Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow
Today, I saw a piece of news: Polygon has laid off about 30% of its employees.
Although Polygon has not officially announced or responded, CEO Marc Boiron admitted to the layoffs in an interview, while stating that the total headcount would remain stable due to the addition of newly acquired teams.
On social media, some laid-off employees also posted, indirectly confirming the fact.
But just this same week, Polygon announced it spent $250 million to acquire two companies. Laying off people while spending big money—doesn't that seem a bit strange?
If it were purely a contraction, they wouldn't simultaneously spend $250 million on acquisitions. If it were an expansion, they wouldn't cut 30% of the staff. Looking at both events together, it seems more like a blood change.
They laid off people from the original business lines, freeing up positions for the teams brought in through acquisitions.
The $250 Million Purchase Was for Licenses and Payment Channels
The two acquired companies are Coinme and Sequence.
Coinme is an old company founded in 2014, providing channels for converting between fiat and cryptocurrencies, operating crypto ATMs at over 50,000 retail points in the U.S. Its most valuable asset is its licenses—it holds money transmitter licenses in 48 states. These are very hard to obtain in the U.S.; companies like PayPal and Stripe spent many years to gather them.
Sequence builds wallet infrastructure and cross-chain routing. Simply put, it allows users to avoid handling bridging, gas swapping, and other hassles themselves, enabling one-click cross-chain transfers. Its clients include Polygon, Immutable, Arbitrum, and it has a distribution partnership with Google Cloud.
The two acquisitions total $250 million. Polygon has named this suite the "Open Money Stack," positioning it as middleware for stablecoin payments, aiming to sell to B2B clients like banks, payment companies, and remittance providers.
My understanding of the logic is this:
Coinme provides compliant fiat on- and off-ramps, Sequence provides user-friendly wallets and cross-chain capabilities, and Polygon's own chain provides the settlement layer. Put together, these three pieces create a complete stablecoin payment infrastructure.
The question is, why is Polygon doing this?
On the L2 Path, Polygon Is Already Struggling
The situation in 2025 is clear: Base has won.
Coinbase's L2 grew from $3.1 billion TVL at the beginning of last year to $5.6 billion, capturing 50% of the entire L2赛道 (L2 track/race). Arbitrum held onto 30% but basically saw no growth. The remaining dozens of L2s mostly became unused after their airdrops ended.
Where did Base win? Coinbase has hundreds of millions of registered users; any product feature launched naturally attracts users.
For example, deposits in the lending protocol Morpho on Base grew from $354 million at the beginning of last year to $2 billion now, primarily because it was integrated into Coinbase's App. Users can use it just by opening the App, without needing to know what an L2 or Morpho is.
Polygon doesn't have that kind of entry point. It also had layoffs in 2024, cutting 20% at that time, which was a bear market contraction—everyone was cutting staff.
This time is different; they have money on the books but still choose to lay off, indicating an active choice to change direction.
Remember before, Polygon's story was about enterprise adoption, like the Disney accelerator program, the Starbucks NFT membership plan, Meta's Instagram minting, Reddit avatars, etc.
Four years later, most of those collaborations have gone quiet. Starbucks' Odyssey program also shut down last year.
Continuing to fight Base head-on in the L2赛道 (L2 track/race), Polygon has almost no chance of winning. The technology gap can be closed, but the user entry point cannot. Rather than lingering on an unwinnable battlefield, it's better to seek new opportunities.
Stablecoin Payments Is a Good Direction, But It's Crowded
Stablecoin payments is indeed a growing market.
In 2025, the total market cap of stablecoins passed $300 billion, up 45% from the previous year. Their use is also changing, expanding from mainly moving funds between exchanges to cross-border payments, corporate treasury, payroll, and other scenarios.
But this market is already very crowded.
Stripe spent $1.1 billion last year to buy the stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge, and recently secured the issuance rights for the USDH stablecoin on Hyperliquid. PayPal's PYUSD already accounts for 7% of the stablecoin share on Solana.
Circle itself is pushing its Payments Network. JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and other major banks are forming alliances to issue their own stablecoins.
Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal said in an interview with Fortune that these acquisitions put Polygon in competition with Stripe.
Frankly, that's a bit of an overstatement.
Stripe's acquisition cost $1.1 billion; Polygon spent $250 million. Stripe has millions of merchants; Polygon's clients are mainly developers. Most importantly, Stripe has over a decade of accumulated payment licenses and banking relationships.
In a head-to-head fight, they are not opponents of the same caliber.
But Polygon might be betting on a different approach. Stripe wants to incorporate stablecoins into its closed loop, letting merchants still use Stripe, but with the settlement layer switched to stablecoins for faster and cheaper transactions.
Polygon wants to build open infrastructure, allowing any bank or payment company to build their own business on top of it.
One is vertical integration, the other is a horizontal切入 (cut-in/approach). These two models may not directly clash, but they are competing for the attention of the same group of customers.
Changing Its Way of Survival, the Road Ahead Is Uncertain
Finally, coming back to the point, layoffs in the crypto industry these past two years are not unusual.
OpenSea cut 50%, Yuga Labs, Chainalysis are all contracting. ConsenSys laid off 20% last year and again this year. Most are passive contractions; they are out of money and just trying to survive.
Polygon is different. They have money on the books, can still拿出 (take out/spend) $250 million for acquisitions, but still choose to lay off 30% of their people.
Changing blood to change its way of survival, but there are risks.
The core business of the acquired Coinme is crypto ATMs, with machines deployed at over 50,000 retail points across the U.S., allowing users to buy crypto with cash and cash out crypto.
The trouble is, this business ran into trouble last year.
California regulators fined Coinme $300,000 because its ATMs allowed users to withdraw over the limit, violating the $1,000 daily cap. Washington State was harsher, issuing a direct ban that was only lifted last December.
Polygon's CEO said Coinme's compliance situation "exceeds requirements." But regulatory penalties are black and white; pretty words don't change that.
Mapping these events back to the token, the narrative for the $POL token has also changed.
Previously, the more the chain was used, the more valuable POL became. After the acquisition, Coinme takes a commission on each transaction—this is real revenue, not token narrative. The official said they expect to achieve over $100 million annually.
If they can truly achieve this, Polygon could transform from a "protocol" into a "company," with revenue, profits, and a valuation anchor. This is a rare species in the crypto industry.
However, the speed at which traditional finance is entering is clearly accelerating, and the window for crypto-native companies is narrowing.
There's a saying in the industry: build in the bear market, harvest in the bull market.
Polygon's problem now is that it's still building, but the harvester in the bull market might no longer be it.
