Polygon Labs Buys Coinme and Puts Payments in Focus
With Coinme, Polygon adds a regulated U.S. payments player to its lineup, while it takes on Visa and Stripe through stablecoin and fiat conversions.
Key Takeaways
- Polygon Labs has acquired Coinme and wants to keep growing from blockchain infrastructure into regulated payment services.
- The company wants to become profitable in 2027 and is focusing on conversions between crypto, stablecoins, and traditional money.
- Polygon still has to prove that customers want to use not just the blockchain, but also its own payment layer.
Polygon Labs has completed its acquisition of Coinme, taking another step in its effort to grow beyond blockchain infrastructure alone. The crypto company wants to become profitable in 2027 with its regulated payment services, while targeting a market now dominated by Visa and Stripe.
From Infrastructure to Payments
With Coinme, Polygon Labs now has a U.S. regulated crypto payments provider in-house. That means the company can handle conversions between crypto, stablecoins, and traditional money itself, without needing a third party every time money has to move into or out of a blockchain.
According to CEO Marc Boiron, that also changes Polygon’s role. The company no longer wants to just provide the technology that moves money, but also collect the fee revenue that comes with converting and sending that money. That revenue stream often went to other parties before.
The move fits with the launch of the Open Money Stack in January. That framework is meant to support stablecoin payments and make cross-border transfers easier. Polygon says it is not just providing infrastructure with this, but also building its own payment layer.
Competition Is Still Fierce
The ambitions are clear, but the gap with the big established players is still huge. Visa processed more than $12.3 trillion (€10.9 trillion) in payments in fiscal 2025, while Stripe reached $1.9 trillion (€1.7 trillion). Polygon is still only at the start of that path.
At the same time, the broader payments world is also moving toward stablecoins. Visa has already expanded its stablecoin settlement network to include Polygon, and it is also working on a platform that would let banks and fintechs issue, manage, and settle stablecoins. Stripe is also continuing to build out stablecoin payments, while Swift is developing blockchain infrastructure with major banks.
For European crypto readers, that matters because it shows how quickly stablecoins are becoming part of payments outside the crypto market itself. That shift is also growing in Europe: a banking consortium recently got approval from De Nederlandsche Bank to issue a euro stablecoin, which could further intensify competition in digital payments.
What Polygon Still Has to Prove
Polygon says it already has customers for the platform, including Tazapay, Mesh, Toku, and Kira. Still, the unified integration is only in technical preview and is not yet generally available to customers.
The key question now is no longer whether companies want to use Polygon’s blockchain, but whether they also want to use Polygon Labs itself to move money. That makes the Coinme acquisition mainly a strategic move: Polygon is trying to gain more control over the full payment flow instead of just providing the underlying chain.
