Polygon Labs is seeking between $50 million and $100 million in equity to fund its Open Money Stack stablecoin payments business, built on the Coinme and Sequence acquisitions it completed in January. The raise positions Marc Boiron's company as a settlement layer underneath Stripe, Mastercard, and the banks, rather than a consumer-facing payments brand.
Polygon Labs is in talks to raise between $50 million and $100 million in equity to capitalise the stablecoin payments arm it has been quietly assembling since the start of the year, according to reporting in The Information published this week.
The raise would fund what Polygon calls the Open Money Stack, a platform built to handle wallet custody, regulated fiat on- and off-ramps, cross-chain payment routing, and settlement on the Polygon chain itself. Chief executive Marc Boiron, who took over the top job in late 2023 and has since steered the company toward payments and real-world assets, will run the new business. The talks are in early stages, and no valuation or lead investor has been disclosed.
The venture does not come out of nowhere. In January, Polygon spent more than $250 million to acquire two pieces of the plumbing it needed: crypto exchange Coinme, which provided a licensed consumer ramp, and Sequence, a wallet infrastructure company whose APIs have been adopted by a long list of gaming and DeFi projects. Together they give Polygon the consumer-facing and developer-facing rails the Open Money Stack needs — the new capital would fund integration, compliance expansion, and a sales push aimed at banks and fintechs.
Boiron has been explicit about what the business is not. Polygon is not trying to build a consumer payments brand; the pitch to investors is that the company will sit underneath Stripe, Mastercard, and the stablecoin desks of the big banks, providing the settlement layer rather than the customer relationship. It is a deliberately narrow bet on being plumbing rather than a household name, and it reflects how much of the stablecoin market has already been claimed by firms with better distribution.
The market itself has moved faster than even the more aggressive forecasts from two years ago. Stablecoin transaction volumes reached $7.2 trillion in February 2026, overtaking the $6.8 trillion monthly throughput of the US ACH network — the first time dollar-denominated crypto rails have cleared more value than the country's core bank payments backbone in a single month. Polygon alone held about $3.4 billion in stablecoin balances on-chain by that point, a fraction of total supply but enough to give the company a credible pitch as a settlement venue.
The strategic question is whether Polygon can convert developer traction into enterprise distribution. For most of its history the network has been known as a low-cost Ethereum sidechain popular with gaming studios and NFT projects, a reputation that has helped it onboard small developers but has not translated into the kind of bank partnerships that moved USDC from a crypto reserve asset to a payment rail. Circle and Tether have both leaned on institutional relationships that Polygon has not historically cultivated.
There is also a structural awkwardness in Polygon's position. The company is raising equity into a payments business while the POL token — the migration-era rebrand of MATIC — continues to underperform its market cap peers, a gap that has frustrated investors and created tension between the equity holders who will benefit from the payments push and the tokenholders whose instrument does not capture payments cash flows directly. Boiron has promised that value will eventually accrue to POL through chain fees and validator rewards; the mechanism remains theoretical.
The raise lands during what JPMorgan last week called a collapse in crypto capital inflows, with Q1 2026 bringing just $11 billion as both retail and institutional demand evaporated. Polygon will be closing a round in a market where both retail and institutional capital has visibly thinned, and at a valuation that will be set against a token well off its 2024 peak. Investors who bought earlier rounds of Polygon Labs on the promise of Ethereum-scale ubiquity will have strong opinions about whatever number the new sheet lands on.
None of that changes the underlying thesis. Stablecoins have already reorganised how money moves inside crypto, and they are starting to do the same at the edges of traditional finance. Polygon is betting that the infrastructure layer between those two worlds is still underbuilt, and that the firm owning the rails will earn its returns even if the headline franchises belong to others.
