Polygon sees Coinme acquisition as entry to payments sector dominated by Visa, Stripe

Still, the company is a long way from providing serious competition to the incumbents. Visa’s payments volume in fiscal 2025 topped $12.3 trillion, while Stripe hit $1.9 trillion. Polygon is just starting its journey.

The Coinme acquisition addresses a longstanding problem for blockchain networks: They provide the technology behind transactions, but often have little control over the companies generating them. The addition of Coinme will allow Polygon to handle more of the payment process, rather than handing customers off to a third party whenever money needs to enter or leave a blockchain.

"We don't have that customer relationship; we don't get to decide what happens," said Boiron, who claimed rival blockchains have offered financial incentives to payment companies to move their transactions away from Polygon.

"Now, when we are the ones running the regulated business, nobody can cause us to move flows anywhere that we don't want to, because we actually have those customer relationships."

New source of revenue

Polygon Labs earns revenue from its payment services. Transaction fees on the Polygon blockchain are separate, with priority fees distributed to validators and stakers. Boiron said the transaction fees already offset its token emissions, and he assessed that millions of dollars in additional fees go to validators and token stakers.