polygon

Polygon ( $POL ) Labs is seeking up to $100 million in fresh capital to expand its payments business, a move that would formalize the company’s pivot from general‑purpose Layer‑2 scaling to purpose‑built consumer and merchant payment rails, according to a report.

The targeted raise would sit on top of a previously announced $250 million acquisition program for U.S. crypto payments firm Coinme and wallet‑infra provider Sequence, giving Polygon a vertically integrated stack spanning fiat on‑ and off‑ramps, card and ATM distribution, and developer APIs. CEO Marc Boiron has framed the strategy bluntly:

“Our ambition is to establish ourselves as a regulated payments entity in the U.S. Payments represent the most compelling use case,” he told Reuters in January.

The new funding comes after Polygon, which earlier raised about $450 million from investors including Sequoia Capital India, SoftBank and Tiger Global, began consolidating its bet that stablecoin flows will define the next decade of blockchain adoption.

In a recent podcast, Boiron said Polygon had already helped move roughly $2.3 trillion on‑chain and concluded that “stablecoin payments was the standout vertical,” pushing the team to “bet everything on payments” as generalized L1 and L2 performance began to converge. Polygon’s own blog now describes its “Open Money Stack” as a modular payments platform aimed at making cross‑chain, cross‑currency transactions feel like a single network for fintechs and enterprises.

Building a regulated payments stack
Polygon’s shift from token incentives to fee‑driven payments economics is already visible in hard numbers. Combined, Polygon, Coinme and Sequence have processed more than $1 billion in off‑chain sales and over $2 trillion in on‑chain value transfers, according to a January briefing on the Coinme and Sequence deals. The network has also surpassed $11.1 billion in lifetime non‑USD stablecoin transfer volume and now handles more than 43% of all non‑USD stablecoin transfers on public blockchains, positioning it as a leading home for local‑currency payments, Polygon Labs said in an April ecosystem update. Separate analytics from Allium show Polygon processed 178.1 million USD‑stablecoin transactions in a single month, including 42.7 million operations in the last week of March alone, underscoring its role as a high‑frequency payments rail.

On‑chain payments race heats up

With dedicated capital for payments layered on top of its infrastructure roadmap, Polygon is setting itself up as a direct rival to Solana‑based payment protocols and bank‑integrated stablecoin rails rather than just another Ethereum scaling option. Boiron has argued that as chain architectures converge, “differentiation through speed and low fees is over,” and that the real moat will be regulated distribution, enterprise integration and the ability to move real‑world money at scale. If Polygon successfully closes a $100 million round into this vertical, it will sharpen a broader market contest over who owns the plumbing for global dollar and local‑currency stablecoin flows—a contest that increasingly looks less like speculative DeFi and more like the next iteration of Visa, Mastercard and Stripe on‑chain.
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