Polygon Closes Coinme Deal and Gains 37 Money Transmitter Licenses

Polygon Labs completed its purchase of Coinme on Wednesday, nine months after agreeing to buy the Seattle cash-to-crypto firm. The acquisition carries 37 state money transmitter licenses, 11 state exemptions and a registration with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network as a money services business into Polygon's payments arm, which the company says now reaches 48 US states. Polygon sells that capability as Open Money Stack, one integration that takes dollars in by bank transfer, card or cash, settles on a blockchain and pays out in local currency. Four companies were named as first users. What Coinme cost on its own has never been published.

The license book is the asset

Polygon's own post, Cointelegraph, Parameter, The Crypto Times and CoinLaw all carry the same three numbers: 37 licenses, 11 exemptions, 48 states. Not one of them names the two states outside that coverage. A money transmitter license is a state permission to move customer funds, granted one state at a time.

Coinme has run a cash-to-crypto network since 2014. At the January announcement Polygon put it at more than 50,000 retail locations and over a million users, figures Cointelegraph and Parameter both attribute to the company and not to any audit. The Block's report that day carried the location figure and no user count. Architect Partners, which advised on the sale, describes the firm as licensed in 48 states and Puerto Rico. One outlet carries that.

January's price still covers two companies

The definitive agreements announced on 13 January 2026 were worth more than $250 million for Coinme and the wallet infrastructure provider Sequence together. CoinLaw writes the same deal as about $250 million. How the money splits between the two has never been disclosed, in January or this week. The Block reported at the time that Sequence would finalize in January and Coinme in the second quarter. The close landed more than three months past that window, and The Crypto Times notes that Wednesday's post explains nothing about the gap.

Headcount moved alongside the deal, and the two accounts of when do not line up. Cointelegraph ties role consolidation to the January announcement, where chief executive Marc Boiron said the company needed its team to become a "leading payments-focused blockchain company". CoinLaw puts the cuts in July, while the transaction was being readied. Neither gives a number.

Who is plugged in on day one

None of the four launch customers is a bank. Banks are working the same ground separately, with Lloyds and Visa moving $750,000 in USDC over a seven-day pilot this month. Tazapay, which serves more than 1,000 enterprises and fintechs in over 30 countries, is using the on-ramp, off-ramp and wallet tooling. CoinLaw notes that Tazapay is itself being bought by Circle, a deal it expects to close in 2027; no other outlet here mentions that. Mesh is adding a fiat on-ramp inside a network of 300-plus wallets and exchanges. Toku runs payroll in over 100 countries. Kira offers the stack beside ACH, Fedwire, FedNow and SWIFT.

"The bottleneck in stablecoin payments is access," said Bam Azizi, chief executive of Mesh.

Polygon published that sentence and The Crypto Times carries it word for word. CoinLaw renders it loosely, as access being the choke point.

The record that came with the licenses

One part of Coinme's history is missing. The Crypto Times, alone among the outlets checked, reports that the firm was the first company penalized under California's Digital Financial Assets Law, the state's 2023 licensing statute, in a June 2025 order from the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation. It puts the penalty at $300,000 with $51,700 in restitution, for breaching a $1,000 daily kiosk limit per customer and leaving disclosures off receipts, and describes a second order requiring $175,000 more in refunds. We could not find any other outlet carrying it. Polygon's post does not mention it.

Several things stay unstated. Whether the Coinme brand and its cash network continue, and whether POL has any role in moving money through the stack, are absent from Wednesday's announcement. CoinLaw says the unified integration is in technical preview for selected customers, with no date for general release. That claim rests on one outlet too.