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Polygon Goes Multichain in Its Push to Lead Payments

October 29, 2026

Video Transcript

JD Durkin: Is the chief product officer at Polygon Labs. John Egan, good to see you here today.

John Egan: Hey, thanks for having me.

JD Durkin: Talk to me all about the Open Money Stack. First of all, for people who may have heard of it but don’t exactly know what it is, what is the Open Money Stack, and what does it mean that Polygon is more and more becoming a payments company in this environment?

John Egan: For sure. So Polygon’s Open Money Stack is global access to money movement and money storage, on all different rails and in all different currencies. So storing and moving on-chain, as well as through traditional finance rails, including SWIFT and ACH and anything else that you could think of.

JD Durkin: You just expanded the Open Money Stack to Solana. Help us better understand what that actually means. What does that unlock for your underlying business right now?

John Egan: Yeah. So this is really exciting for us. You know, Polygon and Solana have had a history that hasn’t always been the most positive, you know, especially in the Twitterverse. But now, here with the Open Money Stack, we’re trying to enable Solana users to have direct access to the global banking network. So a lot of the customers who are coming on to the Open Money Stack are already using Solana for their digital dollars and for stablecoins. And with the Open Money Stack, they can now translate those digital dollars and stablecoins into US dollars and into bank accounts globally.

JD Durkin: Yep. How should we think about an announcement like this at the same time that more and more so-called TradFi firms, traditional finance, kind of legacy names, are increasingly investing in and moving closer to a world of digital banking?

John Egan: Yeah. I mean, we should think about this as the direction that the industry is going. Polygon’s big advantage is we’re about as close to the metal as you can get. We’ve got a blockchain of our own. We have direct ownership of regulated rails through our recent acquisition of Coinme. And now we’re going multichain. Recently, we also announced Tron. And so Tron, plus Solana, plus Polygon, plus Ethereum, plus every other network that you could need, really puts Polygon in the front of this race and positions us to be kind of the fastest-growing payments company out there.

JD Durkin: First of all, I don’t know how you remember all that. That’s very impressive. Talk to me specifically about the Tron component. How did that come together, and what should people know?

John Egan: It’s very similar. So with Tron, we have a large group of users globally, you know, who are operating on Tron and moving stablecoins, just like we do on Solana. And they also now benefit from connectivity into banking networks, and into non-custodial and custodial wallets, through the Open Money Stack.

JD Durkin: What part of the overall digital banking conversation do you think we are still not quite getting right, or are not quite talking enough about, right now?

John Egan: I think a lot of the world is still on, like, day one of the translation from stablecoins into dollars. This is something we talk about as if it’s a solved problem. We say, okay, a dollar stablecoin is a dollar. It’s not true, right? You’ve actually got to translate in and out. And when you do that, you lose money in the exchanges where you go and do that. The existing financial partners you’ll go and work with, most of them are operating at arm’s length from the actual liquidity partners that are making that translation. So with Polygon, you get to have a first party that you work with, which means we can push the costs down and we can increase the speed.

JD Durkin: If you and I were to have a conversation one year from today, October 29th of 2027, how will we be talking about the way that money is moving 12 months from now, versus where we are today?

John Egan: We’ll be talking about significantly more of that money staying on-chain. So today, a lot of this looks like a stablecoin sandwich, right? So you’re moving money from point to point. You’re coming in. Maybe you have a network preference, you have a coin preference, and you’re coming right back out, because you’re doing a remittance or you’re doing a payout. And what you’re really solving is the cross-border problem.

You know, a year from now, more and more of those recipients will actually want to hold those digital dollars. And they’ll want to hold them both for the opportunities of making them productive, things like yield, but they’ll also want to hold them just for personal usage, for payments, for cross-border payments, and in the future, agentic payments. We’re going to see agent usage of these coins skyrocket over the next year. Think about how humans collect things to pay for them inside of a cart, and make decisions at a vendor level on collections of purchases. Agents don’t, right? Agents make atomic purchases. So the volume of payments we’re going to see is only going to skyrocket. It’s going to skyrocket across these networks. So it’s more important for us to be agnostic.

JD Durkin: It sounds like a really cool time to be working and specializing in this space. Really grateful for your time. Thanks for being here today.

John Egan: Sure. Thanks for having me.

JD Durkin: John Egan, chief product officer at Polygon Labs.

Polygon is expanding its Open Money Stack across more blockchains as it builds out its role as a payments company and traditional finance firms move closer to digital banking. JD Durkin speaks with John Egan, chief product officer at Polygon Labs, about the platform’s expansion to Solana and Tron, the hidden costs of converting stablecoins into dollars, and how money movement could change over the next year.

Egan describes the Open Money Stack as global access to storing and moving money across rails and currencies, both on-chain and through traditional systems like SWIFT and ACH. He says the expansion to Solana gives Solana users, many of whom already use the network for stablecoins, direct access to the global banking network, allowing them to convert digital dollars into US dollars and bank accounts worldwide, despite the two communities not always having the friendliest history online. The expansion to Tron offers similar connectivity to banking networks and wallets. Egan says Polygon’s advantages include its own blockchain, regulated rails through its acquisition of Coinme, and a multichain approach that he believes positions it to be the fastest-growing payments company.

Egan says much of the world is still on day one of converting stablecoins into dollars, arguing that users lose money when they translate in and out because many financial partners operate at arm’s length from liquidity providers, while Polygon can serve as a first party to lower costs and increase speed. Looking a year ahead, he expects more money to stay on-chain rather than moving through what he calls a stablecoin sandwich, with recipients holding digital dollars for yield, everyday payments, cross-border payments, and agentic payments. He adds that AI agents, which make individual atomic purchases, could cause payment volumes to skyrocket across networks.

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