On June 30, Polygon CEO Sandeep Nailwal confirmed that his blockchain became officially deflationary in 2026, when 107.7 million POL tokens were burned, and only 105.2 million new tokens were minted. It means that the circulating supply actually dipped in the first 6 months of this year.
107M $POL burned in 2026!! officially net deflationary this year 🔥
that’s what happens when you move money at payments chain volume (more than any other chain did in May – 198M txns). the fundamentals are all lining up right now, and crypto is sleeping on Polygon. How Long? Not… https://t.co/Ts3tyW6z4m
— Sandeep | CEO, Polygon Foundation (※,※) (@sandeepnailwal) JUNE 30, 2026
This is a major milestone for the Polygon network, which comes after the blockchain recorded 198 million transactions in May alone, which was the second-highest monthly total ever.
This is a major achievement for the blockchain network as it makes Polygon a rare deflationary blockchain Layer 1 whose token supply is shrinking over time, whereas most chains are still inflating their supply. For example, Solana has added more than $1 billion worth of tokens, while Ethereum has added around $500 million worth of new tokens.
How Polygon’s Deflationary Model Works
According to the official whitepaper, Polygon is using a deflationary model to cut down the supply of POL tokens in circulation. The main purpose of this deflationary model is to make the token scarcer over time as the network grows.
Every time someone mints a token on the network, swaps on decentralized exchanges, mints an NFT, or uses the network, they have to pay a gas fee in POL.
The network uses these fees collected from the network for two different purposes. The base fee gets burned on the network after sending on dead addresses, while priority fees are distributed among validators who verify the transactions and keep the network operational.
During the high activity on the network, Polygon is capable of burning around 1 million POL tokens on a daily basis. This deflationary model is currently removing more than 3% of the total supply per year through a burning mechanism.
Polygon Network Witnesses Growth in Transactions
In May 2026, Polygon recorded around $80 billion in stablecoin volume after surpassing popular blockchains such as Solana and BNB. The secret behind the boom in on-chain activities on the blockchain is its low fees and high transactions per second (TPS), thanks to major network upgrades and improvements.
Apart from this, Polygon has integrated Uquid, which has opened a door for 1-click crypto checkout across more than 178 million products. Apart from this, no POL tokens have entered into circulation in 2026 due to the impressive burning mechanism. This shows the network’s net-deflationary stance during a boom in activity on the network.
The blockchain is also following Gigagas’ roadmap, which will allow the network to achieve 100,000 transactions per second. Recently, Sandeep Nailwal revealed a 5 times growth in Polygon’s transactions per second (TPS), soaring above 5,000 TPS.
Apart from this, the AggLayer is also improving in 2026, which is opening doors for large-scale cross-chain transactions and unified liquidity across various chains.
Apart from this, there is a major development around The Open Money Stack at Polygon, which is a leading infrastructure to boost digital dollar payments by using the blockchain network.
In the official post on X, Sandeep mentioned that “onchain payments are the same game. You don’t lead it by shipping a chain and leaving everyone to wire together wallets, ramps, compliance, and interop from different vendors before they can send a single dollar. Own the full stack, and you become the default everyone builds against, and that’s who sets the standard. It’s the entire reason we’re building The Open Money Stack at Polygon.”
Amid the growing on-chain activities on the Polygon blockchain network, the team behind it is working actively to handle the operations on the blockchain smoothly while ensuring the safety of the users’ funds.
