Polygon Adoption: How Global Brands and Institutions Are Using the Network

Polygon has already hosted some of the most notable institutional blockchain deployments to date. 

In November 2022, JP Morgan executed a live cross-currency DeFi transaction on Polygon PoS, marking one of the first major bank-led blockchain trades involving real financial institutions. 

Franklin Templeton later expanded its first US on-chain mutual fund to Polygon, while Hamilton Lane used Polygon-based tokenization to reduce the minimum investment in private credit from hundreds of thousands of dollars to just $10,000. 

On the consumer side, Nike and Reddit launched large-scale blockchain initiatives on the network, although both programs have since been discontinued. This article examines what these institutions built on Polygon, how the underlying technology worked, and where each project stands as of June 2026. 

What Makes Polygon Attractive to Large Institutions?

Polygon is a Layer 2 scaling network built on top of Ethereum. It processes transactions faster and at significantly lower cost than Ethereum mainnet, while inheriting Ethereum's underlying security. For institutions, this resolves a practical problem: they can operate within the Ethereum ecosystem, use its developer tooling, and access its liquidity without paying the gas fees that make mainnet use expensive at scale.

For instance, JP Morgan's blockchain division team wanted Ethereum infrastructure and simply needed cheaper transaction costs. 

Beyond the PoS chain, Polygon offers a zero-knowledge EVM (zkEVM) and a Chain Development Kit (CDK). The CDK, released in 2023, lets organizations build their own custom Layer 2 chains with specific access rules and transaction parameters, while staying connected to the broader Polygon ecosystem through the AggLayer. The AggLayer is an aggregation layer that went live in early 2024 and unifies liquidity across Polygon-based chains so they do not operate in isolation from each other.

JP Morgan and Project Guardian: How a Bank Ran a Live DeFi Trade on a Public Chain

On November 2, 2022, JP Morgan executed what it described as its first live trade on a public blockchain using DeFi, tokenized deposits, and verifiable credentials. The transaction took place on Polygon's PoS mainnet as part of Project Guardian, a pilot initiative run by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).

The participants were JP Morgan (now operating its blockchain division under the name Kinexys), Singapore's DBS Bank, and Japan's SBI Digital Asset Holdings. Together they:

• Issued tokenized deposits representing Singapore Dollars (by JP Morgan) and Japanese Yen (by SBI Digital Asset Holdings)
• Executed a live cross-currency FX transaction using those tokenized deposits
• Conducted a simulated trade of tokenized Singapore and Japanese government bonds
• Used a modified version of Aave Arc, a permissioned liquidity protocol built specifically for institutional participants

Aave Arc is the institutional variant of the Aave DeFi protocol. It restricts pool access to verified counterparties only, meaning all participants must pass know-your-customer (KYC) checks before they can interact with any liquidity pool. 

JP Morgan layered on top of this by building on-chain verification using W3C Verifiable Credentials (VCs). This allowed each institution to prove its compliance status directly on-chain, so any DeFi protocol it accessed could verify identity without requiring a separate KYC check at every interface.

Tyrone Lobban, then head of JP Morgan's Blockchain Launch and Onyx Digital Assets, said Polygon was chosen specifically because it offered Ethereum compatibility at a cost that made on-chain identity verification economically viable at scale. Stani Kulechov, founder of Aave, called it the first real-world use case for institutional-grade DeFi protocols ever executed on a public blockchain.

Project Guardian noted it would explore other blockchain networks in future phases. The Polygon pilot, however, remains the most cited example of a regulated bank completing a live DeFi transaction on a public chain under real compliance controls.

What Did Nike Actually Build on Polygon, and What Is Its Status Now?

Nike launched .Swoosh in November 2022 as its dedicated Web3 platform, built on Polygon. The platform allowed users to buy, collect, and trade virtual Nike products, including digital sneakers and apparel intended for use as avatar wearables in Web3 games and virtual environments.

The first major product drop was "Our Force 1" (OF1), a Polygon-minted NFT based on the Air Force 1 silhouette. Nike offered two editions, the "Classic Remix" and the "New Wave," with select early access granted through airdropped posters to .Swoosh members. 

The platform also included a royalty-sharing model where users who created Nike-branded virtual products could earn a percentage of sales, effectively becoming co-creators with a financial stake in the platform's output.

By October 2022, before .Swoosh had even fully launched publicly, Nike had generated $185 million in cumulative NFT revenue across all its projects, ten times more than the next nine top brands combined, according to Dune Analytics data. The decision to build on Polygon rather than Ethereum mainnet was practical: lower minting costs made the platform viable for a broad consumer base rather than a niche of high-spending crypto collectors.

What Happened to Nike's Web3 Program?

