From infrastructure to open money: building the system that moves finance onchain

Legacy financial infrastructure is slow and unnecessarily expensive because it relies on disconnected providers. Marc Boiron (CEO, Polygon Labs) proposes a fundamental shift with the Open Money Stack.

This integrated system enables businesses to move funds from bank accounts to on-chain settlement instantly, solving real-world payment problems through programmable money that reflects the true needs of a digital world.

You began your career in law before moving into the blockchain space. What initially drew you to crypto, and how did that transition happen? How has your experience shaped the strategic direction of Polygon Labs today?

I started in corporate and securities law, so I was already looking at how capital actually moves. When I found crypto in 2016, the cost of trust in existing systems that caused delays and higher costs stood out to me. One obvious issue is that today, moving money is still slow, expensive, and full of intermediaries that don’t add much value.

By 2017, I shifted my entire practice into crypto. At that point, there wasn’t a playbook. We were helping define how token distributions, compliance, and digital assets would actually work in the real world.

That experience directly shapes how we operate at Polygon. If you want real adoption, especially from institutions, you have to build within the constraints they operate in. Compliance, governance, capital markets structure, those aren’t edge concerns; they’re the foundation. So our focus is very simple: build infrastructure that actually works for how money moves today, while making it dramatically better.

How would you define Polygon Labs' positioning in today's market? Is it primarily an infrastructure provider, a distribution and access enabler, a platform supporting merchant acceptance and enterprise payments, or a combination of all three?

Polygon is the only company in the market that offers a regulated, vertically integrated solution to move money onchain.

Infrastructure was the starting point. We’re on a path to very high throughput, and that matters. But infrastructure alone doesn’t get you adoption. Nobody wants to assemble five different vendors just to move money.

What we’re building is what we call the Open Money Stack. The idea comes straight out of how Sandeep framed it publicly: money should move as freely as information on the internet.

Right now, money movement is fragmented. You have banks, payment processors, wallets, compliance layers, all disconnected. The Open Money Stack collapses that into a single integrated system. One integration gives you wallets, fiat on and off ramps, compliance, orchestration, and settlement.

It’s not just about getting money onchain. It’s about moving it from a bank account, through onchain settlement, and actually using it, without friction.

That’s the shift. From infrastructure to an end-to-end money movement system.

Stablecoins are increasingly seen as a bridge between traditional finance and Web3. From Polygon's perspective, where are stablecoins delivering the most tangible value today?

The biggest impact today is in payments.

If you look at real usage, it’s peer to peer transfers, cross border payments, and access to the US dollar. That’s where the delta is obvious. You go from days to seconds, and from meaningful fees to fractions of a cent.

We see strong volume in everyday transaction sizes, especially in the USD 100 to USD 1,000 range. That’s important because it shows this isn’t just institutional flow or speculative activity. It’s actual usage.

But stablecoins are just the entry point. The bigger shift is when banks tokenise deposits. At that point, moving money between traditional systems and onchain networks becomes trivial. That’s when this scales from a useful tool into core financial infrastructure.

Can you share concrete examples of stablecoin use cases built on Polygon, particularly in payments, treasury management, or merchant acceptance?

There are already real, scaled examples of stablecoin use cases on Polygon across payments, treasury, and merchant acceptance.

If you zoom out for a second, what we’re actually doing with the Open Money Stack is giving financial institutions a way to run global money movement on infrastructure that behaves like the internet instead of like banking hours. It’s not one product; it’s a set of components they can plug into depending on the use case.

The most common pattern we’re seeing starts with always-on settlement. Traditional rails shut off. Stablecoin rails don’t. So PSPs and neobanks are using Polygon to fund accounts and settle merchants 24/7 with finality in a couple of seconds. No batching, no waiting for Monday morning. That alone changes how these products behave.

Then you get into cross-border business payments. Today, that usually means correspondent banking, which is slow, expensive, and opaque. With the stack, you can combine licensed fiat on and offramps with stablecoin settlement and actually stand up global B2B payment corridors without spending years building bank relationships.

A similar thing is happening with dollar banking in emerging markets. Users want USD exposure but don’t have access to US accounts. So you’re seeing neobanks use USDC-backed balances and embedded wallets to offer something that feels like a dollar account without requiring a US banking relationship at all.

Global payouts are another big one. Marketplaces, payroll companies, gig platforms all have the same headache of paying people across dozens of countries. Instead of wiring money country by country, they can initiate in USDC and let the infrastructure handle conversion, compliance, and delivery in local fiat.

On the merchant side, stablecoin acceptance is starting to look real. The key is that merchants don’t want volatility or crypto complexity. So they accept stablecoin, it settles instantly, and they receive fiat in their bank account. It just plugs into existing flows but with better economics.

