Polygon's Origins and Major Announcements: Revolut and Mastercard | Money Rails 2025 | Polygon Labs

Transcript

So first of all, thank you so much uh for uh coming to the first ever edition of uh money rails and uh uh this is amazing to see a full packed house and we are at Dev Connect uh which is again like really amazing thing and thank you Dev Connect also for giving us a place inside the Devcon connect event to do our first ever edition of money rails and uh hopefully there are going to be many many uh big and even bigger uh future versions of it.

A brief about me. Uh I'm SEP. uh grew up in a very uh you know humble neighborhood in in in Delhi and you know I I when I speak with the people in the western world and I say that oh I come from humble background and you will see a lot of people saying that yeah we we are coming coming from humble background but in some of the emerging countries and third world countries when I was growing up India was still a third world country now it's an emerging market and When you say I come from humble background, it really means it's a very humble background. So in US probably like when you come from a humble

background you still have a like a you know probably a probably a uh not so good house not so good car and all that and then you say that yeah we are just but you know in that part of the world things are very very uh difficult and apart from other things the most important thing that I faced growing up is is that is the lack of opportunities. It is like for example doing startups in in in in US is very different than doing startups in India. for me like I've told this story multiple times when we were starting polygon any competitor of polygon they would have raised like minimum seed round $10 million $20 million we for the first two years the

total money raised that we could raise was $265k like 265k and actually this is the we have a very big relationship with the latam because the biggest investor for us back in the day out of that 265K it was Ripio network here like you know which is a fairly big uh uh you know finance uh company and so it is really hard and and and you know life has been hard and it's it's the most important thing is that my story is not very unique like people a lot of people coming from LATAM they would have very similar story like me and in India also a lot of people have

the same story and everybody's struggling willing to to have as to have a fair share of the opportunities towards them. But Polygon's story is very unique. I just said that you know for the first two years we raised hardly 265k and in 2021 we were a $30 billion company and even now it's like somewhere around$ 1.5 to2 billion and we all know like you know this is primarily driven by like Ethereum having a very hard time in the last two years which became even more harder for the L2s because Ethereum was losing its its dominance. I recently tweeted that I feel that the L2s are

going to get their dominance back very shortly and you're going to see that some of the announcements we are going to do today here but some of the other things you are going to see in the next one to two months and you're going to see the the kind of institutions that are going to launch L2s will absolutely change the landscape and define the narrative that web 3 is going to scale to the international to the global scale only via L2 There's no way that the web 3 will scale to the to the scale of 1 billion users by many of these L1s that you guys are seeing these days. But coming back to to Polygon that Polygon now has become this borderless money

rails moving billions of dollars every every every month. And I think if you some of you guys are following the stats we generally are doing from $50 billion to 180 to$200 billion dollars of money movement every every year or every month sorry. And even between that the most encouraging encouraging part is the uh the P2P payments which makes me feel that the actual end user is getting on blockchains and this is the first time in polygon I feel very much at home because as a DNA as a founder you know my DNA is not very speculative DNA like I don't understand the speculative games

games that much So 2021 2022 when polygon was really really big at that time what was really driving polygon if you remember it was all these enterprise real world use cases right whether it was Starbucks whether it was Reddit whether it was Facebook Meta launching their NFTs and Coca-Cola to all the you know probably 60% of the Fortune 500 that time had had launched something on on Polygon but what happened after that we had the FDX fiasco and all the enterprises went back. They nobody wanted to touch crypto. The great part about that is now we have stable coins and with that stable coins the crypto is actually getting mainstream traction and

there is real world utility. We are now solving in crypto real world world problems not the speculative problems meme coins and even in DeFi a large amount of activities around leverage. So now we are doing the real world activities and this is where we are very very much uh at home like polygon's whole team me my leadership team everybody is there to drive the real world use cases and payments fintex banks large institutions that is where we feel really at ease and at home and you're going to see polygon going absolutely exponential from here as you can see like you know I talked about payments a little bit and right

