Polygon Labs, a blockchain developer firm that provides secondary scaling solutions, acquired two crypto startups last month, including Seattle-based Coinme and Toronto-based Sequence. In a recent interview, Sandeep Nailwal, CEO, Polygon Foundation, tells S Shanthi that these acquisitions are aimed at helping the company in its transition from an infrastructure provider to delivering end-to-end payments capability. Notably, Polygon, whose blockchain network sits on top of Ethereum, is one of the largest crypto startups, valued at over $20 billion and backed by investors such as Mark Cuban, SoftBank, Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, and Elevation Capital, among others.
This fiscal year, you are shifting from being a purely infrastructure provider to delivering end-to-end payments capability. Tell us more about this transition.
At Polygon Labs, our payments strategy is centred on building what we call the Open Money Stack, a unified, end-to-end payments infrastructure that makes stablecoin payments instant, compliant, and globally scalable. Right now, when money crosses borders, it faces massive friction — a network of correspondent banks with high fees and delayed settlement. The internet moves at the speed of light, but money is still queuing in line at the bank. The Open Money Stack will change this by offering a single, unified solution for end-to-end money movement, from off-chain systems to on-chain settlement, and back again. In a single API, institutions will be able to tap into everything needed for cross-border and cross-chain money movement, including wallets, transaction orchestration, on- and off-ramps, and a foundational blockchain that is already widely adopted by institutions and users alike.
How will your recent acquisition of crypto startups, Coinme and Sequence, help in this transition?
Coinme brings regulated fiat on and off ramps, enabling compliant entry and exit between traditional finance and stablecoins. Sequence adds enterprise-grade smart wallet support and 1-click cross-chain orchestration. Along with Agglayer, a protocol to unify settlement and liquidity across all blockchains, payments can move seamlessly across networks while abstracting away fragmentation for institutions and users.
Tell us about growth plans for FY27.
Our growth plans over the next 12 months are very tightly aligned with how the Open Money Stack becomes a real revenue engine. The first phase of growth is focused squarely on B2B stablecoin payments, because that is where volume, repeat usage, and clear willingness to pay already exist. This includes cross-border settlements, payroll, treasury operations, and merchant services. Revenue in this phase comes from a combination of transaction fees, fiat on and off-ramp margins, wallet and platform services, and value-added services like compliance, orchestration, and liquidity routing. Over the next year, we will also start expanding these capabilities into consumer-facing use cases, but only once the underlying B2B rails are proven at scale.
How many geographies do you plan to expand in FY27?
With the Coinme acquisition, we will soon operate regulated fiat on and off ramps across 48 US states. It’s important for the Open Money Stack to be available for customers and institutions globally. Many pieces of the stack already operate across borders. Polygon Chain, for instance, is global by nature, with a distributed validator and permissionless coverage across the world. The goal is to be compliant in as many regions as possible, offering the simplicity of a single stack so that we can provide a global local payments method with the OMS.
How do you look at the competition in the segment? Do you see many more players entering the payments space in the near future?
Payments at scale require performance, compliance, user experience, liquidity, and interoperability to all work together. Most players tend to be strong in one layer, whether that is infrastructure, wallets, or fiat rails, but very few are building across the full stack in an integrated way. Our approach is to bring execution, cross-chain interoperability, regulated fiat access, and smart wallet infrastructure together in one coherent platform. That allows us to support real-world payments use cases where reliability, governance, and unit economics matter just as much as innovation.