Polygon prepares permissionless burn of 100 million POL tokens

Polygon is preparing a permissionless contract that would allow anyone to permanently burn 100 million POL, according to Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal.

Nailwal said Polygon’s base fee collector currently holds about 121 million POL. Once the new contracts reach mainnet, the first call would destroy 100 million POL at once, with subsequent burns available for anyone in the community to trigger quarterly. 

The contracts are currently on testnet and awaiting final Security Council signatures.

The initial burn would remove roughly 83% of the tokens currently held by the collector, leaving about 21 million POL before additional network fees accrue.

Polygon collects base fees generated by network transactions as part of its EIP 1559 mechanism. The proposed contracts would make the process of permanently removing accumulated POL permissionless rather than dependent on a centralized party to initiate it.

The 100 million token burn represents 1% of POL’s original 10 billion token supply. With total supply currently around 10.7 billion POL, the planned reduction would amount to slightly less than 1% of outstanding supply.

The burn does not introduce a hard supply cap. POL’s tokenomics include annual emissions of 2%, split between validator rewards and the Community Treasury. Polygon has said the rate can eventually be adjusted or discontinued through community governance.

As a result, whether POL becomes structurally deflationary depends on whether future fee burns exceed new token issuance. Nailwal said the token has been deflationary since January 2026.

Nailwal also said Polygon has generated $24.5 million in revenue so far in 2026, compared with $8.41 million for Arbitrum and $5.6 million for Near. 

He said the comparison came from his “analyst at ChatGPT” and did not provide an underlying dataset or methodology, meaning the figures have not been independently verified.

The next step is deployment to mainnet following the remaining Security Council approvals. As of Nailwal’s announcement, the proposed 100 million POL burn had not yet been executed.

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