Polygon just closed the second quarter of 2026 with 743 million transactions, breaking the network’s all-time record with a 160% increase from the same period last year.
The news was confirmed by Blockworks and Polygon team member Abhinav Sharma earlier today.
Payments infrastructure driving the numbers
The milestone summarizes a successful quarter for Polygon after aggressively positioning itself as infrastructure for stablecoin payments. Polygon processed $79.25 billion in stablecoin transfer volume across 198 million stablecoin transactions in May alone, putting it first among all blockchains by stablecoin transaction count.
That figure was also the chain’s second-highest month recorded for stablecoin volume, surpassing both Solana and BNB Chain during the period.
Polygon being in such high demand signals a deliberate shift towards real-world payment settlement. The network offers average fees of about $0.002 per transaction and confirmation times of around two seconds. As such, the cumulative stablecoin transfer volume on its chain has now exceeded $2.4 trillion over its lifetime.
Cross-border payments also contributed to that total. Earlier today, Polygon officially announced that Credible Finance had processed more than $152 million in payments across the United States, India, Brazil, and Germany.
The network also processed $309 million in Latin American stablecoin volume in May, primarily serving regions where dollar-denominated tokens served as hedges against volatile local currencies.
Polygon has also been building dedicated payment rails to support its strategy. One of them includes what they call the Open Money Stack, a framework that allows payouts in a recipient’s local currency from a single stablecoin balance through bank deposits, cash pickups, or crypto transfers.
On-chain activity hasn’t lifted the token
Surprisingly, Polygon’s record transaction figures have not yet translated into direct gains for the network’s native token POL. According to CoinMarketCap, the token is trading near $0.073, down more than 94% from its March 2024 all-time high of $1.29. The token’s market capitalization sits around $779 million.
The disconnect between usage volume and price is not a new thing, though. Several high-transaction networks have posted record activity this year without any corresponding increase in token price.
For example, Tron and Ethereum still have the largest stablecoin balances, while more and more specialized payment chains continue to compete for the same market share.
What does the DeFi and dApp ecosystem say?
DefiLlama data shows Polygon’s total value locked in DeFi protocols at approximately $916 million, with $3.38 billion in stablecoins circulating on the chain. Daily active addresses stood near 554,000, with the network processing about 7.5 million transactions per day at the time of writing. Polymarket, the prediction market platform, accounts for the largest single share of Polygon’s DeFi TVL at $391 million.
Nonetheless, while Polygon has achieved over seven billion lifetime transactions and maintains 99.99% uptime, what everyone will be looking out for will be whether this high transaction volume will finally translate into higher token prices.
