Again, I'm the Chief Product Officer at Polygon, having joined recently having joined recently . Today we're going to talk a little bit about how we see the future of money at Polygon. Specifically money at Polygon. Specifically , about where our mission is going, what we're practically bringing to market to fulfill that mission to fulfill that mission , you know, and our progress toward what we think will be money becoming available on the blockchain network in general. So, to kick things off a little bit, we have a new mission that you new mission that you may have heard about from Mark, our CEO, or Sandeep, our founder, which is to move all money onto the blockchain network.
This is a continuation of our previous mission, which was to build a trustless internet. We feel like we've come close enough to this mission, and now it's time to have a very practical impact on the world. And I think when we think broadly about what blockchains are for, you know, maybe it's not too surprising, right? The fact that the real, almost killer, use case for blockchain is money. So, it makes perfect sense to say: let's move all this money to the blockchain and do the practical, hard, and product-oriented work to make it happen.
So what is our vision to achieve this? Because it's easy for me to stand up here and just say we're going to do this, everyone will be happy, you know, we'll have speeches, we'll talk, but practically we have to prepare for this. We have to create something that will help people do this. And what we came up with here is an idea and this product that we call the open money stack. It is the only open, vertically integrated stack for all money movement and storage.
And it's not just on the blockchain, by the way. If you also work off- blockchain and have a component on the blockchain, the stack will work for you as well. Mark published our first big blog post about what it is , you know, how it works for business, how we're going to bring it to market. But today we really think about it like this: if you build any product today to move or store money and try to bring it to market, you have to deal with all this complexity at different levels that you have to interact with. So, at a basic level, you have these networks and settlements, you work with existing TradFi players like Visa, MasterCard, you work on systems like ACH and SEPA.
You have infrastructure levels where you work with banks and you work, you know, maybe with Shop Pay if you're a little closer, you know, directly to the UX. You work with Plaid. You have these financial services that you have to integrate. If you've been here, who has integrated before, like Stripe? And you integrate some kind of API for the actual like processing layer.
And then, on top of that, you have a user-centric UX that you have to customize, depending on what you're creating. So maybe you use MoonPay, maybe you use something like Airwallex for treasury if you do it internally. All of these things require different integrations, different contracts, different relationships, and if you're close to this area and dealing with compliance, different integration and compliance management systems. So our goal is to really bring all of this down to a single open money stack that presents itself as an API and a consolidated dashboard . So you can interact with this if you're a direct developer and you're building an app, meaning you're building a neo- meaning you're building a neo- bank, or if you're a treasurer and you just want to do direct money management online with something like a ramp.
So, what does it look like today? Last week, we announced a technical preview of the open money stack, which comes with the first compatible features. This includes regulated cash and fiat ramps, so we're working with banking partners, mostly in the US, to go directly to cryptocurrency at incredible prices and speeds, um, wallets, custodial wallets custodial wallets , soon non-custodial wallets, orchestration, which is the actual command you do to say destination, intent-based action intent-based action that moves through those ramps, distribution, how you actually move that money, even to other blockchains, and then best-in- class UX. So, I don't know if you saw our tweet that showed something like a dashboard, but anyone, even an intelligence person inside a company, can come in and start moving money right away using the OMS dashboard. Okay, what gives us the right to do all this?
Right? Anyone can go on stage and say, "Hey, we're going to do this." You may have attended other financial institutions or presentations where they said, "Yes, we're going full cycle too." Um, I think we have a pretty clear vision of what money will be like in the future, and how Polygon already has a position that allows us to be the ones to move the rest of this fiat money to the blockchain. And what we believe very strongly, first of all, is that the money will be on the blockchain.
So when we think about it, we like to say that this is not our first trillion. And we have already transferred about 2.6 trillion to Polygon. Um trillion to Polygon. Um , our monthly volumes have increased by over 400% since last year.
