polygon has already hosted some of the most notable institutional blockchain deployments to date.
In November 2022, JP Morgan executed a live cross-currency DeFi Transactions on Polygon PoS will be one of the first major bank-led blockchain transactions involving a real financial institution.
Franklin Templeton then expanded the first on-chain mutual fund in the US to Polygon, and Hamilton Lane leveraged Polygon-based tokenization to reduce the minimum investment in private credit from hundreds of thousands of dollars to just $10,000.
On the consumer side, Nike and Reddit launched large-scale blockchain efforts on their networks, but both programs have since been discontinued. In this article, we explore what these institutions built on Polygon, how the underlying technology worked, and where each project stands as of June 2026.
What makes Polygon attractive to large institutions?
Polygon is a layer 2 scaling network built on top. Ethereum. It inherits the fundamental security of Ethereum while processing transactions faster and at significantly lower cost than Ethereum mainnet. For institutions, this solves a practical problem. This means you will be able to operate within the Ethereum ecosystem, use its developer tools, and access liquidity without paying gas fees, which can become expensive when mainnet usage becomes large.
For example, JPMorgan’s blockchain team wanted Ethereum infrastructure and simply needed lower transaction costs.
Beyond the PoS chain, Polygon provides zero knowledge E.V.M. (zkEVM) and Chain Development Kit (CDK). Released in 2023, CDK allows organizations to build their own custom Layer 2 chains with specific access rules and transaction parameters while maintaining connectivity to the broader Polygon ecosystem through AggLayer. AggLayer is an aggregation layer that went live in early 2024 and consolidates liquidity across Polygon-based chains so that the chains no longer operate in isolation from each other.
JP Morgan and Project Guardian: How the bank executed live DeFi transactions on the public chain
On November 2, 2022, JPMorgan executed what it claimed was the first live trade on a public blockchain using DeFi, tokenized deposits, and verifiable credentials. The transaction took place on Polygon’s PoS mainnet as part of Project Guardian, a pilot initiative run by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).
Participants include JP Morgan (which currently operates its blockchain division under the name Kinexys), Singapore’s DBS Bank, and Japan’s SBI Digital Asset Holdings. They are together:
- Issued tokenized deposits in Singapore dollars (JP Morgan) and Japanese yen (SBI Digital Asset Holdings)
- Executed live cross-currency FX transactions using these tokenized deposits
- Conducted simulated trading of tokenized Singapore government bonds and Japanese government bonds
- We used a modified version of Aave Arc, a permissioned liquidity protocol built specifically for institutional investors.
Aave Arc is an institutional variant of the Aave DeFi protocol. This restricts access to the pool to only verified counterparties, so all participants must pass a Know Your Customer (KYC) check before interacting with the liquidity pool.
JPMorgan has further strengthened this by building on-chain validation using W3C’s Verifiable Credentials (VC). This allows institutions to prove their compliance status directly on-chain, allowing every DeFi protocol they access to verify their identity without requiring separate KYC checks for each interface.
Tyrone Roban, then head of blockchain launches and Onyx Digital Assets at JPMorgan, said Polygon was chosen specifically because it offered compatibility with Ethereum at a cost that made on-chain identity verification economically viable at scale. Aave founder Stani Kulechov called this the first real-world use case for an institutional-grade DeFi protocol ever run on a public blockchain.
Project Guardian said it plans to explore other blockchain networks in future stages. However, Polygon’s pilot remains the most commonly cited example of regulated banks completing live DeFi transactions on public chains with real compliance controls.
What did Nike actually build on Polygon and what is its current status?
Nike released the .Swoosh in November 2022 as a dedicated Web3 platform built on Polygon. The platform allowed users to purchase, collect, and trade virtual Nike products such as digital sneakers and apparel for use as avatar wearables in Web3 games and virtual environments.
The first major product drop was “Our Force 1” (OF1), which was minted in Polygon. $NFT Based on the Air Force 1 silhouette. Nike is offering two editions: “Classic Remix” and “New Wave,” with some early access granted to .Swoosh members through airdropped posters.
The platform also includes a royalty-sharing model that allows users who create Nike-branded virtual products to earn a percentage of sales, effectively becoming co-creators with a financial stake in the platform’s output.
By October 2022, before the Swoosh was fully released to the public, Nike had generated $185 million in cumulative revenue. $NFT According to data from Dune Analytics, all of the company’s projects generate 10 times more revenue than the following nine top brands combined: The decision to build on Polygon rather than the Ethereum mainnet was a pragmatic one. Low minting costs have made the platform viable for a broader consumer base rather than a niche segment of high-spending crypto collectors.
What happened to Nike’s Web3 program?
