Polygon (POL) POL

Polygon (POL) is the token of Polygon PoS, a proof-of-stake chain tied to Ethereum that hosts apps such as Polymarket. POL pays for gas on that chain and is staked by the validators who run it. Until 2024 the asset was called MATIC: on 4 September 2024 the old token was swapped one for one into Polygon POL.

The ticker is not all that changed. Polygon switched off its zkEVM chain in July 2026, closed the purchase of the US cash-to-crypto firm Coinme on 14 October and now pitches itself to companies as a payments network. This page covers how the chain works, what POL is used for, how fast new POL is minted, what has broken and where it trades, as of October 2026.

What is Polygon crypto? A chain, a token and two organisations

The name covers several things. Polygon PoS, which Polygon now often calls Polygon Chain, is the network: an EVM-compatible blockchain, so wallets and apps built for Ethereum run on it with few changes. POL is its native token. Polygon Labs writes most of the software, and the Polygon Foundation, run by co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, sets the long-term strategy.

Data sites file POL with the layer 2 networks that scale Ethereum (CoinGecko lists it under “Layer 2”). Technically it is not a rollup. Polygon PoS has its own validators and its own consensus, and it sends Ethereum a fingerprint of its blocks rather than the transaction data, so its security rests mainly on its own validator set. Our explainer on the difference between layer 1 and layer 2 networks covers why that distinction matters.

How Polygon PoS works: Bor, Heimdall and checkpoints on Ethereum

There are two layers. Bor executes: it produces blocks, runs smart contracts and charges gas in POL. Heimdall, now in its second version, is where validators agree on what Bor produced.

At intervals Heimdall bundles recent Bor blocks into a Merkle tree and writes the root to Ethereum as a checkpoint. The Polygon validator documentation says a checkpoint comes roughly every 15 to 20 minutes on average. The staking contracts live on Ethereum as well.

Fifteen minutes is far too slow for a card payment. Since the Heimdall v2 upgrade of July 2025, validators also vote on “milestones”, which Polygon says make blocks final in about five seconds.

105 seats for validators

The protocol allows no more than 105 active validators at a time, a cap set by PIP-4. A newcomer gets in only when a sitting validator unbonds or is removed, and since PIP-70 the minimum self-stake is 100,000 POL. Validators set their own commission, with no upper limit, and holders without a node can delegate POL to one of them and share its rewards. It is a proof of stake design with a fixed number of chairs.

From Matic Network to POL: the history of Polygon

The project began in 2017 as Matic Network, a sidechain meant to make Ethereum cheaper to use. In late April 2019 it sold 19% of the MATIC supply, 1.9 billion tokens, on Binance Launchpad in a lottery open to BNB holders. Its proof-of-stake chain went live in mid-2020.

In February 2021 Matic renamed itself Polygon and kept the MATIC ticker. The new ambition was a family of Ethereum scaling chains. Polygon paid $250 million for the zero-knowledge team Hermez in August 2021, and the chain that came out of it, Polygon zkEVM, opened in mainnet beta on 27 March 2023.

The 2024 swap from MATIC to POL

PIP-17, posted on the Polygon forum on 14 September 2023, laid out the new token: a one-to-one migration from MATIC, an initial supply of 10 billion and issuance of 2% a year, split equally between stakers and a community treasury. Polygon fixed the date in July 2024, and the upgrade went live on 4 September 2024.

Users of Polygon PoS had nothing to do, because the gas token simply became POL. MATIC held on Ethereum or zkEVM had to go through a migration contract, and exchanges converted their customers on their own schedules. Binance opened POL spot trading on 13 September 2024. Polygon Labs said on 3 September 2025 that 99% of MATIC had been migrated, and Coinbase set 14 October 2025 to stop MATIC trading and convert leftover balances to POL, AMBCrypto reported.

Migrated MATIC is held in the migration contract, not burned. The contract can even turn POL back into MATIC, though only if governance switches that function on.

What POL does: gas, staking and the AggLayer

Polygon’s POL token documentation describes it as the gas and staking token of Polygon Chain. Every transaction on Polygon PoS pays its fee in POL.

Staking is the second job. Validators lock POL in the Ethereum contracts and delegators add theirs behind them. Rewards come from new issuance and, since the Rio upgrade of October 2025, from a share of the priority fees that users add to jump the queue.

The third role has not arrived yet. AggLayer, announced in January 2024, is Polygon’s system for linking separate chains through a shared bridge. In a January 2026 primer Nailwal named three income streams for holders: transaction fees, staking rewards and future AggLayer interoperability fees. “If Polygon Chain and Agglayer succeed, then POL holders benefit. Full stop,” he wrote, as quoted by Decrypt. The AggLayer fees were still described as future revenue at the time.

