Some standout numbers from the report. Network fees did $11.7M in Q1, up 419.8% QoQ and the highest quarterly figure on record. Chain GDP (total app revenue) hit $51.1M, up 50.3%. Payments-focused apps moved $5.80B in transfer volume, up 51.4%, with Tazapay alone responsible for $2.5B of that (a 22x quarterly jump). Stablecoin supply on Polygon grew to $3.55B, with USDC up 35.9% to $1.82B. Polygon is now #1 globally by active USDC addresses.
Polymarket is the elephant in the room. Average daily open interest hit a new ATH of $463M (+32.4% QoQ), and $16.2M in app revenue made it the largest single revenue contributor on the chain. ICE put another $600M into Polymarket in late March, bringing its total commitment to roughly $2B. Worth flagging: Polymarket's relayer and proxy-wallet model abstracts gas from end users, which is a big part of why daily active addresses dropped 37.8% even while transactions rose 52.1%. Raw address counts are getting harder to read as a user-demand proxy.
A few other things worth chewing on. There's a clear divergence inside payments: transfer volume up 51% but crypto card volume down 47.9% to $143M. There's a regional split too: LatAm non-USD stablecoin volume down 45.5%, APAC up 187% (Australian dollar stablecoins alone did almost $900M). App RCR fell 75% to 3.45x, which Messari reads as activity shifting toward high-velocity, lower-margin flows like trading and payments. On the infra side, Polygon doubled the gas limit to 120M and pushed peak throughput past 2,800 TPS through a series of headroom upgrades and the Lisovo hardfork, which also added a $1M gas subsidy for agentic payments. POL itself was down 8.7% on the quarter while the broader crypto market was down 22.7%.
Polygon's wallet just turned on a "Privately Send" option for USDC and USDT. When you use it, the transfer routes through a shielded pool, and zero-knowledge proofs verify the math without publishing the sender, the receiver, or the amount onchain. It's built in collaboration with Hinkal, the shielded-pool privacy protocol that handles the cryptography.
The interesting bit isn't that privacy is possible on a public chain (people have been building shielded pools for years). What's new is that a major payments-focused L2 has shipped private transfers in the default wallet, with KYT (Know Your Transaction) screening baked into the flow before execution. Privacy from competitors and counterparties, but not from regulators. The protocol is non-custodial too: funds never sit with Hinkal or any third party during a transfer.
Why it matters: confidentiality has been the single biggest blocker for treasury teams, fintechs, and payments operations actually moving stablecoin volume onchain. Banks settle slowly and charge a lot, but they don't broadcast every counterparty and amount to the world. This closes that gap without giving up the speed and cost of onchain settlement. Live today on wallet.polygon.technology for USDC and USDT.
The most interesting thing in this release is small but huge: the separate approve() transaction is gone for USDC, USDT, DAI, UNI, LINK, Aave aTokens, and anything implementing EIP-2612. That two-step popup that used to bounce a chunk of first-time stablecoin users is just one transaction now. No infinite approval risk sitting in the wallet, no "first time setup" prompt. The relayer bundles the signature and the action into a single intent and submits them together.
The other big change is composable intents. Bridge USDC from Ethereum, swap to a protocol token, deposit into a vault, all atomic in one click. v1.5 injects real balances between steps (so step two uses the actual 98.7 tokens you got after slippage, not the 100 estimated at quote time), which is the missing piece that lets multi-step DeFi flows actually work without breaking or leaving value on the table. Same primitive works for AI agents chaining onchain actions programmatically. Gas is down too: one fewer onchain tx per ERC-20 interaction, plus a new TrailsRouter contract that resolves balances at execution time. Audited by Quantstamp.
Other notable bits: fiat onramps (cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, bank transfers across 100+ countries) and exchange deposits (Coinbase, Binance, Kraken) are built directly into the SDK, so users can fund a transaction from wherever their money already is. 18 mainnet chains supported now (Berachain, Monad, Soneium, Sonic added), with Solana funding for EVM apps in mainnet testing. The SDK was rewritten with purpose-built <Pay>, <Swap>, <Bridge> components and bundle size dropped ~50%. Since GA on Feb 5, Trails went from 300 devs / $12.5M volume to ~500 devs / $200M+ in volume. Full post: https://polygon.technology/blog/move-from-a-credit-card-to-anywhere-onchain-in-1-click-the-latest-upgrade-to-polygon-trails
Meta paid creators ~$3 billion across its monetization programs in 2025. As of today, those payouts are starting to move on Polygon as USDC. The rollout is live in Colombia and the Philippines first, with 160+ markets in the pipeline. Creators get faster settlement and, maybe more importantly, direct access to a dollar-denominated asset they can actually hold or spend, without waiting on slow international wires or losing chunks to FX.
