Polygon is preparing a mechanism that will allow any community member to trigger the permanent destruction of 100 million POL tokens once the required final approvals are completed.
Polygon co-founder and Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal announced the plan on September 18, saying the burn contract is already running on testnet and is awaiting the final signatures from Polygon’s Security Council before it can be deployed to mainnet.
Once the contract reaches mainnet, the first 100 million POL burn can be executed by anyone. The tokens would then be permanently removed from circulation in a single transaction.
The 100 million POL set aside for the initial burn represents about 1% of POL’s original 10 billion token supply. At the time of the announcement, Nailwal said Polygon’s fee collector held about 121 million POL, meaning the proposed burn would remove roughly 83% of the balance currently held there.
About 21 million POL would remain in the collector after the first burn, based on the 121 million POL figure provided by Nailwal.
The mechanism is designed to continue beyond the initial transaction. After the first 100 million POL is burned, community members will be able to trigger additional burns on a quarterly basis as more POL accumulates through the network’s fee system.
The proposed system builds on Polygon’s existing fee-burning architecture. Polygon’s PIP-24 describes changes to the network’s EIP-1559 fee mechanism and identifies the collector used for POL destined to be burned. The proposal explains that base fees collected from transactions can ultimately be removed permanently from the token supply.
Polygon has also been developing other mechanisms that connect network activity and POL economics. Its PIP-87, a draft proposal published in April 2026, outlines a fixed-cost payments revenue program in which POL bought from the market for certain distributions can also be transferred to the PIP-24 collector for burning.
The planned burn comes as Polygon reports that POL has already entered a net deflationary position on a year-to-date basis in 2026.
Nailwal said Polygon had minted approximately 105.2 million POL during 2026 while about 107.7 million POL had been destroyed through the network’s base-fee mechanism. The figures were also reported by crypto industry publications citing his statements.
That difference means approximately 2.5 million more POL had been burned than minted based on those figures. Nailwal attributed the decline in supply largely to the high volume of transactions being processed by Polygon as a payments-focused network.
Polygon reported 198 million transactions in May 2026, according to figures shared by Nailwal, while he has said network throughput has scaled to about 5,000 transactions per second.
Nailwal also put Polygon’s cumulative 2026 revenue at $24.5 million. He compared that figure with $8.41 million for Arbitrum and $5.6 million for NEAR.
Those revenue comparisons require qualification. The figures were presented by Nailwal, and reporting on his comments noted that the comparison was based on an analysis attributed to an analyst using ChatGPT. The underlying dataset and methodology for the comparison were not provided with the claim, so the figures should not be treated as independently audited revenue measurements.
Polygon’s broader token economics still include new POL issuance. A previous Polygon Improvement Proposal established a 1% annual POL emission for validator rewards beginning with the Polygon 2.0 reward schedule after June 2025. A later 2026 proposal reaffirmed the 1% annual emission target while adjusting checkpoint rewards as Polygon reduces block times.
That means the proposed 100 million POL burn does not create a permanently fixed token supply. The longer-term supply balance will depend on the amount of POL issued compared with the amount removed through burns.
The immediate change announced by Polygon is instead the introduction of a publicly triggerable mechanism for an already accumulated pool of POL. The burn has not yet taken place on mainnet; the contracts remain on testnet while the final Security Council approvals are pending.
Once those approvals are completed and the contract is deployed, the first 100 million POL burn can be executed without requiring a Polygon insider or a particular central party to initiate the transaction. Subsequent burns are planned on a quarterly basis under the same community-triggered model.
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