Polygon upgrades in 2025 and 2026: Bhilai, Rio and Ithaca

Polygon upgrades the chain through hard forks, each named after a place. Bhilai arrived on 1 July 2025 and Heimdall v2 on 10 July. Polygon says the pair took the chain to roughly 1,000 transactions per second and cut finality from minutes to seconds.

Polygon announced on 8 October 2025 that Rio was live. Under its VEBloP design, validators elect the producers that build blocks, with backups ready to take over. Rio also introduced stateless validation, which lets a node check blocks without storing the full chain state, and a model that shares fees across the validator set. Polygon said Rio more than tripled throughput, enables about 5,000 transactions per second and removes the risk of chain reorganisations. These are the company’s own figures. We found no independent benchmark.

Ithaca followed at the end of July 2026 (Polygon announced it on 30 July). It targeted a known weak spot: if the node producing blocks stalled, the chain could stop for roughly 15 minutes with no automatic recovery. Ithaca brings in a healthy producer automatically and blocks oversized transactions before they can slow the network.

zkEVM switched off, Katana and AggLayer carry on

Polygon zkEVM lasted just over three years. Its wind-down was announced in June 2025 with a year’s notice, and the Mainnet Beta sequencer was due to stop on 1 July 2026; Polygon’s zkEVM page confirmed on 3 July that it had been sunset. According to the official sunset notice, wallet balances were captured in an exit snapshot and can be claimed on Ethereum until 31 December 2027, after which they count as abandoned. Funds left inside DeFi apps were not migrated.

Katana, a DeFi chain incubated by Polygon Labs and the trading firm GSR and run by its own foundation, opened its public mainnet at the end of June 2025 with AggLayer as its canonical bridge. On 19 October 2026 Polygon introduced CDK Besu, a kit for launching Hyperledger Besu chains connected to other networks.

The 2026 payments pivot: Open Money Stack and Coinme

In January 2026 Polygon launched the Open Money Stack, a set of payment tools for businesses, and Polygon Labs agreed to buy Coinme, a US cash-to-crypto operator, and Sequence, a wallet infrastructure firm, for more than $250 million combined, The Block reported. A spokesperson told the outlet that Polygon Labs “is no longer a scaling company, but a blockchain-based payments company.”

Polygon completed the Coinme purchase on 14 October 2026. In its announcement, it says this gives it coverage in 48 US states through 37 state money transmitter licences and 11 exemptions, plus Coinme’s registration with FinCEN as a money services business. It named Tazapay, Mesh, Toku and Kira as the first companies on the platform.

The usage claims are large, and they are Polygon’s own. On 29 September 2026 it said more than $3 trillion in stablecoin transfers had crossed its chain since September 2020, naming Revolut, Paxos, Cash App and Deel among the firms that had used it. No independent source is given for the total. A headline figure of “11 million payments per second”, published on 24 September, came from a test of payment-channel updates, not from the live network.

Polymarket and the collectibles app Courtyard run on Polygon PoS, as Polygon’s December 2025 incident report notes. In Germany, savings banks began offering POL in the Sparkasse app on 19 October 2026, alongside bitcoin, ether, XRP and solana, with DekaBank executing trades and holding the coins, crypto.news reported. Each savings bank decides when to join.

POL supply: 10 billion at launch, about 2% more each year

POL started with 10 billion tokens on 4 September 2024, matching the MATIC supply. New tokens are minted continuously by an emission contract. PIP-17 set the rate at 2% a year, half for staking rewards and half for a Community Treasury, and a later vote, PIP-26, trimmed the validator share so that total issuance settled at about 2% after June 2025.

Governance can change the rate through an upgradeable contract called EmissionManager, but only within a ceiling: the POL token contract itself is not upgradeable, and PIP-17 caps minting at 10 POL per second. Crypto Briefing put total supply at about 10.7 billion in September 2026.

There is no maximum supply. The PIP-17 specification sets a growth rate, not a ceiling on the total.

Fee burns and the deflation claim

Fees pull the other way. Since PIP-24 in 2023, base fees paid on Polygon PoS go to a collector contract and are later burned. On 18 September 2026 Nailwal said 100 million POL, about 1% of the original supply, was ready for a permissionless burn, and on 29 September Polygon wrote that the community had completed it that month with fees collected earlier.

Nailwal has also said that all base fees are burned and that POL has been deflationary since January 2026. The numbers are tighter than that. Alea Research counted 141.9 million POL collected in base fees from January to August 2026 against 141.8 million minted, which is roughly break-even.

