By Maher, Foresight News
On September 23, Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal tweeted to announce that the POL token destruction contract was ready and only needed to be triggered by anyone in the community. About three hours later, he posted the Polygonscan transaction hash indicating that 100 million POL (approximately 1% of the total supply) had been permanently destroyed.
At the current price of approximately US$0.10, these 100 million POL are worth approximately US$10 million. The source is not the foundation's treasury, but the handling fees saved in the network's basic fee collection contract. Nailwal previously said that there are about 121 million POL in the collection address, and the first 100 million POL will be burned, accounting for about 83% of the stock. The remainder will remain on the collection side and will be triggered by the community on a quarterly basis.
POL has not gone out of the common wave of destruction narratives. According to the latest market data, its currency price is still fluctuating around US$0.1. The price did not translate the word "deflation" into buying orders.
How were these 100 million coins burned?
Polygon PoS will adopt a fee structure similar to Ethereum EIP-1559 from January 2022: the basic handling fee will follow the burning path. In the past few years, this fee was not immediately written off at the contract level every time it was incurred, but was instead included in the basic network fee settlement contract. Nailwal’s statement is: Since January 2026, POL has been in a net deflation range; a widely cited comparison in the middle of the year is that approximately 105.2 million coins have been minted in 2026, and the base fee collected during the same period is approximately 107.7 million coins.
On September 18, he first released a notice of "preparing to burn 100 million coins" and stated that the contract was still on the test network and required a final signature before it could be put on the main network. After five days, the main network is deployed and triggered by the community’s unauthorized call, and the destruction is completed. The official stated that every quarter thereafter, the community can burn the newly saved POL in the collection address for another round.
The initial supply of POL is 10 billion, corresponding to MATIC 1:1 migration. The total supply on the chain before destruction is about 10.7 billion. 100 million is about 1% relative to the original 10 billion, and about 0.93% relative to the current total supply. According to Polygon documents, the effective annual issuance increase after June 2025 is approximately 2%. In other words, this one-time destruction cannot cover half a year of additional hair issuance.
The destruction is real, but the scale is written on the "phased recovery fee", not changing the issuance system.
For holders, this explains why "burning 100 million coins" is difficult to support the increase alone. What the market wants to ask is not how many chips are missing today, but whether the supply will rise again at this time next year.
2026 revenue $24.5 million
Nailwal tweeted this month that Polygon’s revenue so far in 2026 is $24.5 million. Comparing Arbitrum’s $8.41 million and NEAR’s $5.6 million, he concluded that “POL’s revenue is three times that of ARB and five times that of NEAR.”
DefiLlama’s latest data shows that although its TVL has dropped significantly compared with 2021, its past monthly agreement fee income has begun to grow since 2026.
The payment narrative is substantial. In May 2026, Polygon's stablecoin transfer volume was approximately US$79.25 billion, and the number of stablecoin transactions in that month was approximately 198 million, ranking at the forefront of all chains; the cumulative stablecoin transfer volume exceeded US$2.4 trillion.
Currently, the market value of stablecoins on Polygon remains at a high of around $3 billion.
Visa includes Polygon in stablecoin settlement pilot. These data show that the chain is still being used, but the people who use the chain and the people who buy POL are increasingly not the same group.
Team layoffs and business contraction
Although the data performance is impressive, the resignation of team executives and layoffs still cast a big shadow on Polygon.
Of the original four co-founders of Polygon, Jaynti Kanani and Anurag Arjun will retire around 2023; Mihailo Bjelic will resign as Foundation director in May 2025 and end his day-to-day work in Labs. Sandeep became the only founder still present and became CEO of Foundation in June of the same year, saying that he wanted to regain direction and execution. Polygon Labs continues to have Marc Boiron as CEO.
The personnel list within Labs is also changing. Boiron was promoted from chief legal to CEO in July 2023, when then-president Ryan Wyatt left. In mid-2025, Jordi Baylina, the head of zero-knowledge research, took the team to work on ZisK. Synchronous shrinkage of the product line: Polygon zkEVM was announced to be deprecated in June 2025, and the sequencer was shut down on July 1, 2026 (the official page recorded completion sunset on July 3). This chain comes from Hermez, which was acquired in 2021. The transaction price that year was approximately US$250 million, and it was regarded as the ZK flagship when it was launched.
Layoffs are another parallel. In January 2026, the company laid off 60 people. The official explanation was that the positions overlapped after the acquisition of Coinme and Sequence. On July 16, 2026, Boiron announced the second round of layoffs during the year. The number of layoffs was not announced. The goal is to become a profitable "blockchain payment company" in 2027.
The acquisition itself is also changing the composition of the company. In early 2026, Polygon Labs announced the acquisition of Coinme, a licensed U.S. cash exchange encryption company, and wallet infrastructure Sequence. According to outside reports, the total price exceeded US$250 million. The payment, license, compliance and wallet teams came in, stripping off the underlying public chain ecology and zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) and other non-profit infrastructure businesses. The organizational logic has changed from cultivating the ecology to "building a money transfer company that can make money."
For the secondary market, this is harder to digest than destruction. There are fewer storytellers, the products are narrower, and the glorious narratives of the past are no longer there.
For a project that has been renamed from MATIC to POL, changed from the expansion narrative to the payment narrative, and changed from four founders to one person sitting in the foundation, this dislocation is not sudden. The next thing that the market needs to watch is not who posts a picture of the burning button again, but whether the 2% annual additional issuance will change, whether the quarterly burning can stably exceed the new minting amount, and what part of the cash flow will be allocated to POL after the payment company is completed.