Um, 130 billion 400% since last year. Um, 130 billion , you know, over 30 million payments every month. I think last month we had the most stablecoin transactions across all blockchains, including BNB, including Solana. This happens directly on Polygon directly on Polygon . So we are really familiar with this space.
We are already moving a huge amount of funds and are leaning very aggressively towards stablecoins. Um, that means most of the world's most famous financial companies are already on Polygon. So, if you use Stripe, you're already transferring money to Polygon. If you, um, buy into Bittle, you're doing it with BlackRock, potentially on Polygon. Uh potentially on Polygon.
Uh , we have connections to Robinhood, Paxos, checkout.com, Flutterwave, which is more or less the Stripe of Africa, right? Makes all its distributions, remittances, and payments. It's all happening at Polygon. So what's really exciting about this is that the existing depth of liquidity that Polygon brought to the world has given us access to existing traditional financial institutions that are coming onto the scene or emerging on the blockchain.
Um, and what does this mean in general? How do we do it? Well, we are truly a global payments company. Most payment companies start as internal organizations. You know, they start in their own country, they get regulated, they move to another country, they get regulated, they put up flags while they're doing it.
You know, Polygon has been global since day one, especially in the regions that are most aggressively implementing stablecoins. So in Latin America, which I think accounts for about 55% of accounts for about 55% of all stablecoin transactions, Polygon actually handles 75% of that market cap. So this is already happening in countries where the most adoption is already happening naturally. And this implementation is not just a fictitious trade. This is useful for these people.
It's access to a currency that gives them stability, perhaps compared to the local currency. This is hedging, and it is also something that is used directly for transactions. So we're expanding this to more and more of the world, and we're already there. So where does this extend to? Today, the stablecoin market is largely non- USD-denominated, but it will take over blockchain in the future.
It makes much more sense to have a distributed system to perform this currency transaction before you move on to entering or exiting the market. And about 75% of it is already on Polygon. This is a growing stablecoin market. And so when you look at where people outside the US are building investments in other top-tier currencies like the euro, the peso, the yen, or the rupee, it's all already happening on Polygon. Okay, money should be cheap, right?
It can't cost more to suddenly get this global access. You know, at Polygon we're already approaching 5,000 TPS. You know, if you look at the credit card network, the average credit card network, like Visa, does somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 TPS. Today we are already getting closer to this. And if you look inside you look inside , we are chasing gigabits, which is 100,000 TPS.
So we will exceed those existing limits that already exist in the fiat currency world, and we will exceed them on the blockchain. And that's why the biggest, uh, biggest operators on the blockchain are already using Polygon. So, I'm sure everyone here is familiar with Polymarket. You may have already placed some bets for today. For example, this bet, this action, this transaction is happening on Polygon.
So, we made a lot of improvements to the chain itself around single block finality while keeping fees low. We have n't had a reorganization since January. Hmm, this is all the beginning of building a global scale for this network to support the payment capabilities that we are building with the open money stack. To be open, we must be truly open truly open . We must be compatible.
So we have three different interoperability efforts around Agler that people here are probably already familiar with in terms of liquidity and state, which is unified for transactions across chains that are connected in an extremely secure way. Hmm, Polygon CDK, which is used if you want to create your own private chain and connect it to a kind of network of public chains. And then Trails, which is part of the recent acquisition of Sequence. And what Trails does is that Trails is kind of like Google Maps for moving money. You know where you're going.
You want to know the route to get there. Whether you want to switch from USDC on Polygon to something simple like Tether on Tron, Trails will find you the cheapest and easiest way to do it. And it will do this at the OMS orchestration level. You don't need to go through any special UX, you need to do special integration. You just tell me where I'm going and then OMS takes care of it through the Trails system.
Accessible to everyone, incredibly important. We are making significant investments in this fulfilling future. So it can't just be on the blockchain. We have spent over $250 million in the last year acquiring companies that give us access to regulated money flows. So, we bought a company called Coinme, which you may be familiar with.
