Polygon to let any user trigger 100M POL burn

Polygon will let any user trigger a one-time burn of 100 million POL tokens once new contracts clear final approvals, chief executive Sandeep Nailwal said Friday in a post on X.

The burn contracts are running on testnet and still need signatures from Polygon's Security Council before going to mainnet. Once they are live, any user can call the function and remove the 100 million POL from supply in one transaction. After that first burn, community members will be able to burn POL every quarter.

What Changes

Every base fee paid on the network already adds POL to a collector contract, which holds 121 million tokens today. Nailwal said the network has been deflationary since January, even as payments, trading and consumer apps kept it busy. By June 30, he counted 107.7 million POL burned in 2026 against 105.2 million minted, and in January he called the fee run Polygon's "S curve moment," with about 1 million POL burning daily.

The new piece is who gets to call the burn. Nailwal said 100 million POL is ready for a permanent burn that any user can fire, and once it goes, roughly five months of the current daily burn rate is gone in a single transaction.

What Nailwal Said

Nailwal wrapped the announcement in a revenue comparison against Layer 1 and Layer 2 rivals whose tokens have been rallying this week, which is why ARB and NEAR have been louder on your timeline than POL. He put Polygon's 2026 revenue at $24.5 million, roughly three times the $8.41 million he listed for Arbitrum and more than four times the $5.6 million for NEAR. He credited the numbers to "my analyst at ChatGPT," and they have not been independently verified; his Arbitrum figure also included the Robinhood chain.

ARB climbed about 28% on Friday after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission granted a five-year exemption for tokenized stock trading, though its RSI (a momentum gauge running 0 to 100) hit 78, the level traders treat as overbought. NEAR gained more than 45% in three days, and crypto analyst Michaël van de Poppe said a move to $5 was "just a matter of time." Nailwal called his own comparison "bad cope" as rival tokens rallied without POL.

What To Watch Next

The burn contracts are on testnet and waiting on Security Council signatures before mainnet deployment. The specific Polygon governance proposal and PIP number were not linked in Nailwal's post, and his X announcement was not independently verified. The one-time 100 million POL burn only fires once both clear.