Is the 1 Billion POL Burn Just a Joke?

The 100 million POL only accounts for 0.93% of the current total supply, currently valued at around 10 million USD.

Written by: Ma He, Foresight News

On September 23, Sandeep Nailwal, CEO of Polygon Foundation, tweeted that the POL token burn contract was ready and could be triggered by any member of 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 burned.

At a price of about 0.10 USD on that day, these 100 million POL were valued at around 10 million USD. The source was not from the foundation's treasury but from the fees accumulated in the network's base fee collection contract. Nailwal previously stated that there were about 121 million POL in the collection address, with the first batch of 100 million burned, accounting for about 83% of the total, while the remainder would stay in the collection address, waiting to be burned quarterly by the community.

POL has not followed the typical narrative of token burns; according to the latest market data, its price still fluctuates around 0.1 USD. The price has not translated the term "deflation" into buying pressure.

How the 100 Million Were Burned

Polygon PoS adopted a fee structure similar to Ethereum's EIP-1559 starting in January 2022: base fees are burned. Over the past few years, this fee was not immediately burned with each transaction but accumulated in the network's base fee settlement contract. Nailwal stated that starting from January 2026, POL would be in a net deflationary range; a widely referenced comparison mid-year is that about 105.2 million POL had been minted by 2026, while approximately 107.7 million had been collected in base fees during the same period.

On September 18, he first released a preview of "preparing to burn 100 million" and noted that the contract was still in the testnet and required final signatures to go live on the mainnet. Five days later, after the mainnet was deployed, the burn was completed through community-triggered permissionless calls. The official statement indicated that every quarter thereafter, the community could burn the newly accumulated POL in the collection address again.

The initial supply of POL was 10 billion, corresponding to a 1:1 migration from MATIC. The total on-chain supply was approximately 10.7 billion before the burn, with 100 million representing about 1% of the initial 10 billion and about 0.93% of the current total supply. According to Polygon's documentation, the effective annual issuance after June 2025 is about 2%. This means that this one-time burn does not even cover half a year's gross issuance.

The burn is real, but the scale is written on "periodic recovery of fees," not a change in the issuance system.

For holders, this explains why burning 100 million is unlikely to support a price increase on its own. The market is not asking how many tokens are missing today, but whether the supply will rebound by this time next year.

Revenue of 24.5 Million USD in 2026

Nailwal tweeted this month that Polygon's revenue in 2026 so far is 24.5 million USD, compared to Arbitrum's 8.41 million USD and NEAR's 5.6 million USD, concluding 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 significantly declined compared to 2021, its protocol fee revenue has been growing since 2026.

The payment narrative has tangible volume. In May 2026, Polygon's stablecoin transfer volume was approximately 79.25 billion USD, with about 198 million stablecoin transactions that month, ranking among the top across chains; the cumulative stablecoin transfer volume exceeded 2.4 trillion USD.

Currently, the market cap of stablecoins on Polygon remains around 3 billion USD.

Visa has included Polygon in its stablecoin settlement pilot. These data indicate that the chain is still in use, but the users of the chain and those buying POL are increasingly not the same group.

Team Layoffs and Business Contraction

Although the data performance is commendable, the departure of team executives and layoffs still cast a shadow over Polygon.

Among the four original co-founders of Polygon, Jaynti Kanani and Anurag Arjun exited daily operations around 2023; Mihailo Bjelic resigned from the Foundation board in May 2025 and ended his daily work at Labs. Sandeep became the only remaining founder, taking over as Foundation CEO in June of the same year, stating that he would refocus on direction and execution. Polygon Labs continues to be led by Marc Boiron as CEO.

The personnel roster within Labs is also changing. In July 2023, Boiron was promoted from Chief Legal Officer to CEO, while then-president Ryan Wyatt left the company. By mid-2025, Jordi Baylina, head of zero-knowledge research, left with his team to work on ZisK. The product line is also contracting: in June 2025, it was announced that Polygon zkEVM would be discontinued, and the sequencer was shut down on July 1, 2026 (officially recorded as completed on July 3).

This chain originated from the acquisition of Hermez in 2021, with a transaction price of about 250 million USD, and was initially regarded as a ZK flagship upon launch.

Layoffs are another parallel line. In January 2026, the company laid off about 60 people, officially explained as overlapping positions after the acquisition of Coinme and Sequence; on July 16, 2026, Boiron announced a second round of layoffs within the year, without disclosing the number of employees, aiming to turn the company into a profitable "blockchain payment company" by 2027.

The acquisitions themselves are also changing the company's composition. In early 2026, Polygon Labs announced the acquisition of the U.S. licensed cash-to-crypto exchange Coinme and wallet infrastructure Sequence, with external reports indicating a total price exceeding 250 million USD. The incoming teams are focused on payments, licensing, compliance, and wallets, while the non-profit infrastructure businesses such as underlying public chain ecology and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) have been stripped away. The organizational logic has shifted from nurturing an ecosystem to "becoming a profitable transfer company."

For the secondary market, this is harder to digest than the burn. There are fewer storytellers, the product is narrower, and the past glorious narrative is no longer.

For a project that has already changed its name from MATIC to POL, shifted from a scaling narrative to a payment narrative, and gone from four founders to one person running the foundation, this misalignment is not surprising. What the market wants to see next is not who will post another image of a burn button, but whether the 2% annual issuance will change, and whether quarterly burns can consistently exceed the newly minted amount, as well as what portion of cash flow POL will capture after becoming a payment company.

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