Author: Ma He, Foresight News
On September 23, Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal tweeted that the POL token burn contract was ready and only needed any one person in the community to trigger it; about three hours later, he posted a Polygonscan transaction hash indicating that 100 million POL (about 1% of the total supply) had been permanently burned.
At the price of about $0.10 that day, these 100 million POL were worth about $10 million. The source was not the foundation treasury, but the fees accumulated in the network base fee collection contract. Nailwal previously said that the collection address held about 121 million POL, with the first burn of 100 million, about 83% of the holdings, and the remainder staying on the collection side, waiting to be triggered by the community quarterly thereafter.
POL did not experience the usual wave of the burn narrative. According to the latest market data, its price is still fluctuating around $0.1. The price did not convert the word "deflation" into buying pressure.
How these 100 million were burned
Polygon PoS has adopted a fee structure similar to Ethereum's EIP-1559 since January 2022: base fees go through the burn path. Over the past few years, this fee was not immediately burned at the contract level with each transaction, but was aggregated in the network base fee accumulation contract. Nailwal's statement is: since January 2026, POL has been in a net deflationary range; a widely cited comparison in the middle of the year was that about 105.2 million were minted in 2026, while about 107.7 million in base fees were collected during the same period.
On September 18, he first released a preview of "preparing to burn 100 million" and wrote that the contract was still on the testnet and needed a final signature to go to mainnet. Five days later, the mainnet deployment was completed, and the burn was completed after being triggered by a permissionless community call. The official statement said that thereafter, every quarter, the community can burn another round of newly accumulated POL in the collection address.
POL's initial supply was 10 billion, corresponding to a 1:1 migration from MATIC. The total on-chain supply before the burn was around 10.7 billion, so 100 million is about 1% relative to the initial 10 billion, and about 0.93% relative to the current total supply. According to Polygon documentation, the effective annual issuance after June 2025 is about 2%. In other words, this one-time burn still cannot cover half a year of gross issuance.
The burn is real, but its scale is written as "periodic recovery of fees," not as a change to the issuance system.
For holders, this explains why "burning 100 million" is hard to support a price increase on its own. What the market should ask is not how many tokens are gone today, but whether the supply will rise again this time next year.
2026 revenue $24.5 million
Nailwal tweeted this month that Polygon's revenue so far in 2026 was $24.5 million, and compared with Arbitrum's $8.41 million and NEAR's $5.6 million, concluding that "POL revenue is three times ARB and five times NEAR."
The latest DefiLlama data shows that although its TVL has fallen sharply compared with 2021, its monthly protocol fee revenue has been growing since the beginning of 2026.
The payments narrative does have real volume. In May 2026, Polygon's stablecoin transfer volume was about $79.25 billion, with about 198 million stablecoin transactions that month, ranking among the top chains; cumulative stablecoin transfer volume exceeded $2.4 trillion.
Currently, the market value of stablecoins on Polygon remains at a high level of about $3 billion.
Visa included Polygon in its stablecoin settlement pilot. These data show that the chain is still being used, but the people using the chain and the people buying POL are increasingly not the same group.
Team layoffs and business contraction
Although the data performance is notable, the departure of team executives and layoffs still cast a considerable shadow over Polygon.
Among Polygon's original four co-founders, Jaynti Kanani and Anurag Arjun exited daily operations around 2023; Mihailo Bjelic resigned from the Foundation board in May 2025 and ended daily work at Labs. Sandeep became the only founder still present, and in June of the same year became Foundation CEO, saying externally that he wanted to regain direction and execution. Polygon Labs continues to have Marc Boiron as CEO.
The personnel roster inside Labs is also changing. In July 2023, Boiron was promoted from Chief Legal Officer to CEO, and then-President Ryan Wyatt departed. In mid-2025, zero-knowledge research lead Jordi Baylina took his team and spun out to build ZisK. The product line contracted in tandem: in June 2025 it announced the deprecation of Polygon zkEVM, and on July 1, 2026 (the official page records the sunset as completed on July 3), the sequencer was shut down. This chain came from Hermez, acquired in 2021 for about $250 million, and was treated as the ZK flagship when it launched.
Layoffs are another parallel line. In January 2026, the company cut about 60 people, with the official explanation being role overlap after acquiring Coinme and Sequence; on July 16, 2026, Boiron announced a second round of layoffs within the year, without disclosing the number, with the goal of becoming a profitable "blockchain payments company" by 2027.
The acquisitions themselves are also changing the company's makeup. In early 2026, Polygon Labs announced the acquisition of Coinme, a U.S.-licensed cash-to-crypto company, and Sequence, a wallet infrastructure company, with outside reports putting the combined price at more than $250 million. What came in were payments, licensing, compliance, and wallet teams, while non-profitable infrastructure businesses such as the underlying public chain ecosystem and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) were spun off. The organizational logic shifted from nurturing an ecosystem to "becoming a money-transfer company that can make money."
For the secondary market, this is harder to digest than burning. There are fewer storytellers, the product is narrower, and the past glorious narrative is gone.
For a project that has already renamed itself from MATIC to POL, shifted from an scaling narrative to a payments narrative, and gone from four founders to one person sitting at the foundation, this mismatch is not sudden. The next thing the market wants to see is not another image of someone posting a burn button, but whether the 2% annual issuance will change, whether quarterly burns can consistently exceed new minting, and, once the payments company is built, exactly which part of the cash flow POL gets.
