Polygon eyes payment business shift beyond its own blockchain

Episode 49 of The Starting Block, hosted by The Block's Gareth Jenkinson, was broadcasted live with Polygon CEO Marc Boiron.

Key topics
• Polygon's Open Money Stack single-API now supports Solana for stablecoin payments.
• Polygon claims 41 million TPS on dedicated pay channels, targeting AI agent transactions.
• Boiron frames Polygon as a payments business, not a general-purpose blockchain competitor.
• Polymarket and Courtyard cited as proof Polygon built critical early infrastructure.
• Stablecoin payment growth too slow post-GENIUS Act; Polygon aims to fix complexity barrier.

Outline

00:00 - Introduction
01:59 - The Block Briefing
07:27 - The Hot Seat: Open Money Stack
09:23 - Polygon's Payments Pivot
16:24 - Competition Reframed
20:51 - Polymarket & Courtyard
23:47 - Crypto Meets TradFi
29:23 - Marc's Spicy X Takes

Boiron opened by explaining what the Open Money Stack is: a single API that lets businesses on-ramp money onto a chain, move it across chains, hold it in a wallet, and execute any stablecoin operation through one integration, rather than stitching together separate providers for wallets, RPCs, indexers, on-ramps, off-ramps, and interop. He said the addition of Solana was driven by customer demand, noting that Solana has pushed hard in the payments space and that customers were asking for it. He argued that stablecoin adoption has been slower than it should be since the GENIUS Act passed roughly a year ago — where he would expect 1,000 percent growth in stablecoin payments — and that complexity is the main bottleneck his product is designed to remove. He also cited Polygon's dedicated pay channels, which he said have been tested at 41 million transactions per second, a figure he said no other chain can match and one that will become necessary as AI agents transact at scale.

On Polygon's broader evolution, Boiron said chains have become commodity infrastructure — fast, cheap, and largely indistinguishable — and that winning requires vertical focus rather than being a general-purpose chain. He described Polygon's chosen vertical as payments, positioning Solana as strong on trading and Ethereum as the home for deep liquidity on large trades, while Polygon goes after global money movement. He cited Polymarket and Courtyard as flagship examples of what Polygon's infrastructure made possible, saying Polygon was the first chain that could support the transaction volumes Polymarket needed, and that Polygon has 10x'd its scale over the past 12 months to keep pace with Polymarket's growth. He also described the consolidation effort at Polygon over recent years: spinning off non-strategic products, shutting down initiatives that did not work such as the Polygon zkEVM, and watching projects like the privacy-focused chain Myden emerge from that work.

Boiron drew an analogy between Polygon and Visa, noting that Visa earns $17 billion a year just from flat data-processing fees on transactions — not volume-based bips — and argued that global money movement as a category is far larger than card-network payments alone. He said he came into crypto excited by sovereign money and fully autonomous systems, acknowledged that vision has had to adjust to reality, but maintained that a more resilient, transparent, and accessible global ledger still materially improves people's lives. He closed by defending his increasingly candid posts on X, saying founders who want to run companies need an intensity that most people are reluctant to voice publicly, and that double-digit numbers of fellow founders have privately told him they agree with what he writes.

About the guest
Marc Boiron is the CEO of Polygon Labs, the organisation behind the Polygon blockchain and payments infrastructure ecosystem, a role he stepped into after serving as the company's Chief Legal Officer. A lawyer by background, he previously held the Chief Legal Officer position at dYdX.