POL Supply Shrinks as Polygon Network Enters High-Fee Growth Phase

• The Polygon (POL) supply is reported to have decreased due to rising staking amounts and token burn.
• Data suggests that Polygon maintained high performance across 2025 due to several infrastructure upgrades.

Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal has labeled 2026 as a year of Polygon (POL) resurrection. Explaining this in three points, he pointed out that 1 million POL in base fees have been burnt in the last three to four days. According to the CEO, this trend is expected to continue for the remainder of the year. Mathematically, repeating this trend for the whole year could see 3.5% of POL’s total supply burnt.

Technically, Nailwal highlighted that this situation makes Polygon deflationary. On another point, he highlighted that 3.6 billion POL has currently been staked. In total, stakers and validators earn around 1.5% of POL in rewards. These have shrunk the supply of the asset and positioned it for a possible price surge.

Source: Sandeep Nailwal on X

At the time of writing, POL was trading at $0.125 and had surged by 4% in the last 24 hours and 21% in the last seven days. With a market cap of $1.33 billion, POL is currently the 57th largest coin in the market. Traders’ interest is also rising as its 24-hour trading volume surges by 13% to $83 million.

Polygon (POL) 2025 Performance

POL’s bullish potential is supported by on-chain activities, which are expected to be better than the previous year. Even so, more than 1.4 billion transactions were processed on Polygon in 2025. Within the same period, $1.27 billion in monthly payment volume was recorded. Additionally, there was a $2.8 billion stablecoin supply and $780 million in on-chain volume, driven by integrations.

In December alone, $220.6 million in stablecoin transactions were processed, with $28.1 billion moved across USDC, USDT, and DAI. The monthly unique address on the network reached an all-time high of 21.7 million. This was led by DAI with 8.9 million and USDC at 8.2 million.

Reports explain that this performance was made possible with the infrastructure upgrades made throughout the year. The Bhilai hard fork, for instance, pushed the transaction capacity to 1,000 Transactions Per Second (TPS). Heimdall v2 also contributed to the slashing of the finality times to 5 seconds. Later, the Rio upgrade pushed the transaction capacity to 5000 TPS.

Polygon also embarked on the Madhugiri Hardfork in December to increase the throughput by 33% and supported by Ethereum (ETH) Fusaka EIPs, as claimed by reports. Apart from this, Polygon sealed major deals with the likes of Mastercard and Stripe, as discussed in our earlier post. Polygon has also released CDK Enterprise toolkit with Gateway.