Polygon Prepares Permissionless Burn of 100 Million POL

Polygon is preparing a permissionless smart contract designed to let any participant permanently destroy 100 million POL tokens, CEO Sandeep Nailwal said. The contract code is running on testnet and will be deployed to the mainnet once remaining approvals from the network's Security Council are obtained. Nailwal described the initial action as a single, large burn followed by quarterly burns that members of the community can trigger.

According to Nailwal, the base-fee collector that accumulates POL from network base fees holds about 121 million tokens; burning 100 million would leave roughly 21 million in that collector before any new base fees accrue. Polygon’s documentation treats the base fee as a network-determined charge that is burned, and Nailwal said each base fee increases the collector balance.

Measured against Polygon’s original token distribution, the 100 million token burn equals 1% of the project's initial 10 billion POL supply. A current total-supply figure listed on Blockscout at about 10.716 billion POL implies the planned one-time burn would represent roughly 0.93% of circulating supply. Polygon’s token policy does not set a hard cap: the protocol has scheduled ongoing emissions with an effective annual rate of 2% starting after June 2025, meaning future net supply will depend on how fee burns compare with new issuance.

Nailwal also asserted that POL had been deflationary since January 2026 and cited revenue figures for 2026 — $24.5 million for Polygon versus $8.41 million for Arbitrum and $5.6 million for Near — noting the comparison came from “my analyst at ChatGPT” without specifying the underlying dataset or methodology. The initial 100 million POL has not been burned yet; the next step is deployment to mainnet once remaining Security Council signatures are in place.