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- The U.S. Mint issues its final penny, ending the 232-year production history of the one-cent coin.
- Polygon is uniquely suited for microtransactions due to its low gas fees, high throughput, and PoS architecture.
On November 12, the U.S. Mint pressed the last circulating penny in Philadelphia. The move follows a January recommendation by the Department of Government Efficiency to phase out the coin, and coincided with President Donald Trump's February directive to end penny minting.
It costs 3.69 cents to mint a penny, making production financially impractical. Last year, the U.S. Mint lost $85.3 million despite producing 3.2 billion pennies. Coins already in circulation will remain valid until they become obsolete over time.
Following this development, some experts see this as a step towards on-chain transactions leveraging blockchain technology. Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal explained the scale of that growth in a recent conversation with Paul Barron:
“At the beginning of 2025, Polygon's TPS was 200. Today, its TPS is around 1000 to 1500 TPS. So we scaled the blockchain 5.7 to 8 times and daily transactions on chain were around 3 million transactions. Now we are trending towards 5 million transactions. These are mainly stablecoins and organic payment transactions using stablecoins.”
Polygon’s footprint in microtransactions
Polygon's Proof-of-Stake chain has transaction fees well below 1 cent. Polymarket reportedly pays just $0.007 per trade. Other institutions are also taking note. Calastone, a global fund network that handles £250bn a month, recently announced tokenized fund share classes running on Polygon.
Sandeep also revealed Polygon's plans to make stablecoin transfers as easy as sending money with Venmo. In Asia, R25 launched its revenue-generating rcUSD+ token on the Polygon network in November.
This announcement further expands the list of partnerships Polygon has secured during November. As we previously reported, Mastercard is expanding its crypto credential system to support self-custodial wallets, and Polygon has become the first blockchain to power verified human-readable aliases.
Revolut has integrated Polygon across its platform to enable instant stablecoin transfers, POL trading, and staking for users in 38 countries. To date, Revolut has processed over $690 million in activity on its network, with over 14 million customers using its encryption-enabled features.
