Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal said Polygon is preparing to deploy a permissionless burn contract that would allow anyone to permanently destroy 100 million POL. According to ChainCatcher, the contract is already live on testnet and will be deployed to mainnet after final approval from the security committee.

The first burn would destroy 100 million POL at once, after which community members could trigger burns each quarter. Polygon documentation says base fees are determined by the network and are burned, while Nailwal said each base fee injects POL into the collector. Based on the figures provided, about 21 million POL would remain in the collector after the initial burn.

Nailwal said the burn represents about 1% of POL's initial 10 billion supply, or roughly 0.93% of the approximately 10.716 billion total supply shown by Blockscout. He added that the burn will not impose a hard cap on POL, which will continue to be issued, with an annualized inflation rate of about 2% after June 2025. Nailwal also said POL has been in deflation since January 2026 and cited data from his ChatGPT analyst showing Polygon's 2026 revenue at $24.5 million, above Arbitrum's $8.41 million and Near's $5.6 million.