Marc Boiron of Polygon Labs: Traditional Banks Lag in Cross-Border Payments
Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron stated that traditional banks make it embarrassingly difficult for U.S. companies to pay contractors in Brazil. Companies should be able to send payments in USD on any chain with one click, and have them arrive in Brazilian reais in the contractor's chosen wallet within seconds.
He explained that companies like Toku and Deel have started using Polygon to pay contractors. The Polygon Open Money Stack is designed for payroll companies and marketplace platforms, providing access to fiat channels, custodial wallets, compliance, routing, and settlement through a single API. The technical preview is available to selected partners: clients deposit funds into a virtual bank account via an automated clearinghouse, and a single call can trigger mass payments to contractors. The funds are converted into USD stablecoins on Polygon and enter the custodial wallet within seconds, with a per-transaction cost as low as a fraction of a cent according to official examples; recipients can cash out, transfer to external wallets, or hold.
Official comparisons indicate that traditional payroll systems take one to three business days and cost several dollars per transaction, while integration time has been reduced from months to weeks.
On-chain public metrics show stablecoin transfer volumes of approximately $54 billion, around 159 million unique wallet addresses, a total of about 6.4 billion transactions, and an average transaction cost of about $0.002. The documentation also lists existing integrations including Revolut, Stripe, and Flutterwave. Toku claims its token payroll processes over $1 billion annually, covering more than 100 countries, and integrates with ADP, Workday, UKG, and Gusto, with optional employer record services; Polygon was chosen for its proportion of small USD stablecoin transfers and approximately $3.3 billion in stablecoin liquidity. Deel has paid stablecoins to over 10,000 contractors in more than 100 countries, with stablecoin remittances projected at about $250 million in 2025, and plans to expand the Polygon channel to full-time employee stablecoin salaries in the Eurozone and the U.S., with the U.K. and Latin America as subsequent markets.
The Open Money Stack also supports online cash point deposits and withdrawals, corporate banking channels, external wallet routing, keys, callbacks, permissions, and single sign-on. Marc Boiron compared the experience of a São Paulo company paying a Lagos designer: agent banks, deadlines, and delays were rewritten as local currency issuance with seconds to the recipient's chosen currency. Grupo Braza has connected the BBRL stablecoin pegged to the real to Polygon to bypass agent bank chains for cross-border real transfers. U.S. users still face financial transaction taxes and local bank spreads when sending money to Brazil; on-chain settlement addresses the middle segment, not the entire tax burden.
Buy orders need to complete payroll and marketplace transactions in one interface, with USD coming in and local currency or stablecoins going out, while sell orders still rely on traditional bank channels that account for business days and agent banks. Funds move from corporate payroll accounts through an automated clearinghouse into the stack, then are split into multiple contractor payments in stablecoins, shifting costs from wire transfer spreads to extremely low on-chain settlements. Beneficiaries include Toku, Deel, and similar platforms that can keep compliance and tax matters in-house while outsourcing settlement to public chains; those under pressure are the cross-border payment networks that negotiate agent banks corridor by corridor and settle on business days—one-click and seconds are the product promise, but geographical and licensing restrictions still affect the deposit and withdrawal layers.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Marc Boiron has transformed Polygon from a "cheap Ethereum sidechain" into a payroll settlement layer. The design premise of Open Money Stack is that Polygon operates the settlement itself, rather than layering another intermediary to manage others' channels, wallets, and chains. Toku has integrated its annual processing of over $1 billion in token payroll into existing ADP and Workday workflows, while Deel has expanded contractor stablecoin payments to full-time employees, effectively using enterprise software distribution to purchase public chain settlement. The Brazil corridor is specifically mentioned because the taxes and spreads on real deposits and withdrawals make the traditional wire transfer experience unattractive, with stablecoins only replacing the middle segment.
The capital path involves public chains charging extremely low settlement fees to payroll software, which in turn charges businesses for compliance and foreign exchange spreads. Whoever controls the "payroll button" in the employer's system decides which chain the settlement occurs on. Polygon bundles virtual accounts, custodial wallets, and bulk interfaces into a single counterparty and service level agreement in its technical preview, aiming to eliminate the multi-layered cuts taken by orchestrators. The presence of Revolut, Stripe, and Flutterwave in the integration list indicates that this path requires existing licensed entry points, rather than forcing contractors to learn the chain themselves.
In comparison to Wise and PayPal for single cross-border transactions, Rippling and Gusto have integrated contractor payments into HR suites: Deel has already created high-retention software for contractor payroll, with stablecoins merely reducing the payment time from business days to seconds. The industry is in a phase of migrating cross-border payroll from bank corridors to stablecoin orchestration, with full-time employee channels being more heavily regulated than contractor channels, which is why Deel is prioritizing the U.S. and Europe, followed by the U.K. and Latin America.
This represents a transfer of pricing power. The intermediary price spread for small, high-frequency cross-border payments is being shifted. The mechanism is: agent banks charge based on corridors and settle on business days, while public chains charge per transaction and settle in seconds; payroll companies only need to keep compliance on their books to hand over settlement to cheaper tracks. Banks are not incapable of converting USD to reais, but they cannot achieve the combination of "any chain in, any chain out, contractor's chosen wallet"; once this combination is API-enabled, the corridor premium loses its justification.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
- The pain point of cross-border payroll is not in exchange rate displays, but in the business days of agent banks.
- Whoever controls the payroll button decides which track the settlement falls on.
- Once seconds-level arrival becomes an API, corridor premiums become replaceable costs.