Polygon

In 2017, Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, Anurag Arjun and Mihailo Bjelic founded Matic Network in Mumbai, initially using the Plasma framework to tackle Ethereum's congestion and high gas fees.

Matic ran a Binance Launchpad IEO raising about $5M in 2019, and its mainnet went live in 2020; its PoS sidechain hosted early DeFi and NFT apps at fees far below Ethereum's.

In February 2021, Matic Network rebranded to Polygon, expanding from a single sidechain into a multi-chain scaling and infrastructure ecosystem; that year Aave, Uniswap and Curve deployed on it.

In 2021 Polygon bet big on zero-knowledge tech, merging zk-rollup platform Hermez for about $250M in August and later acquiring Mir Protocol for roughly $400M, with ZK M&A exceeding $1B over two years.

In February 2022, Polygon raised $450M from Sequoia, SoftBank and Tiger Global for ZK R&D and ecosystem growth; its zkEVM public testnet launched that October.

In March 2023, Polygon zkEVM mainnet beta went live as the first EVM-equivalent ZK rollup; that year Polygon 2.0 was unveiled and the migration from MATIC to the new POL token began.

In February 2024, the first AggLayer components went live, connecting X Layer and Polygon zkEVM to share liquidity across sovereign chains as one; on September 4, 2024 MATIC completed its 1:1 migration to POL.

In July 2025, Polygon PoS shipped the Heimdall v2 upgrade with CometBFT and Cosmos SDK, cutting finality from about 90 seconds to 5 seconds and block times to 1–2 seconds, greatly improving UX.

Into 2026, Polygon refocused its ZK strategy—winding down the standalone zkEVM chain while prioritizing CDK and AggLayer, which now links over 190 CDK-built appchains; PoS hit a record ~74.3B quarterly transactions.

Buyback and burn: on September 18, Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal announced a burn of 100 million POL (about 1% of total supply) funded by accumulated fees, structured as a quarterly mechanism any community member can trigger; completion was confirmed on October 12, with another 22 million POL queued for the next phase. POL has been net deflationary since January 2026, though roughly 2% annual issuance continues.

Staking rewards: PIP-92, passed on September 28, directs 27.33 million POL of accumulated priority fees into staking rewards, more than doubling the annualized staking rate from about 3% to 7.7% (October 1 to December 1, 2026) without minting new tokens.

Business progress: on October 14 Polygon closed its acquisition of Coinme (gaining 37 U.S. state money transmitter licenses), expanding Open Money Stack regulatory coverage to 48 states, with its annualized transaction volume topping $1 billion for two straight weeks; on July 1 it shut down zkEVM and cut staff, targeting profitability in 2027.

On April 28, 2026, Visa partners could settle stablecoins on Polygon; on April 29 Meta began paying USDC creator payouts on Polygon and Modern Treasury integrated the same day; on May 26 Mastercard extended settlement to nights, weekends and holidays; on June 10 Mastercard's Agent Pay ecosystem included Polygon; on June 17 Polygon Chain said it supports 5,000 payments per second; on June 22 PayPal USD launched on Polygon Chain; and on July 9 Uquid integrated the Open Money Stack for checkout across 178 million products. On October 12 co-founder Sandeep Nailwal confirmed 100 million POL, about 1% of supply, had been burned using accumulated base fees, with another 22 million queued.

On October 14 Polygon completed its acquisition of Coinme, adding 37 state money-transmitter licences and 11 exemptions covering 48 states into the Open Money Stack. Future strategy and roadmap: shift from Layer 2 scaling to a regulated payments operator, using the Open Money Stack to combine acceptance, accounts, conversion, settlement and payouts, with Agglayer's pessimistic proofs preserving cross-chain security.

Polygon's Future strategy and roadmap: Polygon is placing the next stage of its payments chain on two new demand pools: machine payments and private enterprise blockspace. In late January 2026 it overtook Base in daily x402 transactions and led for eight straight days; as a founding member of the x402 Foundation and a founding partner of Mastercard's Agent Pay for Machines, it earmarked up to $1 million of protocol fee revenue in the Lisovo upgrade to subsidise x402 costs, effectively buying the entry point for agent payments. On the enterprise side it trades default privacy and priority blockspace for settlement migration by regulated institutions. The gap is throughput: Gigagas targets 100,000 TPS against a measured peak near 5,000 TPS in mid-2026, and that pace decides whether it carries institutional volume rather than only stablecoin acquiring.

Sandeep Nailwal, Co-founder and CEO of the Polygon Foundation: BTech in Computer Science from Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University and an MBA from NITIE Mumbai; formerly a Deloitte consultant and head of supply chain at Welspun, he co-founded Matic in 2017 and has led the foundation alone since June 2025. Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs: a lawyer by training and formerly general counsel at dYdX, he became Polygon Labs CEO in 2023, running day-to-day operations. Mudit Gupta, Chief Technology Officer: an Indian Institutes of Technology graduate and formerly Polygon's security lead, he now owns the protocol's technical direction and security architecture. Jaynti Kanani, Co-founder, departed: BE in Computer Engineering from Dharmsinh Desai University, he left Polygon in 2023. Anurag Arjun, Co-founder, departed: BE in Computer Engineering from Nirma University, he left in 2023 and founded Avail. Mihailo Bjelic, Co-founder, departed: he announced his exit from daily affairs in May 2026, completing the departure of all three former founders from management.

Polygon has seen significant team changes recently. In April 2026, Will Button joined as Director of Engineering, Platform. Meanwhile, several key members departed: Michael Sanders, Senior Director of Partnerships and Investor Relations, left in June (after only 4 months); Mattie Fairchild, Head of Founder Community, and Thamilla Talarico, Director of On-chain Finance Growth-Brazil, left in April; marketing team member smokey left in July. According to public sources, Polygon is transitioning from a blockchain foundation to a payments company, accompanied by multiple rounds of layoffs affecting over 200 people. These personnel changes are closely related to the company's strategic shift.