Polygon PoS Hits Record Demand as 3M POL Burned in Single Day

• Polygon PoS burned 3 million POL in a single day as daily network activity hit record levels.
• The network raised gas limits and is preparing a hard fork to manage rising fees from persistent block saturation.

Polygon’s PoS chain reached a new usage milestone earlier this month, recording its highest-ever daily fee burn of 3 million POL tokens. The surge in on-chain activity pushed the network into consistent block saturation, triggering higher gas costs for users due to the EIP-1559 base fee mechanism.

The record burn represents 0.03% of POL’s total supply and follows several consecutive days of elevated network demand. As shared by the Polygon Foundation, the network has now entered a new phase of sustained fee generation, described by its CEO as an “S-curve moment.”

To manage increasing usage, Polygon has implemented changes aimed at improving capacity. The team increased the gas limit from 60 million to 65 million, expanding throughput by 8-10%. Additionally, developers are preparing a hard fork to raise the EIP-1559 utilization target above the current 50%, allowing blocks to carry more data before base fees rise further.

Polygon Staking Locks 3.6B POL

The network’s current structure has shown pressure from increased demand, leading to fee spikes for end users. Polygon’s EIP-1559 model adjusts the base fee upward when blocks remain over 50% full, which has now become persistent due to sustained transaction activity.

User WEB3M commented,

According to the Polygon Foundation, 3.6 billion POL remain staked across the network. With more tokens locked and 1 million POL burned daily, the circulating supply continues to tighten. 

As a result, network usage has grown in tandem with ecosystem adoption. USDC transfers recently reached $1.08 billion across over 7 million wallets. This growing utility, as noted by the CNF, contributes to the fee generation that powers the token burn. Applications like Revolut and Avenut are also supporting the growth in stablecoin settlement volume, which now stands at $780 billion.

Meanwhile, the daily burn rate of POL now stands at 1 million tokens, which is more than twice the 1.5% annual issuance distributed as staking rewards. If sustained, this pace would eliminate roughly 3.5% of POL’s supply by the end of the year.

As per analysts, Polygon’s revenue on a single day exceeded Aptos’s full-year earnings in 2025. On January 5, Polygon earned $380,000 in fees, compared to Aptos’s $270,000 for the year. This increase in revenue coincides with the network’s shift toward a deflationary token model.

Moreover, as we earlier reported, CEO Sandeep Nailwal described 2026 as the year of Polygon’s token “resurrection,” pointing to the deflationary shift and scaling roadmap. The current phase of growth also includes near-term goals to increase throughput to over 5,000 transactions per second, with medium-term scaling addressed through the ongoing “Gigagas” roadmap.

Polygon (POL) has been bullish in the last 24 hours, with the price swaying between $0.126 and $0.129. At press time, bulls were still in control, with the POL price trading at $0.1271, a 1.03% rise from the support level.