Author: Mahe, Foresight News
On September 23, Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal tweeted that the POL token burn contract was ready and only needed to be triggered by any member of the community; approximately three and a half hours later, he posted a Polygonscan transaction hash confirming that 100 million POL tokens (approximately 1% of the total supply) had been permanently burned.
Valued at approximately $0.10 per token, these 100 million POL tokens are worth around $10 million. The source is not the foundation treasury, but rather fees accumulated in the network fee collection contract. Nailwal previously stated that approximately 121 million POL were held in the collection address; the first burn of 100 million tokens represents about 83% of the total supply, with the remainder remaining in the collection address to be triggered by the community on a quarterly basis.
POL has not broken away from the typical pattern of burn narratives; according to the latest market data, its price continues to fluctuate around $0.10. The price has not translated the concept of "deflation" into buying pressure.
How were these 100 million burned?
Since January 2022, Polygon PoS has adopted a fee structure similar to Ethereum’s EIP-1559: the base fee is burned. Over the past few years, this fee has not been immediately burned at the contract level with each transaction, but instead accumulated in the network’s base fee sink contract. According to Nailwal, since January 2026, POL has entered a net deflationary phase; a widely cited comparison from mid-year shows that approximately 105.2 million POL were minted in 2026, while the base fees collected during the same period amounted to approximately 107.7 million POL.
On September 18, he first announced the intention to burn 100 million tokens, noting that the contract was still on the testnet and required a final signature before deployment on the mainnet. Five days later, after mainnet deployment was completed and triggered by permissionless community calls, the burn was finalized. The official team stated that, going forward, the community will be able to initiate another burn round each quarter for any new POL accumulated in the collection address.
The initial supply of POL is 10 billion, corresponding to a 1:1 migration from MATIC. The on-chain total supply before burning was approximately 10.7 billion; 100 million represents about 1% of the original 10 billion and roughly 0.93% of the current total supply. According to Polygon’s documentation, the effective annual issuance rate after June 2025 will be approximately 2%. This means that this one-time burn does not even offset half a year’s gross issuance.
The burn is real, but the scale is listed under "Phased Fee Recapture," not a change to the issuance system.
For holders, this explains why "burning 100 million tokens" alone struggles to drive significant price increases. The market isn’t asking how many tokens are gone today—it’s asking whether supply will bounce back by this time next year.
$24.5 million in revenue in 2026
Nailwal tweeted this month that Polygon has generated $24.5 million in revenue since the beginning of 2026, compared to Arbitrum's $8.41 million and NEAR's $5.6 million, concluding that POL's revenue is three times that of ARB and five times that of NEAR.
According to the latest data from DefiLlama, although its TVL has significantly declined since 2021, the protocol's monthly fee income has been increasing since 2026.
Payment usage has real, measurable volume. In May 2026, Polygon processed approximately $79.25 billion in stablecoin transfers and around 198 million stablecoin transactions that month, ranking among the top blockchains; cumulative stablecoin transfer volume has exceeded $2.4 trillion.
The market capitalization of stablecoins on Polygon remains around $3 billion.
Visa has included Polygon in its stablecoin settlement pilot. These figures indicate that the chain is still being used, but the users of the chain and the buyers of POL are increasingly different groups.
Team layoffs and business contraction
Although the data performance has been noteworthy, the departure of senior team members and layoffs have cast a significant shadow over Polygon.
Of Polygon’s original four co-founders, Jaynti Kanani and Anurag Arjun stepped back from day-to-day operations around 2023; Mihailo Bjelic resigned as a Foundation director and ended his day-to-day involvement with Labs in May 2025. Sandeep became the only remaining founder still actively involved, assuming the role of Foundation CEO in June of the same year, stating his intent to refocus on strategy and execution. Polygon Labs continues to be led by Marc Boiron as CEO.
The team within Labs is also undergoing changes. In July 2023, Boiron was promoted from Chief Legal Officer to CEO, while then-President Ryan Wyatt departed. In mid-2025, Jordi Baylina, head of zero-knowledge research, left with his team to launch ZisK. The product lineup was simultaneously scaled back: in June 2025, Polygon zkEVM was announced for deprecation, and the sequencer was shut down on July 1, 2026 (officially recorded as completed on July 3). This chain originated from the 2021 acquisition of Hermez, which was purchased for approximately $250 million and initially positioned as the flagship ZK solution.
Layoffs are another parallel thread. In January 2026, the company laid off approximately 60 people, officially citing role redundancies following the acquisitions of Coinme and Sequence; on July 16, 2026, Boiron announced its second round of layoffs for the year, without disclosing the number, with the goal of becoming a profitable "blockchain payments company" by 2027.
The acquisition itself is also reshaping the company’s composition. In early 2026, Polygon Labs announced the acquisition of Coinme, a U.S.-licensed cash-to-crypto exchange, and wallet infrastructure provider Sequence, with combined reported valuation exceeding $250 million. The acquisition brought in teams focused on payments, licensing, compliance, and wallets, while divesting non-revenue-generating infrastructure such as the underlying public blockchain ecosystem and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). The organizational logic has shifted from nurturing an ecosystem to building a profitable money-transfer company.
For the secondary market, this is harder to absorb than burn. There are fewer storytellers, narrower products, and the past glory narratives are gone.
For a project that has already rebranded from MATIC to POL, shifted its narrative from scaling to payments, and transitioned from four founders to a single individual leading the foundation, this misalignment is not surprising. The market’s next focus isn’t another image of a burn button—it’s whether the 2% annual issuance will change, whether quarterly burns can consistently exceed new minting, and what portion of cash flow POL will capture once the payment company is operational.