Polygon’s vision for the Open Money Stack

For most of history, information, and money were limited by geography, time, and people. We freed information first with the internet. Money is next.

Today, money movement is slow, expensive and uncertain. Tomorrow, it will be boundless and programmatic. All money will be onchain.

Polygon started by building the first high-performance blockchain, the Polygon Chain. But it always had the goal of enabling anyone to move assets anywhere, anytime, to anyone. For this to happen, the most widely used asset in the world—money—must be freed from the constraints of legacy financial infrastructure.
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Polygon occupies a unique position in this transition. Over the past six years, Polygon has become the standard for production-grade blockchain infrastructure used by millions of users, tens of thousands of applications, and many of the world’s largest institutions. The Polygon Chain has facilitated over two trillion dollars in onchain value transfer. Through real usage, we have learned what it takes for onchain systems to operate at global scale.
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Now we face a generational opportunity to rebuild the way the world experiences money. With approximately two quadrillion dollars transferred globally each year, the competitive landscape is dense. The scale of this opportunity ensures that incumbents will compete aggressively, invest heavily, and execute well. But this moment is too important to ignore. While the migration of all money onchain will take a decade or more to fully unfold, the category-defining companies and protocols will be set in the next three years. This is the moment that matters.

Our mission is to move all money onchain. To make it happen, we will build an open money stack to move all money seamlessly.

Why build the Open Money Stack?

The Open Money Stack will be an open and integrated stack of services and technologies to instantly and reliably move money anywhere and put it to work. Open and interoperable money ensures that it is usable everywhere, by everyone, on their own terms. And when used on someone’s own terms, money fades into the background so people are free to focus on living and building, improving their lives.

People don’t need to understand settlement mechanics or lose sleep because they are worried about when money will arrive. Businesses don’t need to design workflows around settlement delays that keep employees in the office late. AI agents don’t need bespoke logic or manual intervention, eliminating the need for human interruption. Instead, after choosing a recipient, money moves instantly and reliably.

Consider a simple example. A business in São Paulo pays a designer in Lagos. Today, that payment moves through multiple banks, sits in transit for days, incurs unpredictable fees, and often arrives late or short of the expected amount. The business plans around delays, and the contractor waits, unsure when the money will clear.

On the Open Money Stack, the business sends Brazilian Real from its existing account and the designer receives the currency they prefer in seconds. There are no cutoff times, no correspondent banks, and no funds stuck in limbo. Until the money is spent, it earns yield. What once took days, intermediaries, and uncertainty, now happens instantly and reliably. This is how money behaves on the Open Money Stack.

What are the characteristics of the Open Money Stack?

The Open Money Stack will move all money in the future for consumers, businesses, and AI agents alike. Today, onchain money generally needs to return offchain to be used. With Open Money Stack, however, money that comes onchain can stay — and be used — onchain forever.

The Open Money Stack will include blockchain rails, onchain orchestration, wallet infrastructure, indexers and RPCs, on-ramps and off-ramps, offchain orchestration, stablecoin interoperability, compliance, onchain identity, and onchain earning. When businesses are moving money or offering money movement for their customers, the Open Money Stack will offer in one simple integration:

1. a choice of desired compute via blockchain, whether shared or dedicated blockspace;
2. a wallet service to hold customer funds, along with an indexer and RPC to make the experience seamless;
3. a simple way to onboard new customers, both from offchain fiat to onchain stablecoins and from one chain to another chain; and
4. a complete financial experience onchain, including yield opportunities, card programs and other offerings onchain for customers.
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Many of these components have been developed at Polygon or through partnerships. Most others will be available shortly.

We started building the first layer of the Open Money Stack six years ago with the launch of Polygon: the first blockchain to provide fast, low-cost, scalable, and secure rails for money to move onchain. Since then, the Polygon Chain has facilitated over two trillion dollars in onchain value transfer, and it will move exponentially more. As activity increases, Polygon Chain validators and stakers receive more fees, with potential for billions in the future. Upcoming upgrades on Polygon Chain for private, priority, and dedicated blockspace will improve this experience further.

The Open Money Stack will make chains invisible to users and seamlessly interconnected by the Open Money Stack. Whether through interoperability protocols we build, such as Agglayer, or bridges or other crosschain systems, people, businesses, and AI agents will send and receive money as if everyone were on the same chain, using the same wallet.

The Open Money Stack will leverage wallets to unlock the full potential of onchain money. Sending and receiving money will be as easy as one tap, abstracting fees, wallet creation, and orchestration. Lost wallet access will be recoverable. Those who want custody will have that option.

The Open Money Stack will ensure idle money earns yield. Whether for minutes or years, onchain money will have access to open, global earning opportunities across assets, risk profiles, and preferences. By bringing identity onchain, the Open Money Stack can unlock yields that have traditionally only existed offchain, with returns that are as good or better than what is available today. Earning must be as open as money movement itself.

The Open Money Stack will make it easy for anyone to move money anywhere. For the next decade, on-ramps and off-ramps will remain essential, enabling reliable, global movement between traditional financial systems and blockchains. But our north star is clear: move all money onchain. This makes it easy for people to send and receive money. Because onchain money is more versatile, money will move and remain onchain. It’s better for payments, lower-cost, more convenient, earns yield, and can be seamlessly integrated into existing financial applications.
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The Open Money Stack will support all forms of onchain money, from tokenized deposits to stablecoins. Senders will not think about the form of onchain money recipients prefer, and recipients will not need to dictate what is sent. This decoupling of the money sent from the money received is foundational to open money.This decoupling of the money sent from the money received is foundational to open money.

What progress has been made on the Open Money Stack?

In the coming weeks, we’ll move decisively from vision to execution. We will announce several big initiatives that expand our capabilities across payments, orchestration, compliance, and onchain money primitives. These initiatives are designed to help us move faster, build better, and bring the Open Money Stack to market at scale.

Once we’ve finished, the Open Money Stack will:

• move all money onchain;
• offer open money services and technologies;
• make money movement simple;
• ensure that money stays onchain; and
• define the next thirty years of money movement over the next three years.

Building on the foundation set in the last six years, the Open Money Stack will power the next era of money movement, creating the most significant evolution of money of the last 50 years.