Polygon is preparing a permissionless contract that would let anyone permanently burn 100 million POL. The amount represents about 83% of a base-fee collector that Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal said currently holds 121 million tokens.
Nailwal said the contracts are already on testnet and will move to mainnet once the final Security Council signatures are in place. The first call would destroy 100 million POL in one transaction. After that, burns would take place quarterly, and anyone in the community would be able to trigger them.
How the collector works
Polygon’s documentation says the base fee is a network-determined charge that is burned. Nailwal said each base fee adds POL to the collector. Using the figures he provided, the first burn would leave about 21 million POL in the collector before additional fees build up again.
The reduction is under 1% of total supply
A 100 million POL burn equals 1% of the token’s initial 10 billion supply. Blockscout listed total supply at about 10.716 billion POL, which puts the planned burn at roughly 0.93% of the current total.
The burn would not create a hard cap for POL. Polygon’s token documentation says the asset has ongoing emissions, with an effective annual rate of 2% beginning after June 2025. On that basis, the one-time reduction is less than half of that annual emissions rate when both are measured against supply. Whether total supply falls over time would depend on how future fee burns compare with new issuance.
Nailwal’s revenue and deflation claims
Nailwal said POL has been deflationary since January 2026. He also said Polygon generated $24.5 million in revenue in 2026, compared with $8.41 million for Arbitrum and $5.6 million for Near.
He wrote that the comparison came from 「my analyst at ChatGPT」, but the post did not identify a dataset or methodology behind those numbers.
Mainnet launch still awaits final approvals
The next step is deployment on mainnet after the remaining Security Council approvals are completed. As of Nailwal’s post, the first 100 million POL had not yet been burned.