Polygon’s POL token recorded the largest 24-hour crypto price gain at 16.59%, driven by the Open Money Stack launch, a potential $100-125M Coinme acquisition, and unprecedented daily burn rates reaching one million tokens.
Polygon‘s POL token is in the midst of a price surge propelled by a shift in company strategy, a rumored acquisition, and a record high daily burn rate to start 2026.
As of Jan. 9 and the time of this article’s publication, POL POL $0.18 24h volatility: 16.0% Market cap: $1.85 B Vol. 24h: $539.73 M is trading at $0.1558. This puts it up 16.59% over the last 24 hours, with an intraday price high of $0.1584. Trading volume for this period reached nearly $312 million, up 167% overnight.
This movement marks the single largest price increase among cryptocurrencies over the past 24 hours.
Polygon marked the largest positive price movement for the 24-hour period beginning on Jan. 8 | Source: CoinMarketCap
Polygon Shifts to an End-to-End Strategy
The movement has largely been attributed to a major shift in company strategy. As Coinspeaker reported on Jan. 8, Polygon announced “Open Money Stack,” a modular platform designed to provide seamless, cross-chain transactions between fiat and cryptocurrencies in an open, end-to-end framework.
The firm is also rumored to have inked a deal to acquire cryptocurrency ATM operator Coinme. According to unnamed sources who spoke with CoinDesk under the condition of anonymity, a deal in the range of $100 million to $125 million is close to being closed.
Given the firm’s rapidly expanding service portfolio and the breadth of its technology suite, the acquisition of Coinme and its reported 6,000+ ATMs could make Polygon a full stack banking service bridging the traditional finance and digital assets worlds.
Polygon is close to acquiring Coinme, one of the oldest U.S. bitcoin ATM operators, in a deal valued at $100M-$125M, marking the Ethereum scaling network's move into offline crypto access and retail adoption infrastructure.
— Max Avery (@realMaxAvery) January 9, 2026
POL’s overnight rally could set a new resistance target as the token’s upward momentum is shored up by record high burn rates. As the firm’s CEO, Sandeep Nailwal, said in a Jan. 5 post on Twitter, “Polygon chain is having its S curve moment on the fees generated.”
In the time since, about one million POL per day has been burned on fees generated, with around 3.5% of POL’s total supply expected to burn in 2026. According to Nailwal, this makes the token “massively deflationary.”
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