POL · a mint that never stops, cancelled almost exactly by fees that never come back.

POL mints 2% a year, compounded, and it landed on time: 91 separate mints between May 28 2026 and Aug 26 2026 took total supply from 10,650,353,689 to 10,703,065,413. Every one went to the same issuing contract, which split each batch exactly in half — 26,355,862 to the staking contract for validators and delegators, 26,355,862 to the community treasury. The per-day mint grew from 577,838 to 580,666 over the quarter, which is the compounding showing up in the data.

The original allocation schedule is finished — the last vested tranche came out in Feb 2024 and nothing is dated after it. POL itself never had a vesting contract; it was created one-for-one against the old token.

The community treasury sent nothing at all this quarter — a full sender-side scan of the window returned zero outgoing transfers, and its balance simply grew from 60,117,329 to 86,473,191 on its half of the mint. What did reach holders came from two grant-paying contracts funded earlier: one drained 371,984 to empty, the other 1,121,685 to empty. Tracked and unmoved alongside them: the treasury's own 86,473,191, and the 161,976,598 sitting in the fee-holder contracts on the Polygon chain, which are upgradeable by a multisig. If either balance falls between refreshes, the outflow lands in this row.

There is no bankruptcy estate, no trustee and no court-ordered distribution attached to POL.

The old token is still crossing over: 31,058,962 units went into the swap contract this quarter and exactly 31,058,962 POL came out, matching to four decimal places. The old supply is still exactly 10,000,000,000 — the old units are held, not destroyed — and the POL released was created at the start and is already inside the counted float. It changes the label on supply that already exists, so it adds nothing. Still waiting: 380,634,731 of the old unit, against 380,636,869 POL held for it.

Polygon buys back nothing. A proposal to end the 2% mint and spend treasury revenue on buying and burning POL has been in discussion since Oct 2025, but it is still a draft — its own timetable called for a vote in early 2026 and none was held, and the mints kept arriving every day through Aug 26 2026.

Every transaction on the Polygon chain pays a base fee that is taken out of circulation, and it very nearly cancels the mint: the two contracts that collect it went from 109,991,747 to 161,976,598 POL over the quarter, a rise of 51,984,850, and they have only ever risen — 13.65M a year ago, 74.73M in Feb 2026, 161.98M now, with nothing ever released. One caution belongs on the page: the collector is described in its own proposal as a temporary holder that a multisig can upgrade, and destroying the tokens for real would need a further protocol change. The tokens are out of the market, not yet out of existence.

No public evidence of release in window — monitored. No open-market purchase of POL by the project has been disclosed or observed.

Staking shrank rather than grew. The staking contract held 3,733,482,249 POL in May and 3,655,242,078 in August, and that is after it received 26,355,862 of fresh rewards — so roughly 104,600,000 came back out. The liquid staking receipt launched this year is freely tradable, which makes it a claim on a position, not a lock, and unbonding takes days rather than a term.