Polygon to Burn Unused POL Under $1M Agentic Commerce Incentive Plan

• PIP-82 proposes recycling up to $1M in Polygon PoS base gas fees for eligible agentic commerce and x402 transactions.
• Any POL not recycled goes to the burn collector, and the program ends after $1 million is recycled or on Dec 31, 2026.

Polygon has proposed a new incentive plan to reduce base gas costs for agent-to-agent payments on Polygon PoS. The proposal, titled PIP-82 “Agentic Commerce Gas Program,” sets out a mechanism to recycle up to $1 million worth of gas fees from eligible agentic commerce transactions. Any POL that is not recycled under the program would be sent to the existing burn collector address, meaning unused amounts will be burned rather than redistributed.

PIP-82 states that agentic commerce requires low-friction execution for high-frequency, low-value payments. The proposal links that requirement to Polygon’s goal of supporting autonomous AI agents that transact in real time. It also cites x402, a payments approach that uses the HTTP 402 status code to enable software agents to initiate on-chain payments for data, services, and APIs without manual checkout flows. As CNF reported, Hedera became the latest chain to implement x402.

Polygon PoS has attracted 20.3% of x402 transactions and 10.4% of total x402 volume since the start of the year. The proposal also points to prior AI agent activity on the network. It says OpenClaw completed the first fully autonomous AI-to-AI commercial transaction on Polygon, covering listing, pricing, negotiation, execution, and payment in one flow.

Most recently, CNF covered that Polygon joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance to work on institutional payment rails and global onchain settlement. The effort will align with Polygon’s Open Money Stack, which targets compliant transfers and links stablecoin rails to merchant and user access tools.

PIP-82 Changes Polygon’s Burn Mechanism 

To operate the recycling process, PIP-82 proposes changing where the EIP-1559 burn is sent on Polygon PoS. The burn recipient would be changed from 0x7A8ed27F4C30512326878652d20fC85727401854 to 0x3ef57def668054dd750bd260526105c4eeef104f. This would be implemented by adding a new entry on the burntContract configuration in Bor’s genesis file at a specified hard fork block.

Additionally, the program would use the existing PIP-65 fee distribution system to periodically recycle base fees that qualify under the Agentic Commerce rules. The initial scope would apply recycling to public Polygon x402 facilitators, using an initial list of facilitator addresses referenced by the proposal. For base fees that do not qualify, the POL would continue to be sent to the current burn collector address, where it would be burned.

PIP-82 sets an end condition based on either budget or time. The recycling would stop once $1 million is fully recycled or on December 31, 2026, whichever comes first. The proposal states that POL would be valued at the prevailing market rate at the time of each recycling transaction, and the corresponding amount would be deducted from the $1 million allowance.

Additionally, Billon introduced an on-chain lending protocol on Polygon for tokenized asset lending rather than a general DeFi money market. CNF noted that Billon introduced isolated lending pools with published risk parameters to set leverage, collateral, and liquidation rules for tokenized RWAs.

At the time of reporting, POL was trading at $0.09495, up 4% in 24 hours, while 24-hour trading volume rose 24% to about $105.3 million.