Nike’s Web3 experiment was unsuccessful due to a change in leadership and a prolonged cooling of the social climate. $NFT market. Here’s the full timeline for the end:
- In 2024, Nike suspended new activities. $NFT collection and said it would redirect the .Swoosh to gaming partnerships and in-game wearables.
- Nike in December 2024 $NFT Studio RTFKT officially announces that it will cease all operations by January 2025
- RTFKT was secretly sold to an undisclosed buyer in December 2025
- The .Swoosh website was decommissioned on May 5, 2026, and users were instructed to transfer their digital collections to external wallets.
- In April 2025, the RTFKT group $NFT The holders filed a class action lawsuit in Brooklyn federal court, seeking $5 million in damages, alleging that the NFTs were unregistered securities sold without SEC registration.
Current CEO Elliott Hill, who replaced John Donahoe at the end of 2024, has pivoted Nike’s strategy toward core sports and wholesale retail. The .Swoosh name will continue to appear in connection with gaming partnerships; $NFT Polygon’s infrastructure is no longer operational.
Nike’s Polygon rollout is best understood as a historically significant consumer $NFT Experiments that generated real revenue and real user engagement at scale, before market conditions or company strategy changed.
Franklin Templeton: America’s first mutual fund on a public blockchain
How did FOBXX use Polygon?
Franklin Templeton’s Franklin On-Chain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX) remains one of the largest tokenized Treasury products on the market. The Fund will be represented on-chain through BENJI tokens, with each token corresponding to a share of the Fund. FOBXX invests at least 99.5% of its assets in U.S. government securities, cash, and fully collateralized repurchase agreements.
Franklin Templeton has expanded BENJI beyond the original Stellar deployment to multiple blockchain networks, including Polygon. The fund continues to use the public blockchain as its official system of record for ownership and transaction processing, making it one of the earliest examples of a regulated investment product operating on-chain.
As of April 2026, FOBXX reports approximately $825 million in fund assets, and the BENJI tokenization product represents over $1 billion in on-chain asset value across supported networks. The fund’s seven-day effective yield was approximately 3.58%.
Polygon’s deployment will remain active in 2026 and continue to serve as one of Franklin Templeton’s primary EVM-compatible distribution channels. The effort is widely seen as an example of blockchain being used for fund management, payments, transferability, and ownership record-keeping, rather than as an independent marketing experiment.
Reddit’s blockchain avatar: Massive adoption, then complete demise
Reddit launched a collectible avatar program on Polygon in July 2022. The design is intentionally invisible. Reddit never used the word “blockchain.”$NFTUsers were simply invited to purchase or claim a limited edition digital avatar stored in a feature called the Reddit Vault. This feature worked as an in-app crypto wallet without requiring users to understand what a wallet is.
Within a few months, millions of users had unknowingly created Vaults to hold Polygon-based NFTs. By mid-2023, there were more than 10 million unique holders. By 2025, that number will exceed 15 million, making Reddit’s avatar program perhaps the most widespread Web3 consumer deployment by any mainstream platform. In total, over 33.5 million collectible avatars were created. Artists earned royalties, and secondary market transactions on Polygon briefly generated high volumes.
How did Reddit’s program end?
Reddit’s blockchain ambitions were unraveled in stages over two years.
- October 2023: Reddit shuts down Community Points, a token reward system running on Arbitrum Nova, citing resource constraints and the regulatory environment.
- August 5, 2024: Reddit discontinues Collectible Expressions, an animated commenting feature built on Polygon NFTs.
- September 2025: Reddit announces end of Avatar Creator program
- November 11, 2025: Avatar Store is permanently closed
- January 1, 2026: The deadline for users to export their blockchain wallets has passed
Reddit’s withdrawal from Polygon becomes the second blockchain feature to be discontinued. The Collectible Avatars program serves as a true case study on how to engage a general audience with blockchain technology without creating technical friction, and equally as a case study on what happens when a company’s priorities shift and the underlying infrastructure is dismantled.
Hamilton Lane and the tokenization of private credit
Hamilton Lane, one of the world’s largest private market investment firms with approximately $958 billion in assets under management and oversight, brought the Senior Credit Opportunities Fund (SCOPE) on-chain through Securitize in 2023.
The launch used Polygon to tokenize access to private credit strategies that previously required a minimum investment of $2 million, reducing the entry point to $10,000 through tokenized feeder funds. Investors gained exposure to floating rate senior secured loans across sectors such as healthcare, information technology and business services.
Tokenization allows ownership of a fund to be represented as a blockchain-based token rather than a traditional transfer agent record. This creates a more accessible path for investors into private credit, an asset class that was previously limited to institutions and ultra-high-net-worth investors.
