The Future of Money at Polygon

Transcript

[applause] >> Again, I'm the chief product officer at Polygon, joined recently. Today we're going to talk a little bit about how we see the future of money at Polygon. Specifically around sort of where our mission is going, what we're practically bringing to market to serve that mission, you know, and sort of our progress towards what we believe money is going to become on chain broadly. So, just to get started a little bit here, um we have sort of we have a new mission, which maybe you've heard Mark, our CEO, or Sandeep, our founder, talk about a little bit, which is to move all money on chain. This is a progression of our previous mission, which was really about building a trustless internet. We feel like we've we've gotten close enough to

that mission now that it's time to have a very practical effect on the world. And I think when we think about broadly what blockchains are meant to do, you know, maybe it's not too much of a surprise, right? That the that the actual like killer use case of blockchain turns out to be money. So, it's reasonable that we would say, "Let's get all of that money on chain, and let's do the practical and the hard and product-oriented work to make that happen." And so, what is our vision to get there? Because it's easy to for me to stand up here and just say we're going to we're going to do it, everyone's going to get excited, you know, we're going to have we're going to have speeches, we're going to talk, but practically we've got to build for this. We've got to create something that helps people to do that.

And what we've come up with here is this idea and this product that we call the open money stack. And this is a single, open, vertically integrated stack for all money movement and storage. And this isn't only on chain, by the way. If you're operating off chain as well, and there's even an on-chain component, the stack is going to work for you as well. Um Mark put out sort of our first big blog post about what this is, you know, how it works for businesses, how we're going to bring it to market. Um but today, we really think about it this way, which is if you're building any money moving or storage product today, and you're trying to bring that to market, you have all of this complexity you've got to work through in the different layers that you have to interact with. So, sort of at the base

layer, you've got these networks and settlement, you know, you're working with kind of existing TradFi players with Visa, MasterCard, you know, you're working over systems like ACH and SEPA. Um you've got infrastructure layers where you're working with like banks, and you're working with uh you know, maybe like Shop Pay if you're a little bit closer, you know, directly to the UX. You're working with like Plaid. Um you've got these financial services you have to go and integrate. If you've been here, who's integrated like Stripe before? You you're integrating some sort of an API for the actual like processing layer. And then above that, you've got a user-facing UX that you have to interface depending on what you're creating. So, maybe you're doing MoonPay, maybe you're using like an Airwallex for treasury if you're doing this internally. All of these things require different integrations, different contracts, different

relationships. And And if you're if you're close to the space and you've dealt with compliance, different compliance integration and management systems. So, our goal is to really collapse all of this down into the singular open money stack, which presents itself as an API and a consolidated dashboard. So, you can interact with this if you're a direct developer and you're creating an app, so you're making a neo bank, or if you're a treasurer and you just want to go and do direct money management online with something like a ramp. So, what does it look like today? Last week, we announced the technical preview of the open money stack, which comes with the first capable features. These include regulated cash and fiat ramps, so working with bank partners primarily in the US for doing direct ramping into crypto at sort of unbelievable prices

and speed. Um wallets, custodial wallets, soon to be non-custodial wallets, uh orchestration, which is the actual command that you'll make to say the destination, the intent-based action that pushes through those ramps, distribution, how you're actually then moving that money out and about even to other blockchains and then best in class UX. So, I don't know if you saw our tweet showing sort of the dashboard, but anyone even a knowledge worker inside of a company can come in and start to move money around right away with the OMS dashboard. Okay, what gives us the right to do any of this? Right, anyone can kind of come on stage and say, "Hey, we're going to do it." You might You might have gone to other financial institution or presentations where they'll say, "Yeah, we're going full stack, too." Um I think we've got a pretty clear vision

for what money will be in the future and how Polygon already has a position to allow us to be the one to bring the rest of that fiat on chain. And what we believe very strongly first and foremost is that money will be on chain. And so, when we think about that, it's we like to say it's not our first trillion. And we've moved about 2.6 trillion so far already on Polygon. Um our monthly volumes from last year are up over 400% um 130 billion across, you know, 30 million plus payments each month. I think last month we had the most stablecoin transactions across all chains, including BNB, including Solana, is happening directly on Polygon. So, we're really familiar with this space.

