Polygon is preparing a contract that would allow anyone to trigger the destruction of 100 million POL from a base-fee collector, according to Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal. He said the collector currently holds 121 million POL, meaning the initial burn would remove about 83% of that balance in a single transaction.

The contracts are now on testnet, Nailwal said, and are expected to move to mainnet after the final signatures from Polygon’s Security Council. If deployed as described, the first call would burn 100 million POL at once, with later burns taking place on a quarterly basis through a permissionless process open to the community.

How the proposed burn would work

The collector accumulates POL through the network’s base fee, a protocol-set charge that is itself designated for burning. Each time that base fee is paid, POL is added to the collector until a burn is executed.

Based on the figures shared by Nailwal, removing 100 million POL would leave roughly 21 million tokens in the collector before new fees begin adding to the balance again. The planned mechanism is intended to make those burns callable without a centralized operator once the contracts are live on mainnet.

What the numbers mean for supply

A burn of 100 million POL would equal 1% of the token’s initial 10 billion supply. Against the reported current total supply of about 10.716 billion POL, the same burn would amount to roughly 0.93% of supply outstanding.

That reduction also needs to be viewed against POL’s issuance schedule. The token has ongoing emissions with an effective annual rate of 2% starting after June 2025, so the one-time burn is less than half of that yearly rate when measured as a share of total supply.

As a result, the longer-term supply impact would depend on how much POL is later burned through fees compared with how much new POL is issued. The proposed transaction would reduce supply immediately, but it does not by itself settle whether supply will keep shrinking over time.

Claims around deflation and revenue

Nailwal said POL has been deflationary since January 2026. He also said Polygon had generated $24.5 million in revenue during 2026, compared with $8.41 million for Arbitrum and $5.6 million for Near.

Those figures were presented as part of the broader case for Polygon’s token and network economics, but the immediate operational change under discussion is the rollout of the burn contract and the handling of the collector’s existing balance.

Next confirmed step

The next confirmed milestone is mainnet deployment after the remaining Security Council approvals are completed. As of Nailwal’s post, the first 100 million POL had not yet been burned.

If the launch proceeds as outlined, the initial burn would be executed once on mainnet, after which quarterly burns could be triggered by any community member using the permissionless contract.

Source: thedefiant.io