now even if you go to like let's say stripe stripe's largest amount of transactions are happening on polygon like in the last few days what did you all see you saw flutterwave which is the stripe of Africa completely moves on to polygon yeah yesterday we saw or two days back we saw R25 which is Ant Financial the Alibaba group they launched a pretty large uh initiative on on polygon um there was like uh there is this uh one of the largest fund of funds who who launched their RWAS on polygon and you're going to see more and more we are going to announce two massive massive things just now today in some time. So, Polygon is for merchants, consumers, fintexs, banks, platforms and

in the banks like I can guarantee you, you close your eyes and think about the largest or the biggest finance brands that you can think about. What are the top five finance banks brands and you will see many of them doing very deep work in web 3 with polygon and it's coming in in very very fast. It's happening very very fast and that this all means that polygon is for payments and I say polygon is for payments and fintex because fintex do something more than payments also a lot of things more than payments but primarily that's our focus area payments payments payments like just at polygon we want polygon to be the number one place for payments stable coins which means stable coins

forex and I think like we will show you a few stats also in latam we right now have around 70 60 to 70% market share in the regional stable coins in Southeast Asia. We have around 80 to 90% market share on regional stable coins. That's how big Polygon is becoming. I think you guys know that JPYC happened like the the the Japanese yen coin that has the highest amount of activity and the growth is actually happening on Polygon only and you're going to see more and more sustainable coin joint. So since we are very very deep into the payments, we actually are in the process of changing the entire DNA of the company to focus on payments and that's why we have this

gentleman who is a star in this space uh in the in the payment space crypto payment sta space John Eaggan he has joined us as the head of uh our product and he's driving our journey next into this deep and the large multi-t trillion dollar market of payments. John, I would request you to come on stage. >> Thanks, Andy. Thank you. >> All right. It's always fun to uh stand in front of a giant picture of yourself. Super excited to be here at Polygon.

Super excited to be here at Money Rails. Hope everyone's having a really great time so far. Um, you know, I think when I left Stripe, a lot of just questions came in sort of from all over the media and in general. We'd really taken Stripe on a meteoric kind of journey into crypto in terms of leaning deeply from a payment standpoint. And the questions that kind of come to me really often are, you know, why Polygon and sort of this world of blockchains and this evolving kind of ecosystem of global money movement, you know, why pick Polygon? And for me, I have to say like looking at it from the other side, it's a very obvious decision. Everywhere we look to to Sandeep's points earlier, when we go talk to banks, when we go talk to institutions, when we go talk to our largest platforms that were moving

money globally, it just always turned out that they were on Polygon or they'd heard of Polygon or they had a relationship with Polygon. And so I did my homework. I started to dig in and I want to dig into some of that with you here. When we think about like where Polygon is and where it's going from very being a very early mover in global money movement to what we're just seeing over the last quarter over the last year as the traditional finance space starts to move on chain more and more we're seeing that payments providers specifically are preferring Polygon over every other chain especially when it comes to everyday payments and what an everyday payment is is these are payments between people payments that are actually payouts on marketplaces payments payments being made for goods

and services generally defined as payments around like a $100 and under that. This is actual real commerce happening globally and Polygon is dominating here. Last month we did almost a billion. We'll do a billion on chain this month just for these everyday payments. And we had in quarter in Q3 about 1.8 billion. Um I think we're just going to see this number skyrocket over the next quarter. And then if you zoom out a little bit and you think about this space from a wider payments use case, this is like peer-to-peer pay payment volume on chain in Polygon, we're seeing like 14.7 billion just in Q3. This is 147% quarter-over-arter growth. These graphs are just getting started. This is the beginning of the world coming on chain. And this is

Polygon owning that movement of the traditional finance commerce global space onto the uh onto the globally connected ecosystem. So really excited about that. I like to pull out I feel like Sandep you stole a little bit of my thunder on these numbers here. But one of the best numbers on here is this LATAM. 60% of the local LATAM stablecoin market is on Polygon. And that's because Polygon was one of the first in this region and will continue to be the first in all of the regions that have historically had limited access to the global market, limited access to the dollar, limited access to currency conversion, limited access to being able to set up a new company and operate with consumers globally on day one without

having to pack up and move somewhere for a startup ecosystem. So, we're really seeing that these numbers are starting to glow and we're going to see these numbers just skyrocket over time. I really love the unique addresses and that growth there. That's about a what is it? Half a billion today. This is one of the fastest growing numbers we've got. This is just count of wallets on chain transacting on stable coins on Polygon. So to say we're just getting started, I think it's a bit of an understatement. When you look at this global market, we're not talking about billions. We're talking about trillions. And we're not just talking about trillions, but we're talking about hundreds of trillions. This number is about $200 trillion already that moves in the global uh money movement space.