We're already moving tons of value and we're leaning into stablecoins very aggressively. Um that means that most of the world's most well-known financial companies are already on Polygon. So, if you're using Stripe, you're already moving money on Polygon. If you're uh buying into Bittle, you're doing that with BlackRock potentially on Polygon. Uh we have connectivity into Robinhood, Paxos checkout.com Flutterwave which is more or less the Stripe of Africa, right? Does all of its distributions and remittances and payouts, this is all happening on Polygon. So, what's really exciting about this is sort of the existing depth of liquidity that Polygon has brought to the world has given us access to the existing traditional finance organizations that are coming on stage or coming on chain.

Um and what does that mean underneath? Like, how are we doing that? Well, we're a truly global payments company. Most payments companies start as a domestic organization. You know, they start within their country, they get regulated, they move to one more country, they get regulated, they hang flags up while they do it. You know, Polygon's been global since day one, especially in the regions that are adopting stablecoins the most aggressively. So, in Latin America, which I think is accounts for about 55% of all stablecoin transactions, uh Polygon is actually doing 75% of that market cap. So, it's already happening countries where the like largest adoption is already occurring naturally. And that adoption isn't just wash trading, this is utility for those people. This is access to currency that

gives them stability over maybe the local currency. It's a hedge and it's also something that's being used directly for transactions. So, we're spreading that out to more and more of the of the globe and we're already there. So, where does this expand to? Today, the stablecoin market is primarily non-USD, but in the future, on-chain FX will take over. It makes a lot more sense to have a distributed system for doing that FX before you do the off-ramp or the on-ramp. And about 75% of that is already on Polygon. This is the emerging market of stablecoins. And so, when you look at, you know, where are people building outside of the US for other first-class currencies like the um the euro, you know, or uh or the peso or the the the yen or the rupee, these are all

happening on Polygon already. Okay, money needs to be inexpensive, right? It can't cost more to suddenly get this global access. You know, at Polygon, we're already pushing up against 5,000 TPS. You know, if you look at a credit card network, an average credit card network like Visa's doing somewhere between like 4,000 and 8,000 TPS. Today, we're already approaching that. And if you look internally, we're chasing after gigagas, which is 100,000 TPS. So, we'll exceed those existing limits that already are are in are present in the fiat world, and we'll exceed that And that's why the biggest uh the biggest operators on-chain already use Polygon. So, I'm sure everyone here is familiar with

Polymarket. Maybe you've already got some bets out for today. Like that bet, that action, that transaction is happening on Polygon. So, we've made tons of improvements to the chain itself here around one block finality, keeping the fees low. We haven't had a reorg since January. Um all of this is the beginning of making this network global scale to support the payments capabilities that we're building with the Open Money Stack. To be open, we have to actually be open. We have to be interoperable. So, we have three different efforts towards interoperability around Ag Layer, which people here are probably already familiar with in terms of liquidity and state, which is unified for transactions between chains that are connected in an extremely secure way.

Um Polygon CDK, which is if you want to build your own private chain and connect it in to sort of the public chain network. And then Trails, which is part of a recent acquisition of Sequence. And what Trails does is Trails is like a Google Maps for moving money around. You know where you're going. You want to know the route to get there. You want to get 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 it at the orchestration layer of the OMS. You don't have to go to some special UX. You don't have to do a special integration.

