Polymarket’s 15-minute market, which allows users to bet on short-term “up or down” price movements for major cryptocurrencies, has led to an increase in activity on the Polygon blockchain, which incurs significant network costs.
These markets are known to resolve every 15 minutes based on Chainlink price feeds, making them fast-moving and attractive to high-frequency traders and arbitrage strategies.
According to Castle LabsPolygon has experienced explosive growth this year. Since the beginning of the year, the chain has reportedly generated more than $1.7 million in fees and burned more than 12.5 million POLs, or more than $1.5 million.
Why will Polygon’s compensation increase in 2026?
The main reason for the increase in fees Polygon is generating is related to a move Polymarket made where it turned on fees for its 15-minute markets a week ago because reported by Cryptopolitan.
According to a report from Castle Labs, Polymarket has earned more than $100,000 in fees for Polygon in the last 24 hours.
The fees Polymarket charged for its 15-minute market also caused gas prices to rise; However, this was achieved with the Dandeli hard fork that went live on block 81.424.000, increasing the chain’s throughput to 20 mgas/s.
The larger chain capacity is expected to ensure that the network can absorb the strong increase in activity with more predictable gas prices. An analysis of P2P volumes across chains found that Polygon is now leading the micropayments category, with 37% of the market share.
However, the share is still converging towards Ethereum for the other categories, including small, medium and large payments. Building on the current hype, Polygon plans to partner with providers such as Revolut, Stripe, Flutterwave, Decard and more to drive stablecoin transactions and on-chain economic activity.
This is reportedly all part of Polygon’s Open Money Stack, which focuses on more on-chain applications of money and easier spending, so off-ramping will be an option rather than a necessity.
As the chain continues to evolve and develop use cases outside of crypto, and the Polygon thesis plays out with Agglayer and Open Money Stack, more sources like Polymarket are expected to contribute even more to the chain’s growth, pushing it back from the brink of oblivion.
What is Polygon’s Open Money Stack?
According to a long article, CEO of Polygon Lab, Marc Boiron posted on X, Polygon’s Open Money Stack is a comprehensive ecosystem designed to help transition the world’s financial system completely onchain.
In the article, the authors point out that even though the Internet has opened up information, monetary transactions are still largely limited by geography, time and infrastructure. They claim that Polygon wants to change that by making the movement of money “borderless and programmatic,” shifting from a slow, expensive legacy system to one that is faster and more reliable.
The Open Money Stack is an integrated set of technologies designed to make the blockchain invisible to the end user and will feature high-quality blockchain rails, simplified on- and off-ramps combined with cross-chain interoperability, good wallet infrastructure, and onchain utilities such as high-yield capabilities.
The timeline for the total migration could be ten years, but Polygon is confident that the protocols that will define this category will be established within the next three years.
In the coming weeks, Polygon Labs plans to launch several initiatives that will focus on payments, compliance, and onchain money primitives to move execution from vision to execution.