Investing $250 million to acquire two companies, Polygon Labs launches a challenge to Stripe in the payment war

Blockchain development giant Polygon Labs recently announced the acquisition of U.S. crypto startup Coinme and Sequence for a total price exceeding $250 million.

This acquisition marks a key move following Polygon’s launch of its “Open Currency Stack” strategy, aiming to obtain critical U.S. money transfer licenses, compliance infrastructure, and smart wallet technology, thereby building a global stablecoin payment network capable of competing directly with payment giant Stripe. Against the backdrop of traditional financial giants like Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard heavily investing in the stablecoin track, this move by Polygon signifies that blockchain-native forces are accelerating their push into the trillion-dollar payments market through mergers and acquisitions.

One transaction, dual strategy: A full analysis of Polygon’s $250 million acquisition

At the start of the new year, a disruptive merger and acquisition shook the industry. Polygon Labs, the core development company behind Ethereum scaling solution Polygon, officially announced the completion of its acquisition of two U.S. crypto startups—Coinme and Sequence—with a total deal value exceeding $250 million. Although Polygon Labs declined to disclose specific acquisition amounts and payment methods (cash, equity, or hybrid), the strategic intent behind this heavyweight deal is crystal clear: to pave a “highway” for Polygon’s full entry into the stablecoin payment space, combining compliance, usability, and robust infrastructure.

The timing of this acquisition is particularly clever, occurring just five days after Polygon unveiled its grand “Open Currency Stack” vision. This system aims to unify liquidity, payment processing, and regulatory control for global stablecoin transactions, painting a blockchain-based future financial blueprint. The addition of Coinme and Sequence is crucial in turning this blueprint into a practical reality. Coinme, founded in 2014, is a well-established compliant service provider and one of the earliest licensed digital currency exchanges in the U.S., holding money transfer licenses across 48 states and a mature compliance framework. This means that post-acquisition, Polygon will gain a legal gateway to conduct large-scale fiat and crypto exchanges in the U.S., solving a major “entry” problem faced by many blockchain projects.

Meanwhile, Canadian-based Sequence brings future-oriented “exit” technology and user experience. Formerly Horizon, a blockchain gaming development company, Sequence offers a modular crypto infrastructure, especially its smart wallet technology and tools, which greatly simplify cross-network crypto payments, allowing users to perform one-click operations without understanding underlying technical details. In Polygon’s official announcement, it states that while stablecoins already serve as a currency function, they lack the infrastructure to connect with existing financial systems. Now, Coinme provides compliant fiat channels and over a million existing users, while Sequence offers wallet infrastructure and cross-chain transaction capabilities. Together, they form a complete closed-loop from compliant entry points to seamless payments and on-chain settlement.

Targeting Stripe: Polygon’s “reverse” competitive strategy in payments

Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron and Polygon Foundation founder Sandeep Nailwal are open about the ultimate goal of this acquisition. They explicitly state that it is to position Polygon as a direct competitor to payment giant Stripe. Nailwal vividly describes this strategy as “reverse Stripe.”

To understand this “reverse” strategy, we need to compare their growth paths. Stripe, as a traditional fintech leader, grew “from outside in”: after solidifying its dominant position as an internet enterprise payment gateway, it has made a series of major acquisitions (such as the $1.1 billion purchase of stablecoin startup Bridge in 2024 and the 2025 acquisition of Valora team), penetrating into blockchain and stablecoin fields, building its own crypto payment infrastructure, such as launching an “open issuance” platform that allows enterprises to quickly issue stablecoins. Essentially, Stripe leverages its vast existing merchant network and brand influence to add blockchain capabilities as a new service.

In contrast, Polygon’s path is “from inside out.” It is an established blockchain ecosystem built on Ethereum, having processed over $2.2 trillion in on-chain value transfers and holding a stablecoin reserve of $330 million. Its network already supports payment services for Stripe, Revolut, Flutterwave, and even the world’s largest prediction market Polymarket. Polygon’s shortcoming lies in its lack of direct, compliant connections to the real-world financial system and simplified experiences for vast non-crypto-native users. By acquiring Coinme and Sequence, Polygon is rapidly strengthening these external capabilities, aiming to expand from its strong blockchain “inner strength” into a fully independent, comprehensive, and traditional payment network–comparable open financial stack.

Polygon’s Strategic Value of Acquiring Coinme and Sequence

Total acquisition amount: Over $250 million.

Coinme core assets: U.S. money transfer licenses in 48 states, compliant fiat on/off ramps, over 1 million existing users.

Sequence core assets: Modular smart wallet infrastructure, one-click cross-chain transaction tech, developer-friendly platform.

Synergies: Coinme provides compliant entry points; Sequence optimizes payment exit; combined with Polygon mainnet to form a complete “fiat–stablecoin–on-chain settlement” closed loop.

Benchmark target: Directly challenge Stripe’s dominance in crypto payments.

Thus, the essence of “reverse Stripe” is that Polygon is not mimicking Stripe’s outside-in approach but leveraging its already built massive on-chain ecosystem to open the door to the traditional world through strategic acquisitions, thereby defining a new blockchain-native payment standard. This competition is a face-off between old financial tech giants and new blockchain-native giants over the future of payment discourse.

