- Polygon Labs announced “Open Money Stack,” a modular payments infrastructure framework aimed at regulated stablecoin payments and modernizing cross-border money movement.
- What it’s designed to do: Combine key building blocks—settlement, liquidity, orchestration/routing, and compliance—into a single, modular system.
- Polygon said fintechs and institutions will be able to adopt only the components they need.
Polygon Labs is pitching a new “Open Money Stack” as stablecoin payments move from crypto-native rails toward mainstream financial plumbing, outlining a modular framework it says will help fintechs and regulated institutions move tokenized dollars across borders without stitching together wallets, on-ramps, routing and compliance tools from multiple vendors.
“All money will move onchain over time. The companies and infrastructure that define that future will be built in the next few years, and this is the moment that matters,” Polygon Founder Sandeep Nailwal and Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron said in a joint statement sahred with AlexaBlockchain.
“Our mission is simple. Move all money onchain and make it seamless, open, and interoperable for everyone,” they added.
The company said the Open Money Stack—scheduled to roll out in phases—will bundle onchain settlement with orchestration, liquidity and compliance services, while remaining “chain neutral” so payment firms can accept assets from multiple networks without forcing end users to bridge tokens or manage gas.
The announcement lands as stablecoins, once primarily used for crypto trading, increasingly show up in cross-border flows and corporate treasury experiments. Citigroup, in a September 2025 report, projected stablecoin issuance could reach about $1.9 trillion in a base case by 2030 and $4.0 trillion in a bull case. The outlook hinges less on token mechanics than on whether compliant distribution and settlement networks can scale.
A framework aimed at regulated money movement
Polygon’s framing is that the hardest part of stablecoin adoption is no longer the blockchain itself, but the surrounding “plumbing”: onboarding from bank accounts into tokenized cash, screening transactions, managing wallet UX, and routing payments across liquidity venues and rails. On its “vision” page for the Open Money Stack, Polygon argues today’s money movement remains “slow, expensive and uncertain,” and that “all money will be onchain,” with the category-defining infrastructure built over the next few years.
Polygon says the Open Money Stack will include components such as blockchain rails, wallet infrastructure, on- and off-ramps, cross-chain interoperability, compliance tooling, onchain identity and “onchain earning,” positioning the system as a one-stop integration for payment providers that want to keep funds onchain rather than treat blockchains as a temporary settlement hop.
The company also tied the initiative to its broader interoperability efforts—pointing to Agglayer as a way to make chains “invisible” to users, so senders and recipients interact as if they’re on the same network even when settlement is happening across multiple chains.
Why Polygon is leaning into payments
Polygon is attempting to differentiate on operational track record and stablecoin liquidity. Its payments marketing pages cite about $3 billion of stablecoin supply on Polygon, $0.001 average transaction costs, and 5.3+ billion total transactions—metrics it uses to argue the network is already supporting production payment flows rather than pilots.
In a year-end 2025 recap, Polygon Labs said much of Polygon’s sustained usage came from applications that “move value” such as payments, remittances, subscriptions and onchain financial products, and it highlighted activity tied to fintech integrations including Stripe and Revolut.
A crowded race for stablecoin “plumbing”
Polygon is far from alone in building a payments stack around tokenized dollars.
- Visa said in December 2025 it launched USDC settlement for U.S. institutions, citing more than $3.5 billion in annualized stablecoin settlement volume as it expands stablecoin-based settlement beyond pilot corridors.
- Circle markets a suite of stablecoin payments tools and describes a “Circle Payments Network” intended to connect financial institutions for real-time, stablecoin-powered money movement.
- Traditional finance is also experimenting with clearing layers. Barclays took a stake in stablecoin-settlement startup Ubyx, as banks explore ways to settle across stablecoins from different issuers within regulatory boundaries.
Those efforts reflect a broader shift: stablecoins are increasingly treated as a new settlement rail, but the market’s center of gravity is moving toward compliance, identity, dispute handling, issuer risk, and the ability to connect stablecoins with bank accounts and merchant acceptance at scale.
Polygon Labs said the Open Money Stack will launch in phases and is soliciting early partners.
The market impact will likely hinge on specifics still to come: which compliance standards and jurisdictions it supports first, how it handles fiat on/ off-ramps and identity, whether it can route across multiple chains without reintroducing “closed network” dynamics, and how pricing compares with incumbents building similar rails.
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