Polygon (prev. MATIC)

Polygon, first called Matic Network, was created in 2017 in Mumbai by Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal and Anurag Arjun, among others, who also founded Polygon Labs. Development is open: Heimdall-v2 v0.10.0 scheduled the Ithaca hard fork for July 2026, which is meant to let the chain recover when a block producer stalls, and v0.11.0 followed on 18 August 2026. Network changes go through public Polygon Improvement Proposals. Polygon Labs is building the Open Money Stack for business payments and completed a SOC 2 Type 1 examination for it in September 2026.

• SEC v. Binance Holdings et al.: Complaint (Case 1:23-cv-01599)
• 0xPolygon/heimdall-v2 releases (GitHub)
• Polygon completes SOC 2 Type 1 examination for Open Money Stack (Polygon)

According to the SEC's 2023 complaint against Binance, Polygon reported raising about $450 million from venture capital firms in a private round in February 2022, and reserved about 20% of MATIC for team members and advisors and about 67% for the ecosystem, Foundation and operations. That complaint alleged MATIC was a security; the case was dismissed in May 2025. No exchange-traded product for POL is recorded in the sources, and POL is not among the examples named in the March 2026 SEC interpretation on digital commodities. POL is on the National Bank of Kazakhstan's April 2026 list of authorised unsecured digital assets.

• SEC v. Binance Holdings et al.: Complaint (Case 1:23-cv-01599)
• SEC Litigation Release No. 26316: Binance Holdings Limited et al.
• SEC: Application of the Federal Securities Laws to Certain Types of Crypto Assets (Release No. 33-11412)
• List of authorized unsecured digital assets (National Bank of Kazakhstan)

POL started with 10 billion tokens, matching MATIC 1:1 at migration in September 2024, and has no maximum supply. The Polygon docs describe an effective 2% annual emission from June 2025: 1% for validator rewards and 1% for a community treasury. The EmissionManager contract alone can mint new POL, and minting is limited by a per-second cap in the token contract. On 27 September 2026 Etherscan showed about 10.72 billion POL. The base fee of each transaction is burned. A forum proposal of October 2025 to end inflation and add a treasury burn policy had no adopted outcome.

• POL: Polygon Developer Docs
• Polygon Ecosystem Token (POL): Etherscan token page
• 0xPolygon/pol-token (GitHub)
• EIP-1559 Upgrades Are Going Live on Polygon Mainnet (Polygon)

About $2.96 billion of USD stablecoins circulated on Polygon on 27 September 2026, and DeFi value locked on Polygon PoS was about $788.5 million. Users paid about $2.2 million of chain fees over 30 days and $28.7 million over a year. Polymarket runs on Polygon and recorded about $82.2 million of fees over 30 days. Revolut launched its euro stablecoin EURR on Polygon and Ethereum in August 2026. Block production is concentrated: each span has a single producer chosen from a small pool of validators, and fees sit in a multisig controlled by Polygon Labs and Regen Financial before redistribution.

• DefiLlama Stablecoins: chains
• DefiLlama: Polygon chain fees
• Revolut Launches EURR, a Euro-Backed Stablecoin, on Polygon (Polygon)
• Polygon PoS architecture overview: Polygon Developer Docs
• PIP-65: Economic Model for VEBloP Architecture (GitHub)