Polygon (POL)

Polygon (POL) is the native cryptocurrency of the Polygon network, a group of blockchains built to make Ethereum-style applications cheaper and faster to use. POL pays transaction fees on Polygon's main chain, Polygon PoS, and is the token that validators stake to secure it. It replaced the network's original token, MATIC, in September 2024, with each MATIC converted into one POL.

POL is the asset; Polygon is the network and the company-backed project behind it. Polygon is often grouped with Ethereum scaling networks such as Arbitrum (ARB) and Optimism (OP), but its main chain has historically been a separate proof-of-stake chain that sends checkpoints to Ethereum rather than a rollup. Development is led by Polygon Labs, with the Polygon Foundation supporting the ecosystem.

Think of Ethereum as a busy city centre where parking is expensive. Polygon built a large car park on the edge of town, with a fast shuttle into the centre. People do most of their business there for a fraction of the cost, and the car park reports back to the city at regular intervals.

POL is the ticket and the deposit for that car park. Every trip on Polygon's main chain is paid for in POL, and the operators who keep the car park running must lock up POL as a guarantee that they will behave. Polygon's newer plan is to connect many such car parks, run by different groups, so that people and money can move between them as if they were one place.

The project began in 2017 as Matic Network, founded in India by Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal and Anurag Arjun, later joined by Mihailo Bjelic. Its main chain went live in 2020 and the project was renamed Polygon in February 2021, as it widened its aim from one sidechain to a family of Ethereum scaling tools. Low fees made it popular for games, NFTs and payments.

In 2023 Polygon set out a "Polygon 2.0" plan and proposed POL as MATIC's successor. The switch took place on 4 September 2024: POL became the gas and staking token of Polygon PoS, and holders on Ethereum or on exchanges could convert MATIC to POL one for one, with no deadline. In 2023 Polygon also launched Polygon zkEVM, a zero-knowledge rollup; in June 2025, when Sandeep Nailwal became chief executive of the Polygon Foundation, the team said it would wind the zkEVM down and concentrate on the PoS chain, payments and the Agglayer. The zkEVM sequencer stopped producing blocks in mid-2026. The Rio upgrade of October 2025 redesigned how PoS blocks are produced to raise throughput.

POL started with a supply of 10 billion tokens, matching MATIC's supply at the moment of conversion. Unlike MATIC, which had a fixed cap, POL was designed with ongoing issuance: the governing proposal set emissions at 2 percent of supply a year for the first ten years, split equally between validator rewards and a community treasury. Part of every transaction fee is also burned, which offsets some of that issuance. The yearly emission can be written as:

• $E$ is the number of new POL created in a year.
• $S$ is the POL supply at the start of the year.
• $r_{\text{v}}$ is the rate paid to validators and stakers, 1 percent under the original design.
• $r_{\text{t}}$ is the rate paid to the community treasury, also 1 percent.

For example, with a supply of 10 billion POL, $E = 10{,}000{,}000{,}000 \times (0.01 + 0.01) = 200{,}000{,}000$ POL in a year, half to validators and half to the treasury. Fee burning reduces the net increase. Holders who do not run a validator can earn a share of rewards through delegated staking; see tokenomics.

The Agglayer is Polygon's system for joining many separate chains into one network. Chains that connect to it share a common bridge to Ethereum and can pass assets and messages to each other without the users needing to trust a separate third-party crypto bridge. Polygon intends POL to pay for and secure these shared services, so that the token's role extends beyond the PoS chain.

The best-known chain built for the Agglayer is Katana, a network focused on decentralized finance that was incubated by Polygon Labs and the trading firm GSR and opened to the public in mid-2025. Because Polygon PoS is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, most Ethereum wallets and applications work on it with little change.

• Network fees. Every transaction on Polygon PoS is paid for in POL, usually a small fraction of a cent.
• Staking. Validators lock up POL to produce blocks and checkpoints, and can lose part of it for misbehaviour.
• Governance. POL holders and validators take part in decisions about upgrades and the community treasury.
• Payments and stablecoins. Polygon PoS carries a large volume of stablecoin payments, often in USDC, where POL is needed only for gas.

Critics point out that Polygon PoS has relied on a relatively small set of validators and on checkpoints to Ethereum rather than full rollup-style security, so users trust its validator set more than they would on a rollup. The shift from a capped MATIC supply to an inflationary POL drew objections from some holders, and the closure of Polygon zkEVM showed that parts of the roadmap can change sharply. Like any altcoin, POL's price is volatile and depends on continued use of the network, and competition from other Ethereum scaling networks is intense.

• Polygon
• Polygon documentation: POL token
• PIP-17: Polygon Ecosystem Token (POL)