Polygon’s token leads early gains on Friday, nearing a 2-month high
Transaction fees, which are paid in the network’s native token and also burned, have reached record levels.
The native token of polygon, a proof-of-stake side chain of the ethereum network, has seen over $319 million in trading volume in the last 24 hours, with the token increasing 16% to trade near a two-month high and lead crypto market gainers on Friday.
The price swing comes amid elevated usage of the network. Since last Friday, users of the chain have paid nearly 11.4 million polygon tokens (worth roughly $1.8 million at current prices), a record level in transaction fees, data from blockchain explorer PolygonScan shows.
Polygon burns its native tokens that were used as transaction fees, which means these are permanently removed from circulation.
On Tuesday, polygon marked an all-time high of 3 million tokens for daily fees generated and burned on the network, Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal noted:
Yesterday marked an all-time high for single-day fees generated and burned on the Polygon PoS chain.
— Sandeep | CEO, Polygon Foundation (※,※) (@sandeepnailwal) January 6, 2026
3 MILLION POL (0.03% of POL's supply was burnt in a single day) pic.twitter.com/x038HlwQ0i
The top applications on polygon by number of transacting users are Circle, Uniswap, and Tether, according to crypto analytics firm Artemis. Popular prediction markets platform Polymarket also runs on the network.
Another possible driver of polygon’s rally is its “Open Money Stack,” announced yesterday. Scheduled for rollout this year, the newly unveiled stack of services and technologies aims to ensure money that enters the on-chain economy can stay and be used on-chain forever, as opposed to today where on-chain money typically needs to return off-chain to be used, per a blog post published by Nailwal and Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron.
In other news, polygon is planning to acquire US bitcoin ATM kiosk provider Coinme for $100 million to $125 million, CoinDesk reported.
