Polygon just ended the second quarter of 2026 with 743 million transactions, a 160% year-over-year increase and a new all-time record for the network.
This news was confirmed by Blockworks and Polygon team members Abhinav Sharma In the early hours of today.
Payment infrastructure drives numbers
This milestone culminates a successful quarter for Polygon after aggressively positioning itself as the infrastructure for stablecoin payments. Polygon processed $79.25 billion In May alone, stablecoin transfer volume increased by 198 million stablecoin transactions, making it number one among all blockchains in terms of number of stablecoin transactions.
This figure also marks the chain’s second-highest monthly stablecoin transaction volume, surpassing both Solana and BNB chains during the same period.
Polygon’s high demand indicates a deliberate shift towards real-world payment settlement. The average fee on this network is around $0.002 per transaction, and the confirmation time is around 2 seconds. As such, the cumulative transfer volume of stablecoins on its chain is currently over $2.4 trillion over its lifetime.
Cross-border payments also contributed to this total. Early this morning, Polygon officially announced Credible Finance said it has processed more than $152 million in payments in the United States, India, Brazil, and Germany.
The network also processed $309 million in Latin American stablecoin trading volume in May, primarily serving a region where dollar-denominated tokens act as a hedge against volatile local currencies.
Polygon is also building dedicated payment rails to support its strategy. One of them is the so-called open money stacka framework that enables payments in a recipient’s local currency from a single stablecoin balance through bank deposits, cash pickups, or cryptocurrency transfers.
On-chain activity is not pulling tokens
Surprisingly, Polygon’s record trading volume has not yet translated into direct profits for the network’s native token POL. According to coin market capthe token is trading around $0.073, down over 94% from its all-time high of $1.29 in March 2024. The token market capitalization reaches approximately $779 million.
However, a disconnect between usage and price is not new. Several high-transaction networks have recorded record activity this year without a corresponding increase in token prices.
For example, Tron and Ethereum still have the largest stablecoin balances, but more specialized payment chains continue to compete for the same market share.
What does the DeFi and dApp ecosystem show?
Defilama data shows that the total amount of Polygon locked in DeFi protocols is approximately $916 million, with $3.38 billion in stablecoins circulating on-chain. As of this writing, there are nearly 554,000 daily active addresses and the network processes approximately 7.5 million transactions per day. Polymarket, a prediction market platform, accounts for the largest single share of Polygon’s DeFi TVL at $391 million.
Despite this, Polygon has achieved over 7 billion lifetime transactions and maintains 99.99% uptime, but what everyone is watching is whether this high volume of transactions will ultimately lead to higher token prices.
