For the past few months, I’ve kept seeing another chain announce a payment strategy—funding secured, roadmap released, testnet live, a long Twitter thread claiming this time it’s finally happening. Competition is healthy; the industry moves forward when serious teams show up. I get that. But there’s a difference between announcing a payment strategy and becoming a chain where payments actually work. So let’s take a look at where Polygon actually stands.
Let's start with the numbers.
Over $2.4 trillion in stablecoin value has been settled on Polygon—this represents actual on-chain stablecoin transaction volume, not projections. In 2025, stablecoin activity on the network increased by 264% year-over-year, and in April 2026 alone, the chain processed over 577 million stablecoin transactions. By transaction volume, we are now the world’s largest chain for USD stablecoins, with a total of $3.6 billion in stablecoins on the network.
This is not just a story about the US dollar. Approximately 89% of local currency stablecoin on-chain activity in Latin America runs on Polygon, and about 66% of the Japanese yen stablecoin JPYC also operates on our chain. While the absolute scale of non-dollar markets is much smaller, wherever real currencies begin to flow on-chain in their local forms, Polygon is where it actually happens.
Announcing a shift to payments is one thing; seeing fintech companies move tens of billions of dollars is entirely another. We have the receipts to prove it. Most of the chains rushing into this narrative now have no idea how long it actually takes to get here.
Those who truly chose to build on Polygon
If I just list a bunch of logos here, it will look like marketing material and tell you nothing. The real picture only emerges when you understand what these companies actually do with this chain—and why they chose Polygon specifically over elsewhere.
Revolut has累计 transferred over $1.3 billion in stablecoin volume on Polygon, and they are far from the only ones operating at this scale. Paxos has processed approximately $1.3 billion in stablecoin payments on-chain through its enterprise payment platform, with monthly transaction volume increasing 50-fold over 12 months. Under these figures, this is no longer an experiment—it’s where their actual payment flows now reside. The truly astonishing part is that the total gas fees for Paxos’s entire $1.3 billion transaction volume amounted to less than $700. Anyone who has spent time within traditional payment infrastructure knows exactly how impressive such numbers are.
Then last week, three more milestones were achieved. Visa, the world’s largest payment network, announced that its partners can now settle stablecoins instantly via Polygon. On the same day, Meta launched creator payments on Polygon. Additionally, Modern Treasury, a payment orchestration layer that has processed over $400 billion in corporate payments, added Polygon as a native rail. Stablecoins now exist alongside ACH, wire transfers, RTP, and FedNow within the same APIs that enterprises already use. Household names and enterprise pipelines all chose Polygon in the same week. I’ve heard people say the Polygon payment story has been overhyped. Meanwhile, the world’s largest companies are now placing their trust on this chain. The market is overlooking it. That won’t last much longer.
These names ending up on Polygon was no accident. They evaluated their options. They chose this chain because it works—and it continues to operate at scale, day after day, under real-world load.
Why did they choose Polygon (this is what I care about)?
Enterprises choose infrastructure because it works, and they stay because it continues to scale reliably. On Polygon, what this looks like in practice comes down to a few key things: transactions are confirmed in seconds—often faster than Venmo confirmations on your phone. Since the Rio upgrade went live in October 2025, the chain has experienced zero reorganizations. For a payments chain, this is the entire game—you can’t ask merchants or fintech companies to bear the risk of settlement being reversed a minute after clearing.
Today, we’ve reached a capacity of 2,800+ TPS, handling approximately 240 million transactions per day. We’re upgrading the network to payment-level throughput—the scale at which Visa operates. When I talk about fighting for the next order of magnitude, I mean it literally.
On-chain fees have become predictable enough to build businesses around. Applications will be able to price their services against stable fees, just as they currently do with card networks, eliminating the situation where a cost is quoted to customers but a different cost is paid at settlement.
To be honest, the deployment speed has always been impressive. Over the past four months, we’ve launched three mainnet upgrades, each directly addressing what matters most to payment operations. The recent Giugliano upgrade just went live, reducing finality by approximately 1.5 seconds. For platforms like Polymarket running at full capacity, this isn’t just a theoretical win—it means transactions settle noticeably faster under real-world load.
All of these transform a chain from "fast enough for crypto" into something genuinely trustworthy for real payments. Each number represents years of work by the engineering team. To be honest, I’m proud of what they’ve built.
Open Currency Stack
Moreover, all of this remains significant only if businesses can plug in and use it without first hiring a crypto engineering team. This is the gap the open monetary stack is addressing.
If you’re a finance team trying to transfer funds end-to-end, you need access to fiat on-ramps connected to banking systems, compliance tools covering KYC, AML, and sanctions—without having to build custom solutions for each jurisdiction—alongside wallets your users can actually use, and stablecoin interoperability to tie it all together. Without these layers, even the best settlement chain on Earth forces businesses to connect with five vendors and burn months on integration before sending their first dollar. That’s why most enterprise crypto projects die in the procurement phase—and why no one really talks about it.
That’s why we built the Open Monetary Stack to bridge this gap. It’s one integration, not five: on-ramp, compliance, stablecoin interoperability, yield, and orchestration—all running on Polygon as the default settlement layer, with the finality and fee transparency that finance teams expect from their infrastructure. We deliberately built the layer first because without a settlement layer that works the way enterprises need it to, everything built on top is worthless. You wouldn’t put your business on tracks that can’t carry it.
Where do I go from here?
New features will be available for enterprises requiring greater custom control. Throughput will enable us to reach payment-grade speeds. Cross-chain liquidity will be enabled via Agglayer. The open money stack will serve as the default integration point for any enterprise seeking to transfer funds on-chain without building half the pipeline themselves.
Institutions building on Polygon chose us not because we’re the loudest chain in the space, but because our chain works when they need it to—and it continues to scale reliably. This is a kind of trust you earn slowly and lose quickly, and I often think about that. Every upgrade from here is designed to win that trust again at the next order of magnitude, and then the next.
Cryptocurrencies have waited a decade to reach true practicality—and stablecoins are it. Payments are the use case. Polygon is going straight for it, until moving money on-chain feels as normal as swiping a card. This is the only thing that matters now.
Author: Sandeep Nailwal; Translated by Shenchao TechFlow
Source: Shenchao TechFlow