Nike's Web3 experiment did not survive a change in leadership and a prolonged cooling of the NFT market. Here is the full timeline of its wind-down:

• In 2024, Nike paused new NFT collection launches and said it would redirect .Swoosh toward gaming partnerships and in-game wearables
• In December 2024, Nike's NFT studio RTFKT formally announced it would cease all operations by January 2025
• RTFKT was quietly sold to an undisclosed buyer in December 2025
• The .Swoosh website was retired on May 5, 2026, with users directed to transfer their digital collectibles to external wallets
• In April 2025, a group of RTFKT NFT holders filed a class-action lawsuit in Brooklyn federal court, seeking $5 million in damages and alleging the NFTs were unregistered securities sold without SEC registration

Current CEO Elliot Hill, who replaced John Donahoe in late 2024, has redirected Nike's strategy back toward core sport and wholesale retail. The .Swoosh name continues to appear in connection with gaming partnerships, but the NFT infrastructure on Polygon is no longer operational.

Nike's Polygon deployment is best understood as a historically significant consumer NFT experiment that generated real revenue and real user engagement at scale, before market conditions and corporate strategy shifted.

Franklin Templeton: The First US Mutual Fund on a Public Blockchain

How Did FOBXX Use Polygon?

Franklin Templeton's Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX) remains one of the largest tokenized treasury products in the market. The fund is represented onchain through the BENJI token, with each token corresponding to a share of the fund. FOBXX invests at least 99.5% of its assets in U.S. government securities, cash, and fully collateralized repurchase agreements.

Franklin Templeton expanded BENJI beyond its original Stellar deployment to multiple blockchain networks, including Polygon. The fund continues to use public blockchains as an official system of record for ownership and transaction processing, making it one of the earliest examples of a regulated investment product operating onchain.

As of April 2026, FOBXX reported approximately $825 million in fund assets, while the BENJI tokenized product represented more than $1 billion in onchain asset value across supported networks. The fund's 7 day effective yield stood at roughly 3.58%.

The Polygon deployment remains active in 2026 and continues to serve as one of Franklin Templeton's primary EVM compatible distribution channels. The initiative is widely viewed as a practical example of blockchain being used for fund administration, settlement, transferability, and ownership recordkeeping rather than as a standalone marketing experiment.

Reddit's Blockchain Avatars: Mass Adoption, Then a Full Exit

Reddit launched its Collectible Avatars program on Polygon in July 2022. The design was deliberate in its invisibility. Reddit never used the words "blockchain," "NFT," or "crypto" in its initial communications. Users were simply invited to buy or claim limited-edition digital avatars stored in a feature called Reddit Vault, which functioned as an in-app crypto wallet without requiring users to understand what a wallet was.

Within months, millions of users had created Vaults and held Polygon-based NFTs without knowing it. By mid-2023, unique holders surpassed ten million. By 2025, that number had climbed above fifteen million, making Reddit's avatar program arguably the most widespread Web3 consumer deployment by any mainstream platform. Over 33.5 million Collectible Avatars were created in total. Artists earned royalties, and secondary market trading on Polygon briefly drove meaningful volume.

How Did Reddit's Program End?

Reddit's blockchain ambitions unraveled in stages over two years:

• October 2023: Reddit shut down Community Points, its token reward system running on Arbitrum Nova, citing resourcing constraints and the regulatory environment
• August 5, 2024: Reddit discontinued Collectible Expressions, the animated comment features built on top of the Polygon NFTs
• September 2025: Reddit announced the end of its Avatar Creator Program
• November 11, 2025: The Avatar Store closed permanently
• January 1, 2026: The deadline for users to export their blockchain wallets passed

Reddit's exit from Polygon was its second blockchain feature to be discontinued. The Collectible Avatars program stands as a genuine case study in how to onboard a mass audience to blockchain technology without technical friction, and equally as a case study in what happens when corporate priorities shift and the underlying infrastructure is removed.

Hamilton Lane and the Tokenization of Private Credit

Hamilton Lane, one of the world's largest private markets investment firms with approximately $958 billion in assets under management and supervision, brought its Senior Credit Opportunities Fund (SCOPE) onchain through Securitize in 2023. 

The launch used Polygon to tokenize access to a private credit strategy that had previously required a $2 million minimum investment, reducing the entry point to $10,000 through a tokenized feeder fund. Investors gained exposure to floating rate, senior secured loans across sectors such as healthcare, information technology, and business services.

Tokenization allows ownership interests in the fund to be represented as blockchain-based tokens rather than traditional transfer-agent records. For investors, this created a more accessible pathway into private credit, an asset class that has historically been limited to institutions and ultra-high-net-worth investors.

The project has since evolved beyond its original Polygon deployment. In July 2025, Securitize upgraded the tokenized vehicle, known as sSCOPE, with native issuance on Ethereum and Optimism, daily NAV pricing, instant subscriptions, on-demand redemptions, and multichain interoperability powered by Wormhole. The expansion was designed to make the fund more compatible with emerging onchain financial infrastructure and decentralized finance applications.