Remittances follow the same pattern. Instead of stitching together state licenses and foreign banking partners, platforms can use licensed corridors, stablecoin settlement, and local offramps to move money faster and cheaper.

And then you have embedded ramps, which are less visible but critical. Any wallet, exchange, or fintech needs a way to move between fiat and crypto, and building that from scratch in the US is painful. So they embed it and let the stack handle licensing, KYC, and compliance.

When you map that back to real companies, it lines up pretty clearly. Avenia, Tazapay, Revolut, Toku, they’re all approaching this from different angles but using the same underlying idea, which is stablecoin rails for real money movement.

Stripe building directly on Polygon for payments is probably the clearest signal on the merchant side. That’s going straight into checkout flows.

Toku is a good example on payouts. They’re already running over a billion dollars a year in tokenised payroll across more than 100 countries. That’s exactly the global payouts use case, just at scale.

Polymarket shows the throughput side. Billions in USDC volume, continuous activity, no concept of closing hours. Different product, same infrastructure advantage.

And then on the treasury and asset side, BlackRock and Apollo are launching tokenised funds on Polygon showing how institutions are thinking about settlement and distribution differently.

So the pattern is pretty consistent now. This isn’t early or experimental. These are live systems, moving real money, across borders, at scale.

What ties all of it together is that stablecoins let you decouple financial services from the constraints of the traditional system. Always-on settlement, global reach without rebuilding corridors one by one, and infrastructure you can actually compose into products. The Open Money Stack is really just making that usable for institutions without them having to rebuild everything themselves.

What have been the biggest lessons learned from working with institutional partners?

They do not care about the technology for its own sake. It has to solve a real problem, and it has to do it better than what they already use.

There was a period where partnerships were more about signalling. That ended around 2023. Now it is simple. Can you reduce settlement time, lower costs, and improve capital efficiency? If the answer is no, there is no reason for them to switch.

Another key lesson is that institutions want something that just works. They are not interested in stitching together a wallet, an onramp, a stablecoin issuer, a cross-chain solution, and an FX provider. They want one partner that can deliver an integrated solution to move money globally, faster, more reliably, and at lower cost. That is exactly why Polygon acquired Coinme and Sequence, and why institutions are increasingly leaning in with us.

Compliance is the other non-negotiable. It has to be there from day one. You cannot add it later. If it does not meet their requirements upfront, the conversation does not even start.

There is growing discussion around the intersection of AI, agentic commerce, and programmable money. How do you see stablecoins fitting into this emerging landscape?

AI agents are going to transact. That’s inevitable. The question is what payment system they use. Existing rails don’t work for that. They’re too slow, too expensive, and not designed for machine-to-machine transactions.

Stablecoins fix that. They’re programmable, they settle instantly, and they work at extremely low cost. That’s why we built infrastructure around x402. It allows payments to happen directly inside web requests. An agent can request, authorise, and settle a transaction in one flow, with near-zero fees.

Once that scales, you start to get a completely new class of economic activity where software is transacting continuously. That’s not something legacy systems can support.

Looking ahead to 2030, what role do you expect Polygon to play in shaping programmable, AI-integrated financial infrastructure?

The direction is already clear. All money moves onchain over time. That’s the core thesis behind the Open Money Stack. Banks will drive a lot of this. They already see the efficiency gains, which is why they’re building internally. Our role is to provide the system that makes that transition seamless. The settlement layer, plus everything around it that makes it usable in the real world.

By 2030, the distinction between blockchain and payments won’t really exist. It’ll just be how money works. Users won’t think about chains or infrastructure. They’ll just use applications, and those applications will move money instantly, globally, and programmatically in the background.
That’s what we’re building toward.

About author

Marc Boiron serves as the CEO of Polygon Labs, a blockchain payments company building compliant financial infrastructure with the mission to move all money onchain. Polygon Labs develops the Open Money Stack, an open, integrated stack of services that makes it easy for any institution to move money onchain, using various infrastructure, including the Polygon chain, wallet, interoperability, and on- and off-ramp infrastructure.

In this role, Marc works closely with financial institutions, enterprises, and crypto-native companies to accelerate money movement onchain. Before stepping into the CEO role, Marc was Chief Legal Officer at Polygon Labs, where he guided the organisation through complex legal and regulatory landscapes, solidifying its position as a world-leading blockchain platform.

About Polygon Labs

Polygon Labs is a global blockchain payments company building and operating infrastructure to move money instantly, reliably, and at internet scale, with the mission to move all money onchain. It is building the Polygon Open Money Stack, an open and integrated stack of services and technologies to instantly and reliably move money anywhere, and put it to work. Its infrastructure has facilitated trillions of dollars in onchain value transfer and supported millions of transactions daily for some of the globe's largest banks, fintechs, enterprises, and consumer applications.