A hundred billion market cap only burns 100 million, is POL's deflation a joke?

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

Written by: Maher, Foresight News

On September 23, Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal tweeted that the POL token burn contract was ready, just waiting for anyone in the community to trigger it; 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.

Based on a valuation of about 0.10 USD on that day, this 100 million POL is worth around 10 million USD. The source is not from the foundation’s treasury but from the transaction fees accumulated in the network's base fee collection contract. Nailwal previously stated that there are about 121 million POL in the collection address, with the first batch of 100 million burned, accounting for about 83% of the stock, while the remainder continues to stay in the collection end, waiting to be burned by the community on a quarterly basis later.

POL did not follow the usual burn narrative pattern; according to the latest market data, its price is still fluctuating around 0.1 USD. The price did not translate the word "deflation" into buying power.

How This 100 Million Was Burned

Polygon PoS has been using a fee structure similar to Ethereum EIP-1559 since January 2022: base fees are burned. In the past few years, these fees were not immediately burned with each transaction but were collected into a base fee accumulation contract. Nailwal's statement is that since January 2026, POL has been in a net deflationary range; a widely cited benchmark is that about 105.2 million were minted in 2026, while about 107.7 million in base fees were collected during the same period.

On September 18, he first released a preview of "preparing to burn 100 million," and specified that the contract was still in the testnet and needed final signing to go live on the mainnet. Five days later, the mainnet deployment was completed, and the burn was triggered by the community's permissionless call. The official stated that thereafter, every quarter, the community could burn another round of new POL accumulated in the collection address.

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

The burn is real, but the scale is recorded as "phased recovery of transaction fees," not changing the issuance system.

For holders, this explains why "burning 100 million" is hard to sustain a price increase on its own. The market is more concerned not with how many chips are lost today but whether the supply will rise again by this time next year.

2026 Revenue of 24.5 Million USD

Nailwal tweeted this month that Polygon has earned 24.5 million USD in 2026 to date, compared to Arbitrum's 8.41 million USD and NEAR's 5.6 million USD, concluding that "POL 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 monthly protocol fee income has started to increase since 2026.

The payment narrative does show real growth. In May 2026, Polygon's stablecoin transfer volume was approximately 79.25 billion USD, with around 198 million transactions that month, ranking among the top across chains; the cumulative stablecoin transfer volume exceeds 2.4 trillion USD.

Currently, the market cap of stablecoins on Polygon still maintains around 3 billion USD at a high level.

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

Team Layoffs and Business Contraction

Despite the impressive data performance, the departure of senior team executives and layoffs have cast a significant shadow over Polygon.

Of the original four co-founders of Polygon, Jaynti Kanani and Anurag Arjun exited daily operations around 2023; Mihailo Bjelic resigned as a Foundation director in May 2025 and ended his daily work at Labs. Sandeep became the only founding member still present and assumed the role of Foundation CEO in June of the same year, stating externally the need to regain focus and execution. Polygon Labs continues to be led by Marc Boiron as CEO.

The internal personnel roster is also changing. In July 2023, Boiron was promoted from Chief Legal Officer to CEO, while then-president Ryan Wyatt left. In mid-2025, Jordi Baylina, head of zero-knowledge research, left with his team to pursue ZisK. The product line also concurrently shrank: in June 2025, it was announced that Polygon zkEVM would be discontinued, with the sequencer shutting down on July 1, 2026 (officially noted as completing sunset on July 3).

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

Layoffs form another parallel line. In January 2026, the company laid off about 60 people, explaining that it was due to overlapping positions after acquiring Coinme and Sequence; on July 16, 2026, Boiron announced a second round of layoffs for the year, without disclosing the number of people affected, aiming to become 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 company Coinme and wallet infrastructure Sequence, with outsider reports placing the total price above 250 million USD. Included are payment, licensing, compliance, and wallet teams, while stripping away the underlying public chain ecology and non-profit foundational businesses like zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP). The organizational logic has shifted from nurturing ecology to making it a profitable transfer company.

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

For a project that has already changed its name from MATIC to POL, shifted its narrative from scaling to payment, and reduced its founding members from four to one in the foundation, this misalignment is not unexpected. What the market wants to see next is not who posts another image of a burn button, but whether the 2% annual issuance will change and whether the quarterly burn can consistently exceed the newly minted amount, as well as how much cash flow POL will actually share once the payment company is established.