Polygon will let anyone trigger a one-time burn of 100 million POL (POL) tokens once new contracts clear final approvals, Chief Executive Sandeep Nailwal said Friday.
Key Points:
- Polygon CEO Sandeep Nailwal says 100 million POL is ready for a permanent burn that any user can trigger.
- He put Polygon's 2026 revenue at $24.5 million, citing ChatGPT for comparisons with Arbitrum and NEAR.
- The contracts sit on testnet and still need final Security Council signatures before reaching mainnet.
Nailwal Details POL Burn Plan
Nailwal announced the change in a post on X. He wrote that every base fee paid on the network adds POL to a collector contract, which now holds 121 million tokens.
The contracts are running on testnet and still need final signatures from Polygon's Security Council before moving to mainnet. Once they go live, any user can trigger the first burn and remove the 100 million POL from supply at once. Community members will then be able to burn POL every quarter.
Nailwal said the network has been deflationary since January, even as payments, trading and consumer apps kept it busy, and that it has scaled tenfold to 5,000 transactions per second.
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Polygon Revenue Vs ARB, NEAR
Nailwal put Polygon's 2026 revenue at $24.5 million, roughly three times the $8.41 million he listed for Arbitrum (ARB) and more than four times the $5.6 million for NEAR (NEAR). His Arbitrum figure included the Robinhood chain. He credited the numbers to "my analyst at ChatGPT," and they have not been independently verified.
Separate data point the same way for Polygon, whose proof-of-stake chain processed more than 1.83 billion transactions this year through early September and generated about $24.7 million in fees. Fee and revenue totals often diverge, though, and NEAR Intents alone generated $5.01 million in fees over 30 days while keeping $1.58 million as net revenue.
Polygon Labs has also been buying its way into payments, picking up cash-to-crypto operator Coinme and wallet developer Sequence for a reported $250 million combined, with stablecoin supply on the network above $3 billion.
ARB, NEAR Rally Leaves POL Behind
Nailwal called his own comparison "bad cope" as rival tokens rallied without POL. ARB climbed about 28% on Friday after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission granted a five-year exemption for tokenized stock trading, though its RSI reached 78, an overbought level.
NEAR gained more than 45% in three days, and crypto analyst Michaël van de Poppe said a move to $5 was "just a matter of time."
Nailwal has pressed the burn story all year, and in January he said Polygon was having its "S curve moment" on fees, with about 1 million POL burning daily. By Jun. 30, he counted 107.7 million POL burned in 2026 against 105.2 million minted, a pool Friday's post suggests is still waiting in the collector.
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