Polygon Labs expects its regulated payments arm to turn a profit in 2027 after closing its purchase of Coinme, a push into a business dominated by Visa and Stripe.
Key Points:
- Polygon Labs is targeting profit from its regulated payments business in 2027.
- Coinme brings 37 state money transmitter licenses and 11 exemptions covering 48 states.
- Four early customers signed on, but the unified platform is still in technical preview.
Polygon Coinme Deal
The company closed the acquisition on Wednesday. Chief executive Marc Boiron said in a video interview that Coinme, a U.S.-regulated crypto payments provider, lets the Cayman Islands-based firm convert between cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and traditional money itself and charge fees for moving it. That revenue used to go to other businesses.
Coinme's 37 state money transmitter licenses and 11 exemptions cover 48 states, and the business is registered with FinCEN as a money services business. When Polygon first announced the deal, Coinme counted more than 1 million users and a retail network of about 50,000 locations.
Early users include cross-border payments provider Tazapay, payroll platform Toku, crypto payments network Mesh and infrastructure firm Kira. The unified integration, however, is still in technical preview. It is not yet open to all customers.
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Marc Boiron's Strategy
Boiron said he stopped viewing Polygon as a rival to other blockchains some time ago, describing it instead as a payments company "that just uses blockchains to move money." He also claimed rival chains have offered payment firms incentives to move off Polygon.
Owning the licensed business ends that, he said. Polygon now keeps the customer relationship instead of handing users to a third party whenever money enters or leaves a blockchain. Fees on the network itself stay separate, and Boiron said they already offset emissions of the Polygon Ecosystem Token (POL).
Polygon Versus Visa
Payment fees grow with the value of each transfer, unlike blockchain fees that can be fractions of a cent. Polygon still starts far behind, though, since Visa's payments volume topped $12.3 trillion in fiscal 2025 and Stripe's reached $1.9 trillion.
The Coinme deal caps a year of sweeping changes at Polygon Labs. In January, the company unveiled its Open Money Stack for stablecoin payments and agreed to buy Coinme and wallet infrastructure provider Sequence for more than $250 million combined. Boiron then announced a second round of 2026 layoffs on Jul. 16, saying the merger would position Polygon Labs to be profitable in 2027.
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