While Polygon served as the original launch network, SCOPE has since become a multichain tokenized fund. Its continued expansion is one of the clearest examples of how traditional asset managers are using public blockchain infrastructure to broaden access to private market investments

Is Polygon Still Relevant for Institutional Use in 2026?

The consumer NFT programs from Nike and Reddit have closed. The financial infrastructure deployments from Franklin Templeton and Hamilton Lane remain active and expanding. That distinction is the most accurate way to assess Polygon's institutional relevance as of mid-2026.

Over 30 Fortune 500 companies had testnet or mainnet deployments on Polygon as of early 2025. Stripe launched global USDC stablecoin payments across Ethereum, Base, and Polygon on December 12, 2025, enabling merchants in over 150 countries to accept crypto with instant USD settlement at a flat 1.5% fee. 

In April 2026, Meta began paying select creators in USDC on Polygon and Solana via Stripe, in what Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron described as a program expected to expand to more than 160 countries by year-end. These are not experiments. They are live payment flows running on Polygon's infrastructure today.

On the technical side, Polygon implemented a series of rapid upgrades through early 2026. The May 8, 2026 upgrade raised the block gas limit to 140 million and reduced block time to 1.75 seconds, pushing the network's maximum theoretical throughput to approximately 3,800 transactions per second. For context, actual live TPS on the network runs between 97 and 537 depending on demand, per Chainspect data. The 3,800 figure reflects capacity at peak load. These upgrades are part of the Gigagas roadmap, announced in June 2025, which targets 100,000 TPS as a longer-term infrastructure milestone. That target has not been reached yet and remains in progress.

The AggLayer continues to address one of enterprise blockchain's persistent challenges: liquidity fragmentation across isolated networks. By connecting Polygon-based chains, it allows assets and transactions to flow across chains without requiring institutions to manually bridge between them.

POL, the token that replaced MATIC through a 1:1 migration in September 2024, trades near $0.09 as of June 2, 2026, with a market capitalization of approximately $975 million to $983 million across major exchanges. POL functions as the gas and staking token across the Polygon ecosystem. On-chain activity recorded 1.4 billion transactions in 2025. The gap between that volume and the token's price performance reflects a market that has not yet priced infrastructure-layer adoption in any consistent way.

Conclusion

Polygon's track record shows that institutional blockchain adoption is no longer theoretical. While consumer-focused NFT initiatives from Nike and Reddit have largely come to an end, financial institutions continue to expand their use of blockchain infrastructure for payments, tokenized funds, private credit, and asset settlement. 

From JP Morgan's landmark DeFi transaction to Franklin Templeton's onchain mutual fund and Hamilton Lane's tokenized private credit strategy, Polygon has served as a proving ground for real-world blockchain applications. As the network continues to evolve through upgrades, tokenization, and enterprise-focused infrastructure, its long-term relevance will likely be determined less by NFT hype and more by its ability to support regulated financial activity at scale.

Resources

1. CryptoSlate – JPMorgan Executes First DeFi Transaction on Polygon, November 2022
2. Aave Blog – Kinexys by JP Morgan: Project Guardian Pilot on Polygon
3. Decrypt – Nike Launches .Swoosh Web3 Platform With Polygon NFTs
4. Decrypt – Nike Is Retiring RTFKT, Its NFT Subsidiary, December 2024
5. Sole Retriever – Nike Retiring .Swoosh Website, May 2026
6. BlockEden – Why 96% of Brand NFT Projects Died, March 2026
7. Polygon Labs Blog – Franklin Templeton Money Market Fund Launches on Polygon Blockchain
8. CoinPaprika – Franklin Templeton FOBXX and Benji Explained, April 2026
9. Securitize – Securitize Expands Access to Hamilton Lane's SCOPE Fund via Polygon, May 2023
10. CoinDesk – Securitize Takes Hamilton Lane SCOPE Fund Multichain, July 2025
11. Decrypt – Reddit Sunsetting Collectible Expressions for Polygon NFTs, August 2024
12. MEXC News – Reddit Ends Avatar Creator Program, November 2025
13. Stablecoin Insider – Stripe Launches Global USDC Stablecoin Payments on Ethereum, Base, and Polygon, December 2025
14. Decrypt – Meta Launches USDC Creator Payouts on Polygon via Stripe, April 2026
15. CryptoTimes – Polygon Pushes Scalability Further With 140M Gas Upgrade, May 2026
16. Polygon Labs Blog – Polygon's Gigagas Roadmap to 100K TPS, June 2025
17. CoinGecko – POL Live Price and Market Cap, June 2026
18. Chainspect – Polygon Live TPS, Block Time, and Network Metrics, June 2026