Polygon Labs expects its regulated payments business to become profitable in 2027 as the company moves beyond blockchain infrastructure into the payments processing industry, a sector dominated by firms such as Visa (V) and Stripe, CEO Marc Boiron told CoinDesk.

The developer of the Polygon blockchain said Wednesday that it completed its acquisition of Coinme, a U.S.-regulated crypto payments provider, giving the Cayman Islands-based company the ability to handle conversions between cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and traditional money using its own resources.

The deal marks a shift in Polygon's business that began with January's introduction of the Open Money Stack, a framework designed to support stablecoin-based payments and streamline cross-border transfers. Beyond supplying the technology to move money, Polygon Labs can now collect fees for converting and transferring it — a source of revenue that previously flowed to other businesses, Boiron said in a video interview.

"I have not considered us to compete with blockchains for a while now, to be frank," Boiron said. "It's very much that we're a payments-focused company that just uses blockchains to move money, and in particular, Polygon."

Even so, the company remains a long way from seriously challenging the incumbents. Visa's payments volume in fiscal 2025 topped $12.3 trillion, while Stripe hit $1.9 trillion. Polygon is just starting its journey.

The Coinme acquisition addresses a longstanding problem for blockchain networks: they supply the technology behind transactions but often have little control over the companies generating them. With Coinme, Polygon can handle more of the payment process itself rather than handing customers off to a third party whenever money needs to enter or leave a blockchain.

"We don't have that customer relationship; we don't get to decide what happens," said Boiron, who claimed rival blockchains have offered financial incentives to payment companies to move their transactions away from Polygon. "Now, when we are the ones running the regulated business, nobody can cause us to move flows anywhere that we don't want to, because we actually have those customer relationships."

New source of revenue

Polygon Labs earns revenue from its payment services. Blockchain transaction fees are kept separate, with priority fees distributed to validators and stakers. Boiron said those transaction fees already offset Polygon's token emissions, and he assessed that millions of dollars in additional fees go to validators and token stakers.

Unlike blockchain transaction fees, which can amount to fractions of a cent, the payments business can earn fees based on the value of the money transferred. For a company that does not keep those protocol-level fees — they flow to validators and stakers — value-based payments fees give Polygon Labs a direct claim on the flows its stack moves.

Polygon is nonetheless likely to face competition from the opposite direction, as traditional payment companies expand into blockchain-based money transfers. Stripe has been building out stablecoin payments, while Swift, the global interbank messaging service, is developing blockchain infrastructure with major banks. Visa meanwhile, has expanded its stablecoin settlement network to include the Polygon blockchain among others, while launching a platform that lets banks and fintechs issue, manage and settle stablecoins.

For Polygon, the challenge is no longer simply persuading companies to use its blockchain. It is convincing them to use Polygon Labs to move their money.

The platform's early users include Tazapay, a cross-border payments provider; Mesh, a crypto payments network; Toku, a global payroll platform; and Kira, a payments infrastructure company. The unified integration remains in technical preview, meaning it is not yet generally available to customers. The markers to watch from here are the integration's path to general availability and whether the payments unit reaches the projected 2027 profitability, as incumbents keep building their own stablecoin capabilities.

Source: CoinDesk