All money will be onchain
Polygon’s new vision bets on stablecoins, abstraction, and compliance as infrastructure. What that means for open money — and who they're really competing with.
Two years ago, I started the Open Money newsletter mainly because I thought there were a lot of misconceptions or misunderstandings about what "crypto" is and its main value proposition.
To help explain away or combat some of those misunderstandings, I landed on the Open Money framework for a few reasons. I've spent the past couple of years trying to articulate what, exactly, those reasons are, but for me the things that resonate most are open access, alternatives to internet monopolies of information and data control, and the sense of individual freedom.
If I'm being honest with myself, 98% of people in crypto don't really care about all of that stuff. They just want to make money on memes, alt coins, or whatever else feels like the fastest path to quick wealth. Crypto, for many, is a juiced get-rich-quick scheme.
So, talking about Open Money all of the time can feel like an uphill battle. But it's OK because every once in a while there's validation that the idea is worthwhile, and that among crypto's casinos, there still is a core group of builders interested in creating something better.
It’s in that spirit that it was really fun to read about the news this week from Polygon Labs about the launch of something they’re calling the “Open Money Stack.”
What polygon actually announced
Polygon Labs introduced a modular “payments stack” it’s branding the Open Money Stack: a framework meant to make stablecoin and tokenized deposit transfers feel like familiar payments infrastructure — but with onchain settlement underneath.
The pitch is about moving money onchain and letting it stay there, without relying on banks or card networks as default off-ramps. In their words: “all money will be onchain.” Polygon wants to be the integrated stack that moves it.
What’s in the “stack”
The Open Money Stack isn’t a single product. It’s a menu of components developers and institutions can assemble via “one simple integration.” That includes:
- blockchain rails
- onchain/offchain orchestration
- wallet infrastructure
- indexers and RPCs
- on- and off-ramps
- stablecoin interoperability
- compliance
- onchain identity
- yield mechanisms
Two components are especially relevant to Open Money readers
First, “stablecoin interoperability” is doing a lot of work. Polygon argues the UX breaks if users have to care about which stablecoin or token they’re using. So the system is designed to decouple sender and recipient: you send what you have, they receive what they want. Polygon calls this idea “foundational to open money.”
Second, it’s pushing to make “chains invisible” through interoperability (it name-checks Agglayer), so people transact “as if everyone were on the same chain, using the same wallet.”
Why polygon is making this move now
Polygon is positioning this as a shift away from the generic “smart contract platform” lane, and into payments infrastructure — boring by design, but built to move real money. The wedge is stablecoins. After years of experimentation, the goal now is packaging what they’ve learned into a modular payments stack fintechs and institutions can use.
There’s also a clear competitive dynamic: payments-focused chains and stacks are multiplying. Polygon wants to stake out the default option before someone else does.
The competition polygon is implicitly picking a fight with
DL News describes the broader backdrop as a payments land grab. It’s not just crypto-native players. Stripe is building a blockchain-based platform called Tempo. Klarna is exploring blockchain rails. Tether, Circle, Visa, BVNK, and Ripple are all expanding stablecoin-based payments systems.
Polygon’s bet is specific: “don’t build your own chain and stack; use ours (or parts of it).”
The Open Money angle
The basic take here is: “Polygon launches a thing.” But, there's more to this kind of news from an Open Money perspective (besides, of course, the name "Open Money Stack").:
Stablecoins are becoming a neutral settlement layer for global payments, and everyone wants to be the Stripe for that layer.
The next big UX challenge is abstraction. End users don’t want to think about bridges, fee tokens, or chain compatibility. The winners will be the ones who can make those layers invisible.
But there's also a deeper question: will compliance modules — which Polygon includes in its stack — be pragmatic adapters that help open rails scale, or will they quietly rebuild the same old chokepoints on top of new infrastructure?
That’s the tension at the heart of “open money” right now.
Daniel McGlynn
What to watch next
Polygon says it’s moving “from vision to execution” in the coming weeks, with big initiatives across payments, orchestration, compliance, and onchain financial primitives. The rollout will happen in phases, with early design partners onboard first.
The signals to watch are concrete integrations: who’s first, which parts of the stack they adopt, and whether “send vs. receive decoupling” can be made real without sliding back into permissioned territory.
The framing may be new but the struggle — open, composable, resilient infrastructure vs. centralized control in new clothes — is not.