Polygon initiates restructuring after $250 million acquisition, 60-member team adjustment draws attention

This week, it was announced that Polygon Labs, an Ethereum scaling network, has conducted a personnel optimization after completing major acquisitions of Coinme and Sequence. According to sources close to CoinDesk, this round of adjustments involved 60 employees and spanned multiple business teams across the organization. The restructuring is closely related to Polygon Labs’ strategic shift towards a payment-oriented blockchain.

Polygon officially clarified the related reports. A company spokesperson denied the claim of “30% layoffs,” emphasizing that this is not a scale reduction but a structural optimization during the integration of the newly acquired teams. The spokesperson stated that after integrating Coinme and Sequence employees, the total number of Polygon Labs staff remains close to 200.

Team Integration Behind Payment Ecosystem Expansion

Polygon’s acquisition, worth over $250 million, targets the blockchain payment sector. Coinme and Sequence are teams with expertise in payment and wallet technology. Before integrating the two teams, Polygon Labs underwent restructuring adjustments to absorb new employees while maintaining overall scale.

Polygon founder and CEO Marc Boiron confirmed this move on social media, noting that the personnel changes resulted from overlapping roles during the integration process. Boiron emphasized that the fusion of the two teams aims to support Polygon’s core mission of “bringing all funds on-chain,” which is also the company’s vision for entering the payment track.

Boiron expressed gratitude to departing employees, stating they made significant contributions to Polygon. The company also revealed that Polygon Labs has sufficient funds, with over $200 million in treasury reserves and more than 1.9 billion MATIC tokens, ensuring the execution of the strategic shift.

Third Major Workforce Adjustment in Three Years

This is not the first large-scale personnel adjustment by Polygon Labs in recent years. Looking back over the past three years, Polygon has experienced two major organizational optimizations:

In early 2023, Polygon Labs conducted its first large-scale layoff, involving about 100 employees, accounting for 20% of the workforce at that time. This adjustment aimed to consolidate multiple business units into a unified structure.

In February 2024, the company again optimized its personnel, involving 60 employees, representing 19% of the total. The official stance was that this move was a necessary step to improve operational efficiency and overall performance.

The current adjustment marks the third major workforce restructuring within three years. Each change corresponds to a strategic shift—from initial infrastructure optimization, to efficiency improvements, and now to building a payment ecosystem.

Market Performance and Polygon’s Long-term Outlook

Following the layoffs, the MATIC token declined about 6% over the past 24 hours. This reflects the market’s short-term sensitivity to personnel adjustment news. During the same period, the broader cryptocurrency market—measured by the CoinDesk20 index—fell approximately 1%, indicating that MATIC underperformed the market.

Despite short-term price pressures, Polygon’s strategic position as one of Ethereum’s main scaling solutions remains unshaken. The Polygon network uses a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, with the native token MATIC used both for paying transaction fees and earning staking rewards. Since its launch in 2017 under the name Matic Network by several Ethereum developers, Polygon officially went live in 2020 and has become an indispensable scaling solution within the Ethereum ecosystem.

This acquisition and restructuring can be seen as a strategic upgrade for Polygon in the payment sector. From infrastructure provider to payment ecosystem participant, Polygon is repositioning itself within the blockchain industry. Whether this transformation will ultimately create greater value for investors and users remains to be seen over time.