Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal has announced plans to permanently burn 100 million POL tokens, with the burn contract deployed on testnet and awaiting final signatures from the Polygon Security Council before mainnet activation.
The one-time burn will draw from a base-fee collector contract that currently holds roughly 121 million POL, according to Nailwal. Once the contract is live, any community member can trigger the initial removal, and additional base-fee burns can be initiated once per quarter. The initial 100 million POL equates to 1% of the token's historical initial supply of 10 billion, although POL retains an ongoing annual emission rate of 2%.
Nailwal also said Polygon has been in a deflationary phase since January 2026, citing transaction base fees accumulating in the collector. He added that the network has increased processing capacity tenfold to 5,000 transactions per second, with payments, trading, and consumer applications among active use cases. No specific governance proposal or Polygon Improvement Proposal number was linked in the announcement.
Alongside the burn update, Nailwal compared Polygon's reported $24.5 million in 2026 revenue with figures attributed to Arbitrum at $8.41 million and NEAR Protocol at $5.6 million. He credited the revenue comparison to his 'analyst at ChatGPT,' and the figures have not been independently verified. A CoinMarketCap News report noted a 6.5% POL price increase shortly after the announcement.
The supply reduction builds on Polygon's transition from MATIC to POL and its wider aggregated blockchain strategy. The network has also reported stablecoin activity such as PayPal's PYUSD, with base-fee revenue now feeding the planned burn mechanism.