Coinme, I think, was the second regulated exchange in the US, holding virtual currency licenses in 38 states with 48 state access for consumer-level transactions. So, this means that if you are building a consumer-facing application, you can work with Polygon OMS and have licenses to transact with consumers to convert their fiat currency to virtual currency. If someone here is trying to build a Revolut competitor, you're going to need something like that because you need to have direct access to consumers to get started and then to interact with that currency and turn it into something productive. Similarly, we acquired Sequence, which gave us access to Trails, as well as an enterprise wallet that has already been rigorously tested across hundreds of millions of deployments. You probably use it on your phone, depending on what games you have loaded in the background.
Okay, great. This all makes a lot of sense. Another thing lot of sense. Another thing that, in my opinion, is most concerning to everyone right now is AI. AI will obviously be a step function of utility, usability, and scale, which will happen on the blockchain, as its use at scale requires fast calculations.
Today, we think of AI mostly as a mostly as a chatbot that you interact with over the phone or otherwise, which collects information. But tomorrow it will be autonomous systems that work by interacting with each other. So anything you do today that affects a system, like a network router, a pricing system, or anything else, it's all going to be AI. And the only way to really push value through this system and have an efficient, um, you know, some kind of economy under it is to have a settlement system that can happen fairly quickly, right? So that there can be all these different microtransactions between them that make the final transaction as efficient and convenient as possible.
So, what are we doing here? So Polygon is really investing a lot in AI. First of all, we are one of the most used, I believe we are the most used circuit on X402. We are a member of the X402 Foundation. If you open the X402 charts, you'll see that it's all just purple.
Um, you know, and in this space, we also put our money where we wanted. So wanted. So , if you do agency transactions on Polygon, it's free. You will not have to pay to use a facilitator. Better yet, if you want to create your own facilitator because you believe the existing ones are not achieving the desired result, we will actually refund your operating costs.
This is built into the chain. This was one of the recent EIPs. You simply register it with us and get this money back. So we believe that developing this new space for agents should be free. It should be something that everyone has access to, everyone can experiment with, and everyone can build on .
So this space in general, in terms of transactions, X402 and its usage, there has been a huge amount of progress for agent developers working primarily on Polygon. And then, as a next step, everyone in this room is probably building with AI building with AI . You know, we don't write code anymore. We open a cursor, or maybe we just use the cloud code directly. When we do this, we kind of elevate our level of interaction, and we need to be able to do this for movement and money management as well.
Because as fun as it is to build an internal service for your company or a SaaS product, creating a money management system should be just as easy. So this example is actually pretty honest. So just yesterday, um, James, one of our developer relations guys, put together a, um, command inside the Polygon command line interface where you can just tell it to create a neo-bank. And it takes about 20 minutes. Well, it runs and writes all the code and updates all the code and updates , but you can have your own neo-bank in your pocket tomorrow with a single command.
And what does that do, what is a neo- do, what is a neo- bank, right? Neobanking is an easy way to bring money to the blockchain, store that money, make that money productive through returns or otherwise, easily transact with that money, and be able to share that money with other people who are in the same system. Isn't that right? All four of these things would require a different system, a different level of interaction, a different, um, type of contract, a different API key, a different compliance integration, another UX review. For example, the effort to create a neobank is so high that if you go and talk to a venture capitalist about creating a neobank, the first thing they will ask you is, "Who are you working with as partners?"
So we want to break it all down into parts. We want everyone to be able to create a neobank, and you can do it through agents just like as an individual if you're starting out, or as a company if you're creating a financial system for money movement or money storage, you should be able to use a single interface and a single integration. And for us, it's Polygon, and it's an open money stack. So, if you want to learn more about what we do, how we do it, what we create, go to polygon.technology, submit the inquiry form.
You can contact me. I'm Jay Egan, I'm from polygon.technology. Let me know what you're working on. We want to integrate the open money stack everywhere.
We want to bring money to the blockchain, all money to the blockchain, and we want to work with everyone who has the same goal as us. Thank you.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.