Popcorn 🍿👀

. @0xPolygon adjusted volumes for payments apps grew steadily — from ~$500M per month in early 2025 to over $2B in January 2026. The key drivers of this growth were @aveniaio, @rio_latam, @Revolut, and @blindpay. Particularly notable is the emergence of @tazapay in December–January with a share of over $600M, signaling the active involvement of new major players. Check out our joint report with @AlliumLabs 👇

🔥 UPDATE: Polygon recorded 493M stablecoin transactions in February, marking a new all-time high.

The chain everyone wrote off just had its best month ever. "Polygon is a narrative violation chain. $500 million of stablecoin transactions in February. New all-time high." While the market debates which L1 would win the chain wars, Polygon pivoted to payments, stablecoin settlements through Revolut and high-throughput, low-cost execution. The kind of volume that doesn't generate Twitter hype but does generate fee revenue.

@0xPolygon Building the future of global payments, together @0xPolygon! 🤝

@former_earther @MilkRoadAI 60 sec tokens will be god IF global system collapse and the only thing you have to help you to survive is just a small solar panel and your phone and that local model. Expect the better & plan for worse.

@MilkRoadAI Why would I care about a local model that pumps out 60 tokens a second when the world has ubiquitous high speed 5G/6G and server side models that can pump out 1000s of tokens a second

@ErnestoCettour Ese análisis no importa pq si el % de desempleo es 3 de 10 o mas el mundo no puede sostener el modelo actual y el sistema colapsa. La crisis gran depresion de us solo fue el 25%… Por más que seas un genio y sos 1 de esos 3 estás al horno igual o van a codear desde un búnker?

Hay gente ((muy inteligente)) apostando una guita ridícula a que "el costo de crear software se va a cero". ¿Y si tienen razón? No voy a debatir la tesis. Voy a hacer algo más interesante: tomarles la palabra. Si realmente cualquier Raúl va a codear su propia app, hay una pregunta que nadie se está haciendo. ¿Quién arregla todo eso cuando se rompa? Se viene una ola histórica de: 1. Apps sin arquitectura que se caen justo cuando la empresa más las necesita. 2. Bases de datos sin índices que colapsan con 50 usuarios concurrentes. 3. Monolitos de 18 mil líneas que nadie puede mantener ni debuggear. 4. Empresas que dependen de herramientas que no entienden. Hoy escribí sobre la oportunidad de negocio que se esconde detrás del hype del vibe coding. No es sobre aprender a vibecodear. Se trata de pensar qué hacés vos con todo lo que se viene :) Te lo explico acá: ernestocettour.com/p/lo-que-viene…

@santisiri imo esperar unos mes a la m5, 4x ai y la m4 tiene que bajar además

tentadisimo de meter una mac mini.

This is quite an impressive experiment. Vibe-coding the entire 2030 roadmap within weeks. Obviously such a thing built in two weeks without even having the EIPs has massive caveats: almost certainly lots of critical bugs, and probably in some cases "stub" versions of a thing where the AI did not even try making the full version. But six months ago, even this was far outside the realm of possibility, and what matters is where the trend is going. AI is massively accelerating coding (yesterday, I tried agentic-coding an equivalent of my blog software, and finished within an hour, and that was using gpt-oss:20b running on my laptop (!!!!), kimi-2.5 would have probably just one-shotted it). But probably, the right way to use it, is to take half the gains from AI in speed, and half the gains in security: generate more test-cases, formally verify everything, make more multi-implementations of things. A collaborator of the @leanethereum effort managed to AI-code a machine-verifiable proof of one of the most complex theorems that STARKs rely on for security. A core tenet of @leanethereum is to formally verify everything, and AI is greatly accelerating our ability to do that. Aside from formal verification, simply being able to generate a much larger body of test cases is also important. Do not assume that you'll be able to put in a single prompt and get a highly-secure version out anytime soon; there WILL be lots of wrestling with bugs and inconsistencies between implementations. But even that wrestling can happen 5x faster and 10x more thoroughly. People should be open to the possibility (not certainty! possibility) that the Ethereum roadmap will finish much faster than people expect, at a much higher standard of security than people expect. On the security side, I personally am excited about the possibility that bug-free code, long considered an idealistic delusion, will finally become first possible and then a basic expectation. If we care about trustlessness, this is a necessary piece of the puzzle. Total security is impossible because ultimately total security means exact correspondence between lines of code and contents of your mind, which is many terabytes (see firefly.social/post/x/2025653… ). But there are many specific cases, where specific security claims can be made and verified, that cut out >99% of the negative consequences that might come from the code being broken.