Industry giants clash: The stablecoin payment war under Visa and Mastercard’s involvement

Polygon’s rivalry with Stripe is just a microcosm of the current “battle of hundreds” in the stablecoin payment field. A broader picture shows that the traditional rulers of global payment networks—Visa and Mastercard—have also fully entered, making the competitive landscape unprecedentedly complex and fierce. These giants, with billions of users, millions of merchants, and unmatched brand trust, are pushing stablecoin payments from crypto “experiments” into mainstream financial “standard configurations.”

Visa officially launched USDC settlement in the U.S. in December 2025, allowing partner financial institutions to use USD Coin for cross-border transactions on the Visa network. By November 2025, its monthly stablecoin settlement volume exceeded $3.5 billion on an annualized basis. Visa also initiated pilot projects to enable real-time USD stablecoin payments via Visa Direct, with plans for full rollout in late 2026. Visa even boldly predicts that by 2030, the total stablecoin market size could reach $4 trillion.

Mastercard, not to be outdone, announced its end-to-end stablecoin transaction capabilities in April 2025, directly competing with Visa. Faced with this situation, Polygon’s short-term strategy appears pragmatic and shrewd. CEO Marc Boiron states that their recent strategy will focus on cooperation with existing payment networks like Visa and Mastercard rather than simple replacement. It’s a “integrate and enhance” approach: using Polygon’s open currency stack to provide these traditional card organizations with more efficient, cheaper blockchain settlement layers, while leveraging their global networks to quickly reach end-users and merchants.

This creates an interesting “co-opetition” network: Stripe may be building its own blockchain infrastructure while possibly also using Polygon’s network; Visa and Mastercard are advancing their stablecoin projects while collaborating with blockchain infrastructure providers like Polygon; and Polygon, through acquisitions, is strengthening its capabilities to compete with Stripe and coexist with Visa and Mastercard. The outcome of this chaos may not be a single winner but the emergence of a multi-layered, interconnected, competitive yet collaborative new generation global payment ecosystem.

What is Polygon? The evolution from Ethereum sidechain to Web3 infrastructure giant

For newcomers to crypto, understanding Polygon’s ambitions in this acquisition requires a brief look at who it is and how it reached today. What is Polygon? In short, it started as a “sidechain” and “scaling” solution aimed at solving Ethereum network congestion and high fees, but has now evolved into a vast interconnected blockchain network collection called “Ethereum’s Internet of Blockchains.”

Polygon’s core narrative begins with its native token MATIC. Early on, users staked MATIC to secure the network and pay transaction fees. As its tech stack expanded from a single PoS sidechain to include multiple scaling solutions (zkRollups, Optimistic Rollups), its ecosystem and token applications grew rapidly. MATIC became not only a gas fee token but also the cornerstone of governance, staking, and security for the entire Polygon ecosystem. Its roadmap clearly shows a progression from solving scalability issues, building a full suite of application chains, to now venturing into payments and currency markets.

This $250 million acquisition marks a milestone in Polygon’s roadmap entering a new phase. It indicates that Polygon’s strategic focus has shifted from merely being an Ethereum scaling tech provider to becoming an ecosystem leader building the next-generation open financial infrastructure. It possesses not only technology but also a developer community, on-chain applications, and a large on-chain asset base accumulated over years. These form the foundation for its challenge to Stripe and are part of what makes Coinme and Sequence eager to join. Polygon is demonstrating through action that a successful blockchain project must transcend technical barriers to solve real, large-scale, commercially valuable problems—like global payments.

Future outlook: How the open currency stack will reshape the trillion-dollar payments market

Looking ahead, the long-term impact of Polygon’s acquisition may far surpass the simple company deal. It signals the rapid arrival of an era of “open currency stacks” based on blockchain technology, which will profoundly reshape the trillion-dollar global payments market.

First, competition will drive innovation and reduce costs. Whether it’s Stripe’s “outside-in,” Polygon’s “inside-out,” or Visa and Mastercard’s “centralized integration,” fierce competition among these giants will generate more stable, faster, and cheaper payment products. Ultimately, global enterprises and consumers will benefit from better cross-border payment and settlement experiences than current SWIFT or credit card networks.

Second, compliance and innovation will find new balances. Coinme’s multi-state licenses in the U.S. set a benchmark: large-scale application requires deep integration with regulatory frameworks. Polygon’s approach shows that blockchain projects can proactively embrace compliance through strategic acquisitions rather than evade it. This may lead more crypto projects to adopt similar strategies, accelerating integration with mainstream finance.

However, challenges remain significant. The biggest issue is interoperability among different systems. How will Polygon’s stack, Stripe’s platform, Visa’s network, and banks’ proprietary systems connect seamlessly and securely? This requires extensive standard-setting and technical collaboration. Additionally, simplifying user experience remains critical—whether Sequence’s tech can enable users unfamiliar with crypto to pay with stablecoins as easily as using Alipay will determine its market penetration ceiling.

For investors and industry watchers, Polygon’s move is a high-risk gamble but also a potential strategic leap. Its value will increasingly depend on its ability to penetrate the massive global payments market and capture a significant share. Over the next one to two years, close attention should be paid to the adoption data of its “open currency stack,” collaborations with major payment networks, and killer payment applications built on this stack. This payment war initiated by Polygon has just begun, and the best is yet to come.