Polygon Labs has completed its acquisition of Coinme, giving the company 37 state money-transmitter licenses and 11 exemptions, all of which will be integrated into its Open Money Stack. The closing extends Polygon's regulated payments coverage to 48 US states and adds registration with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) as a money services business.

The deal sat at the top of an acquisition agenda Polygon laid out at the start of the year as it moved to gain access to stablecoin payments in the United States. The licenses are the point: companies moving money on users' behalf in the US generally need money-transmitter authorization state by state, a patchwork that firms often spend years assembling through individual applications.

What the licenses unlock

The licenses and registrations from the acquisition feed directly into Polygon's Open Money Stack, which bundles fiat on- and off-ramps, wallets, cross-chain routing, and settlement behind a single integration. Businesses using the platform can take in funds and hold or settle them in stablecoins, and can also pay out in a recipient's local currency — all from the stack.

Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron said the Coinme acquisition gives the company “more of the infrastructure to support a payment from the moment funds come in to the moment the recipient gets paid.”

Early customers plugging in

The unified integration remains in technical preview for a handful of customers, with four firms already building on the stack. One of them is Tazapay, which is running cross-border business payments through the platform. Another, Mesh, is bolting an on-ramp onto its network of more than 300 wallets, exchanges, and financial services. How quickly the integration moves beyond a technical preview to broader availability will be an early marker of how widely the stack can scale.

A regulatory cloud over Coinme's kiosks

The completion announcement comes just days after Coinme settled a multistate enforcement case. According to the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, Coinme reached a $2.5 million settlement with 34 state regulators on October 8 over alleged Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money laundering failures.

As part of that deal, Coinme agreed to wind down its virtual currency kiosk business by January 1, 2027, or pay an additional $4 million. It must also bring in an independent consultant to review its compliance program. Those obligations now sit with the business Polygon has acquired.

Kiosks of the kind Coinme operated let consumers buy bitcoin with cash, and state regulators have been paying closer attention to the format in recent years. Coinme has operated around 6,000 Bitcoin ATMs in the US through a partnership with coin-counting operator Coinstar. The machines have drawn penalties before: in 2025, California's Department of Financial Protection and Innovation fined the company $300,000, including $51,700 in restitution, for breaching the state's crypto-kiosk transaction limits and receipt-disclosure rules.

Why Polygon is betting $250 million on payments

On January 13, Polygon Labs announced it would acquire Coinme and Sequence for a combined $250 million, positioning itself to offer regulated stablecoin payments in the US. The Coinme closing, completed exactly ten months later, marks the first leg of the combined deal to be finalized, leaving the Sequence closing as the outstanding piece of the January announcement. Coinme was founded in 2014, while Sequence — which supplies smart wallets and the Trails cross-chain routing engine — launched in 2017.

The company signaled its strategic repositioning early in the year. “Polygon Labs is no longer a scaling company, but a blockchain-based payments company,” a spokesperson said in January.

Polygon reported on September 29 that its chain has crossed $3 trillion in cumulative stablecoin transfers since 2020. It has also been expanding the reach of its stack, recently adding support for the TRON network in a bid to tap into the network's roughly $94 billion in circulating USDT.