Polygon Labs buys two crypto startups for $250 million as it looks to compete with Stripe
The longtime blockchain developer bought cash-to-crypto company Coinme and wallet infrastructure firm Sequence.
The blockchain developer Polygon Labs has closed deals to buy the crypto startups Coinme and Sequence. The total purchase price for the two startups was for more than $250 million, but Polygon Labs declined to disclose how much it paid for each, or whether the deals were for cash, equity, or a mix of both.
The acquisitions are meant to aid the blockchain network’s stablecoin strategy, said Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron and Polygon Foundation founder Sandeep Nailwal in an interview. The Seattle-based Coinme, which specializes in converting cash into crypto and is known for its work with crypto ATMs, has a suite of money transmitter licenses in the U.S. Meanwhile, New York-based Sequence builds out blockchain infrastructure, including crypto wallets.
Polygon Labs’ acquisitions of the two startups puts it in competition with the fintech giant Stripe, said Nailwal. Over the past year, the payments giant bought a stablecoin startup, a crypto wallet firm, and backed its own blockchain focused on payments. The Stripe acquisitions signalled an intention to own every layer of the stablecoin stack, from the servers that process payments to the accounts where users hold crypto.
“It’s a reverse Stripe in a way,” Nailwal said of Polygon’s stablecoin play. Stripe first acquired its stablecoin startups and then built out its own blockchain. In contrast, Polygon already has a longstanding network of blockchains, and it’s bringing on startups to build on top of it. “Polygon Labs is becoming a full-blown fintech company,” said Nailwal.
Stablecoin shift
The push from Polygon Labs into payments comes amid a wave of hype for stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies that are pegged to real-world assets like the U.S. dollar. Especially after President Donald Trump signed into law in July a new bill regulating the tokens, fintechs, tech companies, and even banks have said they’ll launch their own stablecoins, which proponents say are an upgrade over decades-old financial infrastructure.
Polygon Labs, whose blockchain network sits on top of Ethereum, is aiming to ride this wave of enthusiasm. Best known for its prominence during the NFT boom of 2021 and 2022, Polygon has made significant investments in payments over the past year, even poaching Stripe’s head of crypto, John Egan.
The deal for Coinme, its latest payments play, was for between $100 and $125 million, reported CoinDesk, which implies that the price for Sequence was somewhere between $125 and $150 million. But Boiron, the CEO of Polygon Labs, pushed back on the reporting. “Almost everything that CoinDesk wrote in that article is wrong,” he said.
He also said he wasn’t worried about Coinme’s legal struggles. In 2025, regulators in California and Washington targeted the crypto company for violations that included a failure to stop customers from taking out more than $1,000 in a day from the firm’s affiliated crypto ATMs. Washington regulators agreed to stay a cease-and-desist order against Coinme a month after going after the startup.
“I think they go far beyond what is required,” said Boiron, in reference to Coinme’s compliance regime. “On the back end, the way that they handle being able to limit risk to users, I think is state of the art.”