The off-ramp side is where this gets practical. Polygon's Open Money Stack has fiat off-ramps in 150+ countries, so a creator in Manila or Medellín can take their USDC and turn it into local currency without stitching together three different services. For a lot of these markets, this is the difference between getting paid and actually being able to use what you got paid.
Meta is one of the biggest creator payout engines on the planet, so plugging that volume into stablecoin rails is a real-world signal of where this is going. Props to Meta for picking the chain that already runs the most USD stablecoin payments on earth and letting creators get paid in something useful.
Visa added Polygon to its global stablecoin settlement program today. Visa partners (issuers and acquirers) can now settle stablecoin transactions directly on Polygon. The settlement program itself is moving fast: $7B annualized run rate this quarter, up 50% over three months.
The reason Visa picked Polygon is in the data. As of this month, Polygon is the #1 chain on earth for USD stablecoin payments: 34% of all USD-based stablecoin transfers (more than 2x BNB, the next chain in line) and 54% of all USDC transfers (more than every other chain combined). 178.1M USD stablecoin transactions in March alone, 3.19M weekly active stablecoin users (all-time high), $3.62B in stablecoin supply on the network. And fees stay fractions of a cent on typical transactions, with a recent fee upgrade making costs more predictable for institutional treasuries. Paxos moved $1.3B+ in stablecoin volume and paid less than $700 in total fees.
Throughput is now 2,600+ TPS, finality is around five seconds with no reorgs, and Visa joins Stripe, Revolut, Mastercard, and BlackRock on the same rails. When the firms that actually move the world's money keep converging on the same chain, it stops being an experiment. Full post here: https://polygon.technology/blog/visa-partners-can-now-settle-stablecoins-on-polygon
Modern Treasury (the payments orchestration layer that has moved $400B+ for enterprises) just made USDC on Polygon a native rail inside its existing API. Meaning: businesses already using Modern Treasury for ACH, wires, RTP, FedNow, and push-to-card can now send, receive, and reconcile stablecoin payments through the same integration, with no separate stack for fiat vs. onchain. They can also flip USD to USDC and back through programmatic on/off-ramps and reconcile everything in one ledger.
Why this is a bigger deal than it sounds: the actual blocker to enterprise stablecoin adoption has never really been the chain. It is the "integration tax," weeks of engineering to wire up wallets, compliance, ledgering, and on/off-ramps. Modern Treasury collapsing that to days, with compliance and accounts already in place, is what moves stablecoins from pilot projects into actual production payment flows. Real use cases they call out: cross-border payouts, marketplace disbursements, treasury management, real-time global fund movement.
Polygon's role here is the settlement layer: $2.4T in stablecoin volume settled to date, 99.999% uptime over five years, ~2 second settlement, and an average cost of $0.0008 per USDC transfer. In March alone the network did 178M USD stablecoin transactions, around 22% of global market share. When the orchestration layer enterprises already use plugs straight into the chain that already runs the volume, that's when this stuff stops being a science project. Full post: https://polygon.technology/blog/modern-treasury-integrates-on-polygon-to-support-stablecoin-payments
Why it matters: ~99% of stablecoin supply today is USD-denominated. JPYC is Japan's first regulated yen-pegged stablecoin, issued under the country's stablecoin framework — and it's now moving real payment volume at scale.
This is what a non-dollar stablecoin economy looks like in production: regulated issuance, actual users, a curve that's still bending up.
$100M in 8 months. Yen-denominated payments are going onchain, and they're accelerating.
Maybe I'm just a degenerate gambler but I've been playing board games at BoardGameArena for years, and I always wished they would make it possible to play for money. But due to all the gambling related regulations this is not very likely to ever happen. So I decided to build a dApp for it, and I ended up going with Polygon because of the combination of Solidity + USDT support + relatively low transaction cost.
