On May 24, 2025, Mihailo Bjelic – one of the co-founders of the layer-2 Polygon (POL) project – officially announced his resignation from the executive role at Polygon Labs and stepped down from the Polygon Foundation. This information was shared by him on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), attracting significant attention from the blockchain community and investors interested in the Ethereum ecosystem.
According to Mihailo Bjelic's sharing, the decision to resign stems from differences in the project's long-term development vision. He emphasized that the natural maturation of any project involves changes in strategic direction, and he no longer feels he can contribute as effectively as before. However, Bjelic affirmed that he still completely trusts the current leadership team of Polygon and will continue to support the project from behind the scenes.
Immediately after this announcement, the remaining co-founder of Polygon, Sandeep Nailwal, expressed deep gratitude on X, calling Mihailo not just a co-founder but also a "brother" who had been alongside him from the early days of writing the whitepaper overnight, discussing strategies on whiteboards until building a top layer-2 platform on the Ethereum network.
Mihailo Bjelic was one of the four original co-founders of the Matic Network (MATIC) project in 2017 – the predecessor of today's Polygon (POL). Together with Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, and Anurag Arjun, he played a crucial role in making Matic one of the most widely used scaling solutions on Ethereum. After September 4, 2024, Polygon officially implemented the Polygon 2.0 vision, simultaneously converting the native token from MATIC to POL, marking a significant step in the ecosystem's expansion and decentralization strategy.
