Polygon Prepares Permissionless Burn of 100 Million POL

Polygon is preparing a permissionless contract that would let anyone permanently burn 100 million POL, or about 83% of a base-fee collector that Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal said holds 121 million tokens.

Nailwal said the contracts are on testnet and would move to mainnet after the final Security Council signatures. The first call would destroy 100 million POL at once, followed by quarterly burns that anyone in the community could trigger, he said.

Polygon's documentation says the base fee is a network-determined charge that is burned. Nailwal said each base fee adds POL to the collector. At the stated figures, the first burn would leave about 21 million POL in the collector before additional fees accrue.

Burn Would Remove Less Than 1% of Supply

The 100 million-token burn equals 1% of POL's initial 10 billion-token supply. Blockscout listed total supply at about 10.716 billion POL, making the planned burn roughly 0.93% of the total.

The burn would not impose a hard cap on POL. Polygon's token documentation says POL has ongoing emissions, with an effective annual rate of 2% beginning after June 2025. The planned one-time reduction is therefore less than half that annual rate when both are measured as a share of supply; whether supply contracts over time depends on subsequent fee burns relative to new issuance.

Nailwal said POL had been deflationary since January 2026. He also claimed Polygon had generated $24.5 million in 2026 revenue, compared with $8.41 million for Arbitrum and $5.6 million for Near. He wrote that the comparison came from “my analyst at ChatGPT,” and the post did not identify a dataset or methodology.

The next step is mainnet deployment after the remaining Security Council approvals. As of Nailwal's post, the first 100 million POL had not yet been burned.