Polygon Is Building the Future of On-Chain Payments and Privacy Stablecoins

Welcome to Fintech TV.

I'm coming to you live from consensus Miami in 2026 Polygon labs transition from being an scaling solution to a global leader in blockchain payments and Polygons open money stack helps with payments by bringing together different vendors for wallets compliance as well as bridges.

Now Polygon has also launched private stablecoin payments which allow.

Companies to send USDC or USDT without the sender recipient amount being visible on the public ledger.

Well, joining me here at Consensus 2026 is Jamal Raees, the head of US payments for Polygon Labs.

Great to have you here.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me.

Well, we're live here in Miami, so I do want to get your take on what you're hearing on the ground here.

A lot of activity, uh, definitely a lot about stable points.

People are talking about regulated fintechs, which is great.

Uh, feels a lot different than the couple last couple of years I've been here.

Yeah, absolutely.

Given where we are in the cycle right now, there's a lot going on.

It's really interesting because there are policymakers that are here in addition to builders, innovators, and of course Tradf.

So I do want to get your take on the pivot that's happening at Polygon.

So where do you stand right now?

Well, we believe that all chains are going to specialize and verticalize into particular use cases or eco.

Systems or whatever.

We looked at our traction.

We looked at our data, and we noticed that people use Polygon for payments more than anything else.

We have a tremendous amount of distribution internationally.

We have a ton of low level payments.

Individuals are using our chain for P2P.

We realized that we should double down into that and respond to our consumers.

We have pivoted entirely to becoming a payments company.

We're focused on building this thing called the Open Money stack.

Our mission is to move all money on chain.

And of course building on what you just said, I do want to get your take on regulation in particular with legislation and expectations for the Clarity Act.

So what do you expect to see in 2026, especially because it's a midterm election year?

Yeah, I think a lot of movement is going to happen.

The market is demanding clarity, and that's not a pun.

The market wants to know what they can do safely and compliantly.

Safety and soundness is.

A huge point for users across the board.

We need to be able to know our assets are safe.

We need to be able to move those assets in a way that's compliant, and those rules and regulations are there for a reason.

They're just a little old and need to be updated to some of our new technology, but those practices are very important to us, and we want to see a lot of those implemented into the blockchain.

Yeah, and building on what you just said, I do want to get your take on Ethereum, especially when it comes to global payments here.

So how is Ethereum enabling global payments?

Ethereum is great.

It's a robust developer community.

A lot of people build on it.

The technology is great.

The architecture is sound, but it's just not optimized for payments, and I think that's the issue.

That's why we built Polygon as an Ethereum-based layer 2.

We focused entirely on the things that people care most with value transfer, which is cheap fees, very, very programmatic settlement, instant global access.

And for people who may not be as familiar with Polygon's open money stack, tell us what this is.

Well, it started with the chain, so Polygon is obviously one of the most adopted, widely used networks in the world.

It's got a lot of traction with stablecoins.

We're seeing a lot of stable, a big chunk of the stablecoin transfer market.

We're seeing a high volume of non-USD stablecoins issued.

Polygon as well.

It started with that.

We realized that that's the base layer though.

In order to move more money on chain, we need to build the regulated ramps that these large institutions, these large payment companies, non-crypto native folks need to be able to use to move money onto the chain.

So we started with our acquisition of a company called CoinMe.

Coinme was a licensed money transmitter in the US.

They had money transmission licenses.

They could operate in 48 US.

States and they were able to use some of their banking infrastructure to move money off the chain onto the chain.

So on-ramps and off-ramps.

That was the first step for us to be able to build this open money stack because we need to import money onto the chain so money can be free and unlocked.

The second thing is what do we do with the money when it's on the chain?

We need to have interoperability and we need to have wallets, and that's where our acquisition of Sequence came in, which is a company that built some of the best.

Class wallets out there and also has this product called Trails which is this one click one API call interoperability solution across any chain across any asset.

For us it's really important that we adopt or we recognize that all these different networks have different values, including blockchain networks, including Visa, including SWIFT, including whatever, and we want to support whatever assets users want to or sorry, whatever ecosystems users want to move their assets on.

And finally, before I let you go, I do want to hear your take on uh stablecoin payments, especially when it comes to privacy.

So tell us what's happening.

Yeah, I mean, I think in the beginning you saw more retail driven or more, you know, less sensitive use cases with stablecoins as the clarity has come in on the regulatory side, as the technology has matured, as people have started using and adopting stablecoins more.

Large institutions are not going to enter the space unless they know that their sensitive data is not going to be leaked, right?

So the auditability and the trail that the block.

And creates is amazing, but it is only amazing if it protects the data and the soundness of the transaction itself.

So for us it was incredibly important for us to integrate privacy at the base layer all the way up to the top to make sure transactions are broadcasted privately, that they are held in private balances, and that any transfers are private also on top of that.

Well, Jamal, great having you on the show here at Consensus 2026.

So I appreciate your time.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you.