And then by 2032 it's expected to get to over 300 trillion. I think this is an underestimation of what this market is going to do because in the future all local markets are going to be global markets and that's going to be enabled through polygon and through onchain global transactions. So where's the evidence right what are the brand names? Who's doing this? Sandeep spoke to this a little bit but if you look up here you know poly market I think is a really popular one to talk about but a lot of traditional finance on here too. JP Morgan, Santander, the issuers like Tether and Circle, these folks are leaning deeply into Polygon as the primary rail for executing their rapidly expanding and global aspirations. We're going to continue to see this. Flutter wave was a recent one.

So, sort of the Stripe uh in another part of the world and Stripe is on here too. So, just wonderful to see these initial kind of capture that's driving this growth today. I think we're going to put one of these tiles up at the next money rails next year and this is just going to be 10x the number. we're going to be like having to cut logos out and making apologies to other companies for not being able to fit them up here. Um, I like to talk about Poly Market purely from just a volume standpoint. You know, we've got the three commas club here, 22.5 billion in total volume. Every dollar that transacts on Poly Market has to make its way in there first on Polygon, right? So, all of these payments making their way into the system before they start to transact, which also happens on chain into about

185 million total predictions. So, this is a really good early mover example of where we're able to operate on chain and serve a global market with the Polygon ecosystem. And we have to scale to support this because the next generation of financial super apps are all going to require that degree of scale. We're all going to be in the three commas club when we're setting up these types of organizations because that's what happens when you reach the whole world. And so, we're going to hit about 5,000 TPS in early 2026. Gigas is going to push us to over 100K in the future. Um, already got some of the lowest cost transactions in the market. Uh, 24% of USDC addresses were ranked number one there. That percentage is only going to grow and you're going to see every

stable coin that you want to transact on on Polygon, easily transactable on Polygon, and easily swappable on Polygon. So, what does it mean when we zoom out? Polygon is the go-to money rail for payments everywhere and anywhere. And so I'm really excited to continue on this journey. I'm really excited to be at Polygon and really excited to be here at Money Rails. So I'm going to hand it back to Sandeep to make some big announcements about some of the additional partners we're starting to work with. And I hope you all have a great rest of your Dev Connect. Thanks, John. Um and one important point John mentioned that uh we are now at 5,000 TPS. I mean

this is a big shout out to our engineering teams that we started the year with 200 TPS and we have made three large upgrades in the last uh 6 to 8 months where now our TPS initially went from 200 to right now we are at around 1,500 TPS. We are slowly growing that TPS and in 3 to 6 months we expect our TPS to be around 5,000 TPS and that is very important because 5,000 TPS means that Polygon will have like probably a larger TPS than Solana itself right so Solana is like a very popular um you know fast high throughput chain by in next 3 to 6 months we believe that we

will surpass Solana in terms of number of in terms of the TPS TPS and then in 12 to 24 months we want to go to 100,000 TPS and that's where like Polygon will will absolutely establish itself as a formidable layer just like Mastercard and Visa for stable coin payments. So some of the big things that we are doing I wanted to you know we wanted to announce some of these big things and these are like um you know these are these are just beginning like in the last 3 4 months if you guys have been following polygon so many things have happened on on uh on polygon I tal talked about you know uh flutterwave stripe doing their maximum amount of volume and then you will see some big

heavy weights in the next one. So first one to announce is I think we already announced this that Mastercard is launching their their crypto credentials which is like everybody has these you know.pole pole. Soul domains. Right now, you're going to have Mastercard native domains and this is right now exclusively on Polygon and you can have your own Mastercard addresses where you can receive and send money u on Polygon and I think we have a very small uh video for that. Let's go through the video.