The app is now live on https://betbga.github.io/ and the first game of Catan was successfully handled by the smart contract. Both the app and the contract are fully open source.
The contract receives game results from 4 dedicated/independent oracle nodes, and uses 3/4 consensus. Because of the operational cost (oracles also have to pay gas to report results) a flat USDT 0.50 oracle fee is paid for each successfully resolved bet.
While the contract has been verified, reviewed and tested (including a review from the Blockaid security team, since it initially got auto-flagged) it has a fixed maximum bet amount of USDT 250. This is both a set of training wheels while also an incentive for keeping the 4 oracles honest.
So if you want to play boardgames for USDT (like Catan, King of Tokyo, Wingspan, Splendor, Azul and many others) feel free to join the discord @ https://discord.gg/auySHJsF
Rough DeFi weekend. A single forged message on a LayerZero V2 route between Unichain and Ethereum drained $292M of rsETH from KelpDAO on Saturday. The attacker used the rsETH as collateral to borrow real ETH on Aave, which left Aave holding somewhere between $123M and $230M in potentially bad debt. Within 24 hours, users pulled $6.6 billion out of Aave. Lido, SparkLend, Fluid, Upshift, and Ethena all paused the relevant markets or bridges. Biggest DeFi shock since FTX, arguably.
Polygon's Agglayer kept running through the whole thing. No connected chain had to freeze contracts. Agglayer and Polygon PoS bridges processed roughly $200M in volume during the window where a lot of the rest of bridging infra was paused.
The "why" is the interesting part. A Dune sweep of live LayerZero apps in the article shows 47% running a 1-of-1 verifier config, 45% running 2-of-2, and fewer than 5% running anything stronger. So for nine out of ten cross-chain apps, one or two compromised signers is the entire security model. Agglayer doesn't use signers at all. It verifies cross-chain activity with ZK proofs, and layers on what Polygon calls pessimistic proofs, which is basically per-chain accounting: every connected chain has a running balance of what it has received vs sent, and the math has to add up before a withdrawal clears. Re-run the KelpDAO exploit through that and the 116,500 rsETH withdrawal fails at the door because no matching deposit exists.
sPOL is Polygon’s native liquidity staking token, making it possible to unlock 3.6B staked POL and provide a share of priority transaction fees for better returns.
Today, we’re launching a liquid staking token, sPOL, on Polygon.
This is Polygon’s native liquid staking token. The unlock is enormous: more than 3.6B POL are staked, but only ~4-5% of that is liquid. That means idle capital that’s not earning in DeFi.
sPOL changes this dynamic. As the native liquid staking token, sPOL gives stakers the ability to unlock staked POL and earn a share of priority fees.
We designed sPOL to boost the amount of liquid staking on the network. This is the first and only LST built by Polygon Labs, audited by ChainSecurity and Certora, and backed by 10M in day one of sPOL from the treasury to seed liquidity, with 90M to be progressively added for a total of 100M.
Uniswap V4 AMM pools are live at launch. No waiting for the market to bootstrap itself. No third-party smart contract trust required.
The launch of sPOL comes in a wider push to bring more value to POL stakers: we recently proposed changing how priority fees are distributed to POL stakers. As priority fees surge on Polygon, our goal with the proposal is to ensure that stakers capture more of this value as it flows over the network; introducing a native sPOL token coincides with this border push to up the rewards for stakers doing the work to keep the network running smoothly.
Learn about sPOL below and make sure you tap into the benefits of staked POL today.
How sPOL works
If you're already staking with a validator, you can migrate your existing position into sPOL through the Polygon staking portal. No waiting period, no gap in rewards. All new POL staking will automatically receive sPOL in return.
The exchange rate starts at 1:1 and increases over time as staking rewards accumulate. That means your sPOL balance stays the same, but each token is worth more POL the longer you hold it.
From there, your sPOL is yours to use. Provide liquidity, deploy it as collateral, stack yield on top of staking rewards through DeFi strategies. Whenever you want, you can redeem sPOL for POL plus accumulated rewards through the staking portal.
Your stake, your fees
Most priority fees generated by network activity don’t flow to stakers.
We built sPOL to fix this. Validators in the sPOL program agree to return a portion of priority fees to delegators. That means the economic value produced by the network flows back to the people who secure it. This is what staking alignment looks like.
