forum participants active on ethresear.ch, contributing the most to the development of Ethereum chain. This forum was the hub for all interested in scaling the Ethereum blockchain, which led him to meet Sandeep Nailwal, Jaynti Kanani, and Anurag Arjun, the founders of Matic. 

In his Ethereum work, he focused on scalability solutions and multi-chain paradigms.  Since 2017, the road he chose for himself has been for the mass adoption of blockchain technology and alternative solutions to the problems of Ethereum. Recognizing the issue of scalability in the Network, he set out to look for solutions to the fact that the increase in gas fees is not sustainable as the number of transactions on the network increases.

With the Matic network they established in 2017, Matic founders addressing scaling issues as Ethereum Layer2 decided not to accept high-level investment until their network was ready. 

Thus, Matic only opened a small-scale bid on Binance and attracted 5 million dollars in investment. However, this was the crypto winter and their equity was fast disappearing. At this time, help came from Mihailo Bjelic. Bjelic soon joined the family as the fourth co-founder of the team.

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The Fourth Horseman

While Mihailo initially was a member of the dev team, he later became business developer and increased the team from its initial 30 to 450. 

You may find Bjelic’s handiwork in many improvements and the ecosystem enlargement since his joining the team. 

However you may remember it was the ZKRollup network, using zero knowledge proofs, that was the starting point of all these developments. 

The Polygon ZKRollup solution in the Ethereum scalability solution is a giant step forward in the world of technology. 

In the July 20, 2022 Coindesk article, Mihailo Bjelic announced the “Polygon Deploys Zero Knowledge Rollup Testnet, as the ‘Holy Grail’ of Scaling". 

From that point on, Polygon developers have made a number of exciting breakthroughs, such as ZK Rollups, Polygon 2.0, the next-generation pioneer POL token, and finally the AggLayer. Polygon’s progress has not been limited to technical developments; Polygon management has built partnerships that have introduced blockchain technology to mainstream companies at a dizzying speed.

You can read all about Polygon cooperation with global companies including Nike, Adidas, Meta(Instagram), Reddit, Starbucks, Disney, and Amazon in Mihailo’s X posts.

Although Mihailo Bjelic is one of the major names in the blockchain field, he is very careful of his privacy. That is why it is nearly impossible to find information on his past or personal life.

However he is an active X/Twitter user with 66K followers. He shares his thoughts on Polygon, Ethereum, or Blockchain in general candidly. 

His tweets provide insight into his keen intelligence and great sense of humor. 

Here is my favorite tweet by Bjelic: 

I have to admit that this pic has a lot to do ith my personal belief that the Balkan people share a very common outlook to that of Turks from Western coastal region, rather than me being Turkish.  

I would like to conclude with more from the Business Insider interview with Morgan Chittum. Mentioning that he works 70 hours per week, Mihailo goes on to say:

"From the beginning, we wanted Polygon to become one of the major infrastructure and scaling providers in the industry," he added. "That being said, we didn't expect it to happen this fast." 

"I really have to take care of day-to-day business activities, strategic activities, and to make sure that all the teams have what they need so that technology is in line with our adoption efforts," he noted. 

Despite the explosive growth of the company, Bjelic says that his life outside of work has not changed. "There's very little bandwidth to do anything apart from Polygon," he said. "My apartment is still the same one that I used to have, maybe on paper I'm richer, but I genuinely find what we are doing here really exciting and rewarding." 

These sentences bear the same sentiment we see in each Blockchain Trailblazer we have spotlighted. 

That might be the answer to the question of why he deserves to be among the pioneers in Blockchain.

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