Polygon’s Giugliano Hardfork Signals a Stability Push After a Rough 2025

The Polygon Foundation confirmed the Giugliano hardfork will activate on mainnet at block 85,268,500, roughly 2 p.m. UTC on April 8.

The upgrade targets faster finality and improved fee transparency as part of the network’s broader push toward higher throughput for payments and tokenized assets.

What the Giugliano Upgrade Changes

The hardfork allows block producers to announce blocks earlier, reducing the time users wait for transaction confirmation to become irreversible.

Polygon Giugliano hardfork countdown. Source: Polygonscan

Testing on the Amoy testnet last month showed a roughly two-second improvement in finality time.

Giugliano also embeds EIP-1559-style fee parameters directly into block headers. This gives developers and applications more efficient access to gas pricing data at the protocol level.

New Remote Procedure Call (RPC) endpoints accompany the fee changes. These let wallets and decentralized applications query fee information without relying on external estimations.

“This upgrade enables faster finality by letting producers announce blocks earlier, adds fee parameters directly in block headers, and introduces new RPC support for fee data,” Polygon shared.

Node operators must update Bor to v2.7.0 or Erigon to v3.5.0 before the activation block. Regular users and developers do not need to take any action.

A Stability Push After a Rough 2025

The upgrade arrives after a turbulent stretch for Polygon (POL) network reliability. In September 2025, a consensus bug caused finality delays of up to 15 minutes, prompting an emergency hard fork to restore normal operations.

Two months earlier, a validator exit triggered a bug in the Heimdall consensus layer that halted finality for roughly one hour.

Since then, the team has shipped several hardforks to tighten stability. The Madhugiri upgrade in December 2025 raised throughput to approximately 1,400 transactions per second.

The Lisovo hardfork in March 2026 added improvements to smart contract reliability and subsidized gas for AI agent transactions.

Part of the Gigagas Vision

Giugliano fits within Polygon’s Gigagas roadmap, announced in