In the arena of Ethereum scalability, Polygon was once regarded as a sidechain alternative. Now, the tide has turned.

Recently, this project has made a significant move. Co-founder Sandeep Nailwal called 2026 the "rebirth year" for the POL token. As soon as this statement was made, the POL price surged over 30%—the market is clearly betting on this turnaround.

What supports this judgment is real money. On January 13, Polygon Labs announced the completion of acquisitions of Coinme and Sequence, with a total investment of over $250 million. This is no small feat. Coinme operates a crypto ATM network across the United States, handling cash and crypto asset exchanges; Sequence provides on-chain infrastructure such as wallets. In simple terms, Polygon is working to connect the physical cash world to on-chain assets—the last mile of integration.

CEO Marc Boiron and Nailwal's intentions are very clear—Polygon is no longer content with just being a scaling solution but aims to become the underlying infrastructure for global payments and tokenization. Acquisitions, roadmap updates, token reshaping—these series of actions point in the same direction: from a technical approach to integrating real financial flows. Whether this aggressive strategy can truly move the market remains to be seen, depending on subsequent execution.