The project has since evolved beyond the original Polygon introduction. In July 2025, Securitize upgraded its tokenization vehicle known as sSCOPE with native issuance on Ethereum and Optimism, daily NAV pricing, instant subscriptions, on-demand redemption, and multi-chain interoperability with wormholes. This enhancement was designed to make the Fund more compatible with emerging on-chain financial infrastructure and decentralized financial applications.
While Polygon served as the initial launch network, SCOPE has since become a multi-chain tokenized fund. Its continued expansion is one of the clearest examples of traditional asset managers using public blockchain infrastructure to expand access to private market investments.
Will Polygon still be relevant for use in education in 2026?
consumer $NFT The Nike and Reddit programs have ended. Financial infrastructure deployments from Franklin Templeton and Hamilton Lane continue to be active and expanding. This distinction is the most accurate way to assess Polygon’s institutional relevance as of mid-2026.
As of early 2025, over 30 Fortune 500 companies have deployed testnets or mainnets on Polygon. Stripe launched globally $USDC Stablecoin payments will begin on Ethereum, Base, and Polygon on December 12, 2025, allowing merchants in over 150 countries to accept cryptocurrencies for instant USD payments for a flat 1.5% fee.
In April 2026, Meta began paying select creators. $USDC According to Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron, the program is expected to expand to more than 160 countries by the end of the year. These are not experiments. These are live payment flows currently running on Polygon’s infrastructure.
On the technology side, Polygon has implemented a series of rapid upgrades through early 2026. The May 8, 2026 upgrade raised the block gas limit to 140 million, reduced the block time to 1.75 seconds, and pushed the network’s theoretical maximum throughput to approximately 3,800 transactions per second. For context, the actual live TPS on the network runs between 97 and 537 depending on demand, per Chainspect data. The 3,800 number reflects capacity at peak loads. These upgrades are part of the Gigagas Roadmap announced in June 2025, targeting 100,000 TPS as a long-term infrastructure milestone. That goal has not yet been achieved and is still a work in progress.
AggLayer continues to address one of the persistent challenges of enterprise blockchains: fragmentation of liquidity across isolated networks. Connecting Polygon-based chains allows assets and transactions to flow between chains without the need for institutions to manually bridge between chains.
$POLa token that replaced MATIC through a 1:1 migration in September 2024, Trades around $0.09 As of June 2, 2026, the market capitalization across major exchanges is approximately $975 million to $983 million. $POL It serves as a gas and staking token across the Polygon ecosystem. On-chain activity recorded 1.4 billion transactions in 2025. The gap between that volume and the token’s price performance reflects that the market has not yet priced the deployment of the infrastructure layer in a consistent manner.
conclusion
Polygon’s track record shows that implementing blockchain in organizations is no longer just a theory. While focusing on consumers, $NFT Although efforts by Nike and Reddit are largely over, financial institutions continue to expand their use of blockchain infrastructure for payments, tokenized funds, private credit, and asset settlement.
From JP Morgan’s groundbreaking DeFi trading to Franklin Templeton’s on-chain mutual funds to Hamilton Lane’s tokenized private credit strategy, Polygon has served as a testing ground for real-world blockchain applications. As the network continues to evolve through upgrades, tokenization, and enterprise-centric infrastructure, its long-term relevance will be less determined by factors such as: $NFT The ability to support regulated financial activities at scale allows for hype and more.
- crypto slate – JP Morgan executes first DeFi transaction on Polygon, November 2022
- abe blog – JP Morgan’s Kinexys: Polygon’s Project Guardian Pilot
- decryption – Nike launches .Swoosh Web3 platform with polygon NFTs
- decryption – Nike retires RTFKT, its $NFT Become a subsidiary, December 2024
- sole retriever – Nike Retireing .Swoosh Website, May 2026
- block eden – Why 96% of brands? $NFT Project finished in March 2026
- Polygon Labs Blog – Franklin Templeton Money Market Fund launches on Polygon blockchain
- coin paprika – Franklin Templeton FOBXX and Benji Explained, April 2026
- Securitization – Securitize expands access to Hamilton Lane’s SCOPE funds via Polygon, May 2023
- coin desk – Securitize acquires Hamilton Lane SCOPE Fund Multichain, July 2025
- decryption – Reddit Sunsetting Polygon NFT Collectible Expressions, August 2024
- mexico news – Reddit ends Avatar Creator program, November 2025
- Stablecoin Insider – Stripe launches globally $USDC Stablecoin payments on Ethereum, Base, and Polygon, December 2025
- decryption – Meta Launch $USDC Paying Creators with Polygon via Stripe, April 2026
- Crypto Times – Polygon furthers scalability with 140M gas upgrade, May 2026
- Polygon Labs Blog – Polygon’s Gigagas Roadmap to 100K TPS, June 2025
- CoinGecko – $POL Live price and market cap, June 2026
- Chain Spect – Polygon Live TPS, Block Time, and Network Metrics, June 2026