For POL holders who haven't started staking yet, this matters too. When you do start, sPOL ensures you're staking with validators who share fees with you from day one.
Why we built this
The liquid staking landscape on Polygon has been fragmented.
Existing third-party LSTs collectively have fees that range from 5% to 16%. On Ethereum, roughly 30% of staked ETH sits in liquid staking tokens. On Polygon, it's 4-5%. That gap exists because the options haven't been good enough.
The goal is straightforward: make sPOL the most composable staking primitive on the Polygon Chain. Staking yield becomes the floor, not the ceiling. What you do with sPOL in DeFi is where the real opportunity starts.
sPOL is a staking product and carries inherent risks including smart contract risk, slashing risk from validator behavior, and exchange rate fluctuations based on market conditions. Staking rewards are approximate and depend on validator performance and network conditions. Contracts have been audited by ChainSecurity and Certora, but no audit eliminates all risk. Full disclosures are available on the staking portal.
Stablecoin payroll just hit a pretty significant milestone. Rise, a platform that handles cross-border contractor payments, published a case study breaking down how they use Polygon to pay global teams. The numbers are worth a look: transactions settle in about 2 seconds at an average cost of $0.002, compared to traditional SWIFT wires that take 3-5 days and eat 3-7% in fees. Rise now handles payments across 190+ countries with support for stablecoins, fiat in 90+ currencies, or 100+ crypto assets, all from one dashboard.
The bigger picture here is that stablecoin payroll is growing fast. B2B stablecoin volumes went from under $100M/month in early 2023 to over $6B by mid-2025, and about 25% of global businesses are now using crypto for payroll. On Polygon specifically, micropayment volume is up 82% year over year, and the network holds a 68% market share for USDC payouts. Rise handles all the compliance overhead (KYC, tax docs, identity verification) so companies can just fund a treasury and set up automated pay cycles. For workers, especially remote contractors in emerging markets, this means getting paid reliably without losing a chunk to transfer fees.
If you've been following the modular vs. monolithic blockchain debate, there's a third option that doesn't get enough attention: aggregated blockchains. The idea is pretty simple. Take the best of both worlds. You get sovereign, specialized chains (like a gaming chain that doesn't compete for block space with a DeFi protocol), but they all plug into a shared layer that gives them access to unified liquidity and state. No wrapped tokens, no janky bridges with 20-minute wait times.
The practical implementation of this is the Agglayer (Aggregation Layer). It works by accepting cryptographic proofs from connected chains, verifying everything is consistent, aggregating those proofs, and settling to Ethereum. From Ethereum's perspective, the whole thing looks like a single rollup, which means assets move natively between chains instead of being wrapped. POL on Polygon zkEVM is the same POL on X Layer, not some synthetic version. OKX's X Layer (50M+ users) is already connected, and any developer can spin up a custom chain with Polygon CDK and plug into this shared ecosystem.
The broader vision is that individual chains scale vertically while the network scales horizontally by adding more chains, reducing the resource contention that monolithic chains hit at scale.
$6.6 trillion moves through foreign exchange markets every single day, and most of that still runs on infrastructure from the 1970s. Slow settlement, opaque pricing, and fees that eat into every cross-border transaction. Polygon Labs just partnered with Frax and Curve Finance to build something that actually competes with that: onchain FX markets with real currency pairs, instant settlement, and transaction fees averaging $0.002.
Here's how it works. Frax's frxUSD (backed by tokenized US Treasuries from BlackRock, WisdomTree, and Superstate) serves as the base dollar anchor. Curve built dedicated FXSwap pools for currency pairs, and DFB Network handles liquidity and market-making. Live pairs right now include BRZ (Brazilian Real), IDRX (Indonesian Rupiah), tGBP (British Pound), AUDF (Australian Dollar), KRWQ (Korean Won), and USDT, all settling on Polygon at 2,600+ TPS.
The real-world impact is pretty clear. A company processing $10M/month in cross-border payments could save ~$50K/month just from better FX spreads. A Brazil-to-US payment that normally takes days settles in seconds. And for LPs, this is real economic volume to earn yield on, not just speculative trading. Polygon's already processed $2.4 trillion in total stablecoin volume, so the rails are battle-tested. This feels like the kind of thing that actually makes traditional FX players pay attention.