Agents using Polygon because Polygon is used by large enterprises and institutions for their stablecoin payment rails!

"AI becomes the government" is dystopian: it leads to slop when AI is weak, and is doom-maximizing once AI becomes strong. But AI used well can be empowering, and push the frontier of democratic / decentralized modes of governance. The core problem with democratic / decentralized modes of governance (including DAOs on ethereum) is limits to human attention: there are many thousands of decisions to make, involving many domains of expertise, and most people don't have the time or skill to be experts in even one, let alone all of them. The usual solution, delegation, is disempowering: it leads to a small group of delegates controlling decision-making while their supporters, after they hit the "delegate" button, have no influence at all. So what can we do? We use personal LLMs to solve the attention problem! Here are a few ideas: ## Personal governance agents If a governance mechanism depends on you to make a large number of decisions, a personal agent can perform all the necessary votes for you, based on preferences that it infers from your personal writing, conversation history, direct statements, etc. If the agent is (i) unsure how you would vote on an issue, and (ii) convinced the issue is important, then it should ask you directly, and give you all relevant context. ## Public conversation agents Making good decisions often cannot come from a linear process of taking people's views that are based only on their own information, and averaging them (even quadratically). There is a need for processes that aggregate many people's information, and then give each person (or their LLM) a chance to respond *based on that*. This includes: * Inferring and summarizing your own views and converting them into a format that can be shared publicly (and does not expose your private info) * Summarizing commonalities between people's inputs (expressed as words), similar to the various LLM+pol.is ideas ## Suggestion markets If a governance mechanism values "high-quality inputs" of any type (this could be proposals, or it could even be arguments), then you can have a prediction market, where anyone can submit an input, AIs can bet on a token representing that input, and if the mechanism "accepts" the input (either accepting the proposal, or accepting it as a "unit" of conversation that it then passes along to its participant), it pays out $X to the holders of the token. Note that this is basically the same as firefly.social/post/x/2017956… ## Decentralized governance with private information One of the biggest weaknesses of highly decentralized / democratic governance is that it does not work well when important decisions need to be made with secret information. Common situations: (i) the org engaging in adversarial conflicts or negotiations (ii) internal dispute resolution (iii) compensation / funding decisions. Typically, orgs solve this by appointing individuals who have great power to take on those tasks. But with multi-party computation (currently I've seen this done with TEEs; I would love to see at least the two-party case solved with garbled circuits vitalik.eth.limo/general/2020/0… so we can get pure-cryptographic security guarantees for it), we could actually take many people's inputs into account to deal with these situations, without compromising privacy. Basically: you submit your personal LLM into a black box, the LLM sees private info, it makes a judgement based on that, and it outputs only that judgement. You don't see the private info, and no one else sees the contents of your personal LLM. ## The importance of privacy All of these approaches involve each participant making use of much more information about themselves, and potentially submitting much larger-sized inputs. Hence, it becomes all the more important to protect privacy. There are two kinds of privacy that matter: * Anonymity of the participant: this can be accomplished with ZK. In general, I think all governance tools should come with ZK built in * Privacy of the contents: this has two parts. First, the personal LLM should do what it can to avoid divulging private info about you that it does not need to divulge. Second, when you have computation that combines multiple LLMs or multiple people's info, you need multi-party techniques to compute it privately. Both are important.

JUST IN: Gas limit is now 100 MILLION and TPS pushing 2,380+ Only Polygon can handle the load of @Polymarket 5min markets 10% of gigagas speed has officially been achieved.

