Polygon prepares for future without Polymarket in $100M payments expansion move

Polygon Labs is in advanced talks to raise up to $100 million to fund a dedicated stablecoin payments business, according to a report by The Information. This development is coming around the same time the network is making serious advancements in its payments features, the latest being its third mainnet upgrade in four months.

For much of the past two years, Polygon’s network economy has had one major catalyst: Polymarket.

Polymarket accounted for over half the transactions on Polygon and 67% of its gas fees in March 2026, making it far and away the largest platform operating on the L2 network. However, the divorce between Polygon and Polymarket is imminent after Polymarket suffered downtime in December 2025 following a Polygon network outage.

Not long after the incident, a team member from Polymarket confirmed that the company was building its own proprietary Ethereum Layer 2 network, internally referred to as POLY.

For a platform that had grown into one of the most liquid prediction markets in the world, dependence on a general-purpose chain it could not control had become a liability.

Polymarket announced on April 6 what it called its biggest infrastructure change to date: a rebuilt trading engine, upgraded smart contracts, and the launch of Polymarket USD, a new collateral token backed one-to-one by Circle’s USDC, replacing the bridged USDC.e it had long relied upon.

So, Polymarket’s L2 going live is not a matter of if but when.

What is Polygon ahead of Polymarket’s exit?

In January, Polygon signed definitive agreements to acquire Coinme, one of the first licensed digital currency exchanges in the United States, and Sequence, a smart wallet and cross-chain infrastructure provider, in a combined deal worth more than $250 million.

Together, the acquisitions form the backbone of what Polygon is calling the Open Money Stack, a vertically integrated platform designed to move stablecoins from fiat bank accounts through to on-chain settlement via a single API.

Coinme brings regulated fiat on- and off-ramps operating across 48 US states under money-transmitter licenses, along with more than one million existing users.

Sequence adds enterprise smart wallets and a one-click cross-chain orchestration engine. Co-founder Sandeep Nailwal described the combined strategy as a “reverse Stripe,” a reference to the payments giant’s own acquisition-led push into stablecoin infrastructure.

Polygon Foundation founder Sandeep Nailwal reportedly said, “Polygon Labs is becoming a full-blown fintech company.”

The fresh $100 million raise, if completed, would add more weight to that bet.

The Giugliano hardfork, activated on Polygon’s mainnet at block 85,268,500 today, Wednesday, April 8, is the technical complement to that commercial strategy.

Can Polygon win as a payments layer for everyone else?

The commercial landscape gives Polygon reason for both confidence and caution. Its on-chain stablecoin supply is currently around $3.4 billion, suggesting that demand for its settlement rails remains substantial even as its most prominent application prepares to exit. Shift4 Payments, Revolut, Mastercard, Stripe, and Flutterwave are among the enterprises currently using the network.

The US GENIUS Act of 2025 has handed regulated infrastructure providers like Polygon a clearer path to market. Coinme’s money-transmitter licenses and compliance infrastructure are now a strategic asset rather than a regulatory footnote.

However, the competitive pressure is real and continues to build up. Stripe and Paradigm have built Tempo, a Layer-1 blockchain focused on stablecoin-native payments, signaling its intent to own the full stack from settlement to custody.

The pace of acquisitions, protocol upgrades, and fundraising activity that Polygon has embarked on points to the organization deciding with some urgency that its future lies in being the payments chain for everyone instead of the home chain for one, in this case, Polymarket.

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