Okay. Oh, that's the that's the next one, right? And this is really really big. Like as you guys all know, Revolute is absolutely a trailblazer in the payment space. and Revolute. Although in the background, Revolute has already integrated Polygon and there is already we have seen $700 million of volume on Revolute on Polygon. And this is Revolute like you know this announcement we are now making public that Revolute is using Polygon as their preferred or

default chain. They have other chains integrated but Polygon is their preferred chain for doing all kinds of payments and payments related use cases. So this is a big moment for the entire web3 industry also that you know a player like Revolute is going all in on stable coins and we are really honored to to to make sure that you know we are we are playing a very important role in in that in that growth. So that was the second large uh announcement from our side. Um then at the end I want to just uh you know reiterate on the story of Polygon. We started as a you know to scale Ethereum. We you know started as a side chain when when when L2s were not

uh you know possible. We were the first team to actually implement and show a full-blown working ZKVM. And right now the biggest like people don't realize this that the biggest ZKL2 by D5 TVL is Katana and this is built on Polygon also like a lot of Ethereum you know community members would be there and they would be like when will Polygon POS become uh the L2 with the ZK proofs and all that and I've said multiple times and I want to say again that with the the Polygon POS is known for its lowc cost transactions high throughput and right now even though the ZK proofs have become very very cheap but they are still not at the place where they can

match the cost that we are providing to the user. We are like right now many of our transactions are 0.00001 00001 right and if we add zk proofs which are somewhere around you know in 1 cents to 0.1 cents that fees goes up by 10x right now so we are expecting zk proofs to to to to go one order of magnitude cheaper at least before we start integrating the zk proofs into the polygon poss but for the other L2s you already know I already talked about katana then you know okx is x layer is fully on polygon and as I was mentioning that some of the large institutions that you're going to see that they will launch on the ZK you know

L2 of ours that ZK L2 that we have built that is going to completely change the narrative and the game for L2s in the coming months. So you know we have like people still think polygon poss because it's the largest chain. So they think that this is not L2 but Polygon has 12 chains in with the A layer connected to a layer which are full-blown ZKL2s and uh you know with Polygon like we discovered some sort of PMF with the enterprises in 2122. That is the that is the most energetic part for me that finally the in crypto what matters is real world use cases. Real world use cases matter in crypto. I mean even six months back meme coins and these things were the were the most important thing

like you know which were giving chains the valuations but now the actual world utility which is payment stable coin and fintex is actually uh is important and this is where our DNA is and that's why I'm super super bullish that polygon will absolutely kill it in the next 12 to 12 to 24 months and you're going to see this and then as I said that enterprises even governments I think many of you guys would have heard on on Twitter that government of Philippines actually is posting their entire budgets and everything on on on Polygon. And right now, I'm not sure if the vote has already gone in or not, but there is a vote going on in Philippine Senate where they are deciding to launch their

sovereign L2 and that L2 is is right now in consideration with Polygon only. It's still not signed and everything but it is being consideration on this and I am seeing a lot of these sovereigns, sovereign countries are going to launch their own L2s. They're not going to launch L1's. They're going to launch L2s because L1's have a huge cost of decentralization. Like Ethereum spends $3 to5 billion every year to get this decentralization. It does not make sense for everybody else to launch their L L1s and then also spend this kind of money to get the the the trust. The ZK L2s give you that trust by just outsourcing from Ethereum. You just piggyback on the trust that Ethereum has created using L2 technologies. So you're going to see

huge governments. This right now I I talked about Philippines. One thing I cannot talk but there is an anti-government. There's a large country in the world where there is a government uh uh there is an anti-government party which actually wants to throw throw the government off and they have actually raised I think hundred million dollars or something and they also fully use polygon only on that. So I mean we it's it's a it's a fully permissionless chain. So anybody can do come and do transactions as far as they are not sanctioned but that's also we are seeing a lot of government activity happening on on polygon in India we saw multiple uh states are launching different different things on on polygon and just now we talked about mastercard revolute and everything and with all this as I

said that polygon hopefully polygon is striving hard to become the money rails of stable coins and payments in the web 3 world. Thank you everyone. That's all from my side.