Polygon Labs closes Coinme deal, gaining money-transmitter licenses in 48 states

Polygon Labs has completed its acquisition of Coinme, which gives it 37 state money-transmitter licenses and 11 exemptions, all of which will be integrated into its Open Money Stack.

Polygon set out to make some acquisitions at the start of the year to give it access to stablecoin payments in the US, and Coinme’s acquisition was at the top of that agenda. The completion of the purchase now extends its regulated payments coverage to 48 US states.

What licenses does the acquisition give Polygon?

The completion of the acquisition also gives Polygon registration with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network as a money services business.

The licenses from this acquisition feed into Polygon’s Open Money Stack. The stack bundles fiat on- and off-ramps, wallets, cross-chain routing, and settlement behind a single integration.

Businesses can take in funds and hold or settle them in stablecoins using the platform. They can also pay out in a recipient’s local currency, all from the stack.

Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron said Coinme’s acquisition gives them “more of the infrastructure to support a payment from the moment funds come in to the moment the recipient gets paid.”

Early customers plugging in

Polygon says the unified integration is still in technical preview for a handful of customers. Currently four firms are already building on the stack.

One of them is Tazapay, which is running cross-border business payments through the stack. Another firm, Mesh, is bolting an on-ramp onto its network of more than 300 wallets, exchanges, and financial services.

A regulatory cloud over Coinme’s kiosks

The announcement of the completion of Coinme’s purchase comes a few days after the company settled a multistate enforcement case.

Coinme reached a $2.5 million settlement with 34 state regulators on October 8, according to the Conference of State Bank Supervisors.

The settlement was due to alleged Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money laundering failures.

As part of that deal, Coinme agreed to wind down its virtual currency kiosk business by January 1, 2027, or pay an extra $4 million. It also has to bring in an independent consultant to review its compliance program.

Coinme has operated around 6,000 Bitcoin ATMs in the US through a partnership with coin-counting operator Coinstar.

Coinme has been fined in the past over these machines. Before the latest penalty, it was fined $300,000, including $51,700 in restitution, in June 2025 by California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation. The reason for that fine then was for breaching the state’s crypto-kiosk transaction limits and receipt-disclosure rules.

Why is Polygon betting $250 million on payments?

On January 13, Polygon Labs announced that it was going to acquire Coinme and Sequence for a combined $250 million to enable it to offer regulated stablecoin payments in the U.S.

Exactly ten months later, it has completed one leg of the combined deal by closing Coinme.

Coinme was founded in 2014; Sequence, which supplies smart wallets and the Trails cross-chain routing engine, launched in 2017.

Earlier in the year, the Polygon team became vocal about their changing position as a company. A spokesperson said in January, “Polygon Labs is no longer a scaling company, but a blockchain-based payments company.”

Polygon reported on September 29 that its chain has crossed $3 trillion in cumulative stablecoin transfers since 2020.

Polygon says its chain has moved more than $3 trillion in cumulative stablecoin transfers.

It has also been expanding the reach of its stack, as it recently added support for the TRON network in a bid to tap into TRON’s roughly $94 billion in circulating USDT.