Polygon leads in stablecoin volume as interoperability competition grows

Polygon dominates the stablecoin settlement market with $2.4 trillion in total transfer volume. This volume reached a monthly milestone of $298 billion in February 2026. The network handles 12 million USDC transactions per day, a figure that places it above the next closest layer-2 network which processes fewer than 3 million daily. USDC supply on the network hit $1.43 billion in February 2026, doubling the $777 million recorded at the start of 2025. In mid-February, Polygon generated $313,000 in daily revenue, which surpassed Ethereum’s $264,000.

The AggLayer unifies liquidity, user experience, and states across multiple blockchains through a unified bridge and the Polygon Chain Development Kit (CDK). This technology allows for proof aggregation and fast optimistic confirmation. AltLayer acts as an implementation provider for the Polygon CDK to accelerate the deployment of zk-powered L2 chains on Ethereum. These chains tap into unified blockspace and Ethereum liquidity. However, Polygon’s network throughput can be lower than competitors like Optimism or ZKsync.

The scaling of the infrastructure remains ahead of usage. Polygon increased its gas limit to 110 million in February 2026. This capacity allows the network to handle 224 million transactions per day. Enterprise users like Revolut moved $810 million through Polygon in 2025, while Tazapay processed $687 million on the network in January 2026. Stripe processed over $75 million in payments on the network.

Interoperability hurdles and state synchronization

The industry faces fragmentation as liquidity scatters across various platforms. Polygon addresses this through the AggLayer, while Optimism uses the Superchain and ZKsync utilizes the Elastic Chain. The Optimism Superchain consists of over 25 chains with a total value locked of $20.4 billion. ZKsync’s Elastic Chain maintains a total value locked of approximately $1.14 billion.

Near faces specific difficulties with its State Sync mechanism. Validators currently face a 70 hour computational workload to retrieve state parts for large shards due to hundreds of millions of random lookups in RocksDB. This inefficiency impacts validator performance. The network plans to move toward a decentralized solution inspired by the Bittorrent protocol to alleviate the load on validator nodes.

How will the network maintain security if the short-term reliance on centralized AWS S3 storage for state parts continues?

The difficulty of maintaining consistency between primary and secondary chains creates a risk of deposit fraud. A sequencer might falsely inform a primary chain about a deposit on a secondary chain that does not exist. zkLink Origin uses a light oracle network consisting of service providers like LayerZero and Chainlink to transfer sync hashes. This process allows the primary contract to compare sync hashes from secondary chains to prevent fraud.

Network performance disparities and liquidity shifts

Polygon’s ecosystem shows signs of strain in certain metrics. Total value locked in Polygon’s DeFi ecosystem fell to $842 million, which remains much lower than Base at $3.41 billion or Arbitrum at $3 billion. Weekly trading volume on Polygon’s DeX fell 20% to $1.2 billion, while Base handled $10.7 billion. Active addresses on Polygon dropped 12% over a 30 day period to 5.96 million. This compares to 21.7 million active addresses on Base.

Liquidity providers provide market depth, but declining liquidity causes slippage and volatility. The exodus of liquidity providers contributes to the drop in total value locked. Polygon remains a unique ecosystem because it combines PoS sidechains, Plasma, and both optimistic and zk-rollups. This variety lets developers choose specific tools for their applications. You should monitor if the Open Money Stack integration can reverse the decline in engagement. The Open Money Stack provides a single integration for stablecoin payments using existing systems.