2025 in Review: A Year of Real Payments Usage on Polygon

Polygon’s network evolved to move money at scale, from protocol upgrades to real transaction flow

2025 brought Polygon a sharpened focus on solving a big, universal problem: how money actually moves. 

Across Polygon’s ecosystem, the most sustained usage in 2025 came from applications that move value: payments, stablecoin transfers in prediction markets, remittances, subscriptions, onchain financial products, and consumer apps where money changes hands continuously.

Major institutions moved from testing blockchain rails to running them in live environments. And Polygon’s core protocol shipped its most aggressive upgrade cycle yet, targeted squarely at becoming the future of payments.

By the end of the year, the pattern was clear. 

Polygon is carrying real transaction flow in payments, payroll, remittances, merchant settlement, and onchain financial products.

Polygon leans into what works

Over the past twelve months, Polygon aligned everything — product, protocol, partnerships, and leadership — around a single mission: Build the blockchain rails for global payment.

That clarity shaped every major decision this year:

• Polygon became a payments chain: fast finality, high throughput, stability, and the onboarding experience institutions expect.
• RWAs emerged as a strength: tokenized assets follow many of the same paths as money.
• The organization evolved: Sandeep Nailwal became CEO of the Polygon Foundation and John Egan joined to lead product and scale Polygon from a high-performance chain into the backbone of the future of payments.

The story of 2025 is how this strategy met reality, plus how institutions, fintechs, and consumers responded.

Increased adoption by institutions, fintechs & breakout apps

People and businesses actually used Polygon to move money.

Fintech & institutional momentum

This year, some of the most trusted financial brands on earth shipped real, production-level features on Polygon:

• Revolut: bringing global crypto transfers to millions of users, with $810M total volume
• Flutterwave: extending crypto-powered payments across Africa in 30+ countries
• Stripe: enabling onchain payments, processing over $75M in payments on Polygon in 2025 as one of the leading chains for Stripe user adoption
• Calastone: moving the world’s largest funds network closer to instant settlement
• Mastercard Crypto Credential: simplifying self-custody with verified, username-based transfers
• Avenia Pay: money movement infra connecting Latam to the world, with over $1B payments volume on Polygon in November and December 2025 alone

Institutions leveraged Polygon for better capital efficiency; fintechs used network where onchain money movement makes commercial sense: fast, stable, cheap, and globally reachable.

Breakout consumer apps chose Polygon too

While institutions provided scale, culture gave Polygon something just as valuable: attention.

• Polymarket became a mainstream phenomenon — the kind your cousin texts you about — running on Polygon rails.
• Courtyard raised $30 million and brought physical collectibles onchain with the kind of mainstream buzz crypto rarely enjoys

Adoption spanned fintech, global commerce, entertainment, and emerging markets, with a simple throughline: Polygon offered the best infrastructure for apps that scale.

The protocol year in review: A network upgraded for global payments

2025 was the year Polygon’s network evolved into true payments infrastructure.

The Gigagas Roadmap

The blueprint for scaling Polygon to 100,000 TPS and supporting the world’s financial flows. Introduced a long-term plan to push Polygon from incremental scaling to sustained, internet-scale throughput without sacrificing efficiency or security.

Polygon’s Gigagas Roadmap to 100k TPS

Bhilai Hardfork: 1,000 TPS Goes Live

The first milestone of the Gigagas roadmap arrived with Bhilai, pushing Polygon past 1,000 TPS and enabling more efficient blocktimes. This upgrade proved Polygon could scale throughput in production while maintaining stability, unlocking higher transaction capacity for payments-heavy workloads.

Polygon Supports 1,000 TPS with Bhilai Hardfork

Heimdall v2: Finality at Human Speed

Finality dropped from minutes to ~5 seconds, enabling:

• Real-time payments
• 12× faster CEX confirmations
• Dramatically fewer reorg risks

Fast finality is the difference that brings crypto to the future of payments. 

Polygon Hits ~5 Second Fast Finality in Significant Upgrade

Rio: 5,000 TPS, Reorgs Eliminated, Stateless Validation

Rio was the most payments-focused upgrade ever shipped on Polygon. It delivered:

• A new block production model (VEBloP) for speed and stability
• Witness-based stateless validation, lowering validator hardware requirements
• The elimination of the threat of chain reorganizations
• A clear path to ~5,000 TPS in the near term

Rio made Polygon faster, lighter, and more predictable under load—critical traits for global payments infrastructure.

Polygon Launches Major Payments Upgrade with Rio

Native USDT0

Polygon now supports a new generation of native, instant-settling stablecoins built for real-time payments.

For institutions and fintechs, these upgrades brought Polygon into parity with global networks, while offering the speed and finality traditional rails can’t match.

Native USDT0 Comes to Polygon for Lower Fees and Deeper Liquidity

Onchain data: The evidence

The clearest indicator that 2025 wasn’t hype? The data.

• P2P stablecoin payments hit all-time highs for consecutive months, including $7.12B in November alone.
• Stablecoin market cap on Polygon rose to over $3B as fintechs and exchanges increased usage.
• Emerging-market stablecoins topped $11B in volume, signaling new demand from regions historically underserved by traditional money infrastructure.
• App-level flows surged, including Revolut, Stripe, Flutterwave, Polymarket, and others.
• Live network throughput consistently exceeded 1,400 TPS across real workloads.

Usage grew because Polygon made payments work.

POL & the Agglayer Ecosystem

Payments were the front of the house. Agglayer was the back, building the architecture where liquidity, security, and user experience unify across chains.

MATIC → POL Migration (Effectively Complete)

The transition is 99% done, with major partners like Coinbase already upgraded. POL now powers both Polygon PoS and Agglayer as the core token of the ecosystem.

MATIC to POL Migration Is Now L…

POL Value Accrual

With POL securing Agglayer and Polygon PoS, it sits at the center of two growing ecosystems, designed for real usage and long-term value alignment.

POL value accrual #1_ POL accru…

Agglayer Breakout Program

A first-of-its-kind program aligning POL, stakers, and builders — designed to bring high-quality chains and apps into the ecosystem with meaningful incentives.

POL Value Accrual Post #2_ Intr…

Katana

Incubated by Polygon Labs and GSR, and launched in 2025, Katana became the early signal of where Agglayer is headed: Unified liquidity. Better UX. Cross-chain applications that feel like one seamless environment.

Agglayer is becoming the connective tissue of the future of payments, and 2025 was its first real proving ground.

A year of leadership

For Polygon, 2025 also saw organizational acceleration.

• Sandeep Nailwal assumed the role of CEO of the Polygon Foundation, sharpening strategic focus and long-term mission.
• John Egan joined Polygon Labs to lead product, bringing clarity to how Polygon becomes not just the fastest chain, but the most useful network for the world’s money.

Together, they reflect the same shift happening across the network: Polygon is growing into the infrastructure layer global finance will depend on.

Coming up

2025 proved something the industry has talked about for years: Payments belong onchain. And Polygon is where they’re coming to life.

2026 will take this further. The infrastructure is ready. The rails are in place. Adoption is here.

In 2026, Polygon will be at the center of the future of payments. Stay tuned.

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