Polygon has passed $3 trillion in cumulative stablecoin transfer volume, but the speed of the latest trillion may be more important than the milestone itself. Polygon says $1.67 trillion, roughly 55% of its lifetime stablecoin volume has moved since January 2025. The network processed $933 billion during 2025, up from only $276 billion in 2024, followed by another $741 billion so far in 2026. That means more stablecoin value moved across Polygon during the past 21 months than during the network’s previous four years combined. Polygon’s Payments Bet Is Starting to Show Up in Volume The acceleration coincides with Polygon’s shift toward payments infrastructure rather than relying primarily on its older DeFi and NFT narrative. Major payment companies including Revolut, Mastercard, Cash App, Deel and Tazapay have used the network, according to Polygon. Revolut alone moved $810 million through Polygon in 2025, while PayPal USD began issuing natively on the chain this summer. That builds on the Open Money Stack push we tracked earlier this year, when Polygon started positioning itself as an end-to-end stablecoin infrastructure provider rather than simply a blockchain settlement layer. The Infrastructure Is Expanding With the Volume Polygon has also been upgrading capacity around the payments thesis. A June upgrade increased network capacity to as much as 5,000 payments per second, while the Ithaca upgrade added safeguards designed to keep transactions moving if a block producer stalls. Polygon says newer agent-payment testing has reached more than 11 million verified payments per second when transactions are settled in batches. Payment infrastructure is expanding beyond raw throughput. Polygon has already introduced private stablecoin payments that can hide the sender, recipient and amount using zero-knowledge technology: a feature aimed particularly at institutional users. The numbers suggest Polygon’s growth is increasingly tied to the broader shift toward stablecoin payments rather than speculative onchain activity alone.