You just say where I'm headed, and then OMS takes care of that through the Trails system. Accessible to everyone. Incredibly important. We're investing heavily in this full stack future. So, it can't just be on-chain. We spent over $250 million in the last year acquiring companies that give us access to regulated money movement. So, we bought a company called Coinme that you might be familiar with. Coinme was I think the second regulated exchange in the US. Holds virtual currency licenses in 38 states with 48 state access for consumer level transactions. So, that means if you're building a consumer-facing application, you can work with Polygon, you can integrate OMS, and you have the licenses to transact with consumers for

translating their fiat into virtual currency. If anyone in here is trying to build a Revolut competitor, you're going to need something like this because you need to be able to have direct access to consumers for on-ramping, and then for um interacting with and making productive that currency. Um similarly, we required Sequence, which gave us access to Trails, and also gave us an enterprise wallet that's already heavily tested across hundreds of millions of of of of deployments. Um you're probably using it on your phone depending on what games you've you've downloaded in the background. Okay, great. All of this stuff makes a ton of sense. One more thing, the thing I think everyone sort of cares the most about right now is AI.

AI is clearly clearly going to be a step function in utility, usability, and volume that's going to happen on chain because it requires rapid settlement to be useful at scale. Today, we think about AI primarily as sort of this chatbot that you interact with on your phone or otherwise that aggregates information, but tomorrow, these are going to be autonomous systems that operate by interacting with each other. So, everything you do today that hits a system like a network router, you know, a pricing system, otherwise, they'll all be AI. And the only way you can really push value through that system and have effective um you know, kind of economics underneath it are to have a settlement system that can happen fast enough,

right? That you can have all these different pieces of of like microtransactions in between that make the ultimate transaction as efficient and usable as possible. So, what are we doing there? So, Polygon's really been investing heavily in AI. First and foremost, we're one of the most used I believe we are the most used chain on X402. We're a member of the X402 Foundation. If you go pull up X402 um charts, you'll see the whole thing is just purple. Um you know, and and in that space, what we've done is we've also put our money where our mouth is. So, if you're doing agentic transactions on Polygon, it is free. You won't pay gas to use the facilitator. And better yet, if you want to build your own facilitator because you don't think the ones that are out there are accomplishing what you want, we'll actually refund you the gas that

it costs you to run that facilitator. This is built into the chain. It was one of the recent EIPs. You just register it with us and you get that money back. So, we think development into this emerging space for agents should be free. Should be something everyone has access to, everyone can go and play around with, and everyone can build against. So, this this space just in general from a transaction standpoint, for agent developers who are operating primarily on Polygon. And then as a next step, everyone in this room is probably building with AI. You know, we're not we're not writing code anymore. We're going and opening up cursor or maybe we're just using cloud code directly.

When we're doing that, we're sort of upleveling the way that we interact and we need to be able to do that for money movement management as well cuz as fun as it is to build like an internal service for your company or like a SaaS product, building a money management system should be just as easy. So, this example is actually is actually quite honest. So, just yesterday James, one of our developer relations folks, put together a a command inside of the Polygon CLI where you can actually just tell it to create a neobank. And it takes about 20 minutes. Well, it goes off there and writes all of the code and updates, but you can have your own neobank in your pocket tomorrow with a single command. And what this is doing, what is a neobank, right?

A neobank is an easy way to on-ramp money on to chain, to store that money, to make that money productive through yield or otherwise, to easily transact with that money, and to be able to share that money with other people who are on the same system. Right? All four of these things would have taken a different system, a different interaction layer, a different uh kind of contract, another API key, another compliance integration, another UX review. Like the effort to create a neo bank is very high to the point where if you go and talk to a VC about creating a neo bank, the first thing they'll ask you is who are you working with as your partners? And so we want to break all that down. We want anyone to be able to create a neo bank and you're going to be able to do that through

agents. In the same way that as an individual, if you were going offer as a company, if you were building 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, that's Polygon and that's the open money stack. So if you want to learn more about what we're doing, how we're doing it, what we're building, come to polygon.technology, send in a form request. You can reach out to me. I'm Jay Egan at polygon.technology. Let me know what you're working on. We want to integrate the open money stack everywhere. We want to bring money on chain, all money on chain and we want to work with everyone who has the same goal that we do. Thank you.

>> [applause]