Tangem turns self-custody into everyday spending on Polygon

Sending money across a border still costs more and takes longer than it should. A transfer clears in days instead of seconds, a conversion quietly takes a cut, and a card declines in the one country where you needed it to work.

For Tangem, the frustrating part isn’t that payments are broken. It’s that the infrastructure to fix them already exists, and most money still isn’t using it.

“It doesn’t have to be that slow and expensive for everyone. Moving money abroad shouldn’t feel like moving money abroad. We live in a globalized world where we finally have enough on-chain infrastructure solutions to make it easy.”

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Stepan Nilov

Tangem Pay is a virtual Visa card that users in eligible countries, including the US, can get in under ten minutes, on a plan that starts at nothing. Crypto stays in the self-custodial Tangem Wallet, protected by the hardware security layer in the card or ring. When a user wants to spend, they move funds into their Tangem Pay account — a custodial account, by design, because that’s what makes a Visa card behave like a Visa card — and the rest settles on Polygon.

Low fees, speed, and reliability were the baseline. Every network on the shortlist had to clear them. What made Polygon the only candidate was everything around the chain: the payments infrastructure already in place and the ecosystem of issuers, processors, and stablecoin liquidity Tangem Pay needed on day one. Polygon is also covering gas fees through the launch period, which removes the last piece of on-chain friction a cardholder would otherwise have to think about.

“Polygon covers the gas fees as part of the launch period. It makes Tangem Pay feel like a regular Visa card. And that’s what we aimed for, this kind of TradFi experience in the best sense of that word. TradFi without the legacy fees.”

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Stepan Nilov

Tangem Pay is early, and the adoption and volume figures aren’t public yet. What is already clear is the experience, which is the part Tangem set out to get right.

A card takes minutes to get and costs nothing on the entry plan. Transactions settle on Polygon cheaply enough and fast enough that a cardholder never has to think about the chain underneath. And the card holds up where cards usually don’t — abroad, at the point of sale, against a local currency.

“Our team member, she just came back from Chile. She traveled across Chile. And she said that it was the best conversion rate to Chilean peso. And she tried many, many cards. So I guess that tells you something.”

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Stepan Nilov

The bottom line: Tangem needed a network that could make spending from a crypto wallet feel like using a regular Visa card, and Polygon was the only one that offered the fees, the speed, and the ecosystem to do it.