I have never been more bullish on crypto. Because the rules-based order is collapsing and the code-based order is rising. So the short term price doesn’t matter. As international law breaks down, we will need not just onchain currencies, but onchain companies. As the post-war order breaks down, we’ll similarly need the post-internet order. States will fail, and the network will take their place. We need internet capitalism, we need internet democracy, and we need internet privacy. So we need cryptocurrency.

2026 Temp Check: Active Users Across the Ethereum Ecosystem ▫️ @ethereum — 3.63M ▫️ @0xPolygon — 2.60M ▫️ @base — 2.27M ▫️ @Celo — 1.00M ▫️ @arbitrum — 838.04k ▫️ @Optimism — 279.33k ▫️ @world_chain_ — 266.10k ▫️ @GravityChain — 198.08k ▫️ @Starknet — 133.67k ▫️ @inkonchain — 74.50k L2s are now competing on adoption, not just hype

🚨 WHY POLYGON HAS OUTPERFORMED RECENTLY $POL has seen strong price performance over the past week & is currently up almost 40%, driven by fundamentals rather than speculation. What's happening behind the scenes: • Polygon ranked #1 by network revenue over the last 7 days • On Jan 5, 3,012,457 POL were burned, the highest single-day burn in Polygon PoS history • Activity reflects sustained on-chain usage Additionally, Polygon’s CEO released a new strategic framework: "The Open Money Stack, a vertically integrated on-chain stack covering applications, financial services, payments, and blockchain rails." This positions Polygon as an infrastructure-focused ecosystem rather than a short-term narrative trade. Price is still down 88% since ATH... do you see an opportunity here? 👀

@scottmelker Just save time go ahead and create your own osi model implementation as well. 😹

POLYMARKET TO PRIORITIZE ITS OWN L2 AFTER POLYGON $POL NETWORK DISRUPTION

There's so much more that goes on behind the scenes within crypto than just what we see here on CT. P2P (peer to peer) payments are at ATH's on @0xPolygon They're pushing the RWA and Payments sectors and it's working. Whether we like it or not, access to the global dollar via stablecoins is probably one of crypto's greatest PMF's and a genuinely good thing for the world that crypto has achieved. Good to see, I hope people in less fortunate financial circumstances are benefitting from the tech - makes me feel better about all the other crap that happens in the space lol.

Madhugiri Hardfork The Madhugiri hardfork will be released on Polygon PoS mainnet for block number 80084800, at approximately 10am UTC on Dec 9. This update enables: Increased network throughput by 33%. Future block time adjustments without a hardfork. Increased stability via faster and reliable node synchronization. Proactive EVM security enhancements. Included in the upgrade: PIP-75 “Change Consensus Time to 1 Second” PIP-74 “Canonical Inclusion of StateSync Transactions in Block Bodies” EIP-7883 “ModExp Gas Cost Increase” EIP-7825 “Transaction Gas Limit Cap” EIP-7823 “Set upper bounds for MODEXP” Users and Apps do not need to take any action. See the countdown here: dashboard.polygon.technology/stats

🔥 LATEST: BlackRock submitted a filing for a staked $ETH ETF.

@crypto_vadim @0xPolygon I agree with what you said, though I still stand by my point. Let’s keep sharing ideas, keeping in mind that the goal is to discuss topics, not individuals or companies. I appreciate your insights and what you do for this community.

1 It’s me talking about a possible airdrop, not Polygon. I don’t work for Polygon. 2 Don’t mix up the “airdrop farming hate” narrative with normal token drops from friendly teams. Polygon invested in Plonky - it’s open source. Some teams might simply decide to show respect to POL holders. 3 POL has a diverse investor base. Retail and institutions need different approaches - and that’s perfectly fine. If you don’t need the token airdrop, just send it to me or burn when you get it.

Well, this time I definitely won’t be wrong, right? … right? 😃 Brevis will likely do an airdrop for POL (MATIC) stakers. There was talk earlier about an airdrop from a friendly “Prover Network.” I thought it was Succinct, but they didn’t deliver. Brevis is built on Polygon’s Plonky, and several Polygon team members have commented on and supported them. I hope I’m right this time. But in any case - good luck to Brevis @brevis_zk 🤝