Staking rewards and the stuck fee share

Alea Research puts the yearly target for validator rewards at 103.53 million POL, about 3% of the roughly 3.5 billion POL staked, before commission. Validators also collect priority fees. Under PIP-85, which has applied since April 2026 according to a later proposal, half of those fees after commission belong to stakers.

That share was never paid out, because the claim contracts were not deployed. PIP-92, a draft posted on 24 September 2026, would send the accrued 27.33 million POL to the staking contract by raising checkpoint rewards between 1 October and 1 December 2026. Its authors estimate this would lift the gross staking reward from about 3.0% to about 7.7% for that window. The forum still listed it as a draft in late October.

Treasury governance changed too. On 9 January 2026 the Foundation turned the Community Treasury Board into an advisory body: the Foundation sets strategy and Polygon Labs executes, with reports twice a year. A community draft of October 2025 to end inflation and fund buybacks from the treasury was never adopted.

Polygon POL risks: issuance, control, outages and competition

A token with no claim on the payments business

POL holders own no part of Polygon Labs. Coinme’s licences and any payments revenue belong to companies, not to the token. One holder made exactly that complaint in July 2026, AMBCrypto reported. Value reaches POL through gas demand, the fee burn, staking and, one day, AggLayer fees.

Dilution, usage and market share

About 2% new supply a year dilutes holders who do not stake. Usage swings hard: Decrypt, citing Growthepie, reported in January 2026 that daily active addresses had dropped from 2.9 million in mid-December 2025 to about 489,000. AMBCrypto, citing Visa and Allium data, reported that Polygon’s share of stablecoin settlement fell from 1.54% in 2023 to 0.72% in 2026, while Solana and Base grew. We could not check either figure against a second source.

A council with the keys and a partly gated validator set

A 13-member Protocol Council, created under PIP-29 in 2023, can change the POL migration and emission contracts through a multisig: seven signatures and a 10-day delay for routine changes, ten signatures and no delay in an emergency. With 105 validator seats, entry depends on someone leaving. PIP-91, a proposal of 18 August 2026, would require single-use passes issued under the Council’s authority to join, and says several slots were taken by operators with no published identity, despite the admission rules of PIP-39.

Finality incidents in 2025 and 2026

On 10 September 2025 milestone finality broke down for several hours. Checkpoints kept finalising blocks within about 15 minutes, and an emergency Heimdall hard fork at around 15:00 UTC restored normal service. On 18 December 2025 some Bor nodes fell behind, degrading RPC access and slowing finality while blocks kept coming. On 12 January 2026 a Heimdall bug stopped block finalisation until validators rolled back to the previous version, according to the Polygon status page.

A strategy that keeps moving

zkEVM was promoted for three years and then closed. The multi-chain plan of Polygon 2.0 has given way to payments. Someone who bought MATIC in 2021 for the scaling story now holds POL in a payments company’s network, with a different set of rules for supply and staking.

SEC cases over MATIC ended in 2025; MiCA paper filed by an exchange

In June 2023 the SEC named MATIC among the tokens it alleged were securities in its lawsuits against Binance (filed 5 June) and Coinbase (6 June). In a July 2024 status report it said it planned to amend the Binance complaint so the court would not need to rule on third-party tokens such as SOL, ADA and MATIC. The SEC and Coinbase filed to dismiss that case with prejudice on 27 February 2025, and the SEC dropped the Binance case with prejudice on 29 May 2025. We found no SEC action naming POL and no US spot POL ETF as of October 2026.

In the European Union, Polygon has not published a MiCA white paper of its own that we could find. The Liechtenstein exchange LCX filed one for POL in April 2025 to seek admission to trading; it classes POL as an “other crypto-asset” and states that no competent authority has approved it.

Where to buy POL and how to hold it

All ten exchanges reviewed by Coindaro had live POL markets on 26 October 2026: Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, OKX, Bybit, Crypto.com, Bitget, Gemini, Bitpanda and Bitvavo. Kraken, Bitvavo and Bitpanda have euro pairs, Coinbase and Gemini dollar pairs, and most of the others trade it against USDT. Staking and other services vary by country. Our guide on how to buy crypto safely covers identity checks, fees and withdrawals.

POL exists on two networks. On Polygon PoS it is the native coin, and on Ethereum it is an ERC-20 token. Any wallet that supports EVM chains can hold both, but a withdrawal sent on the wrong network can be lost, so check the network name each time.

The next date on the calendar is 1 December 2026, when the PIP-92 reward window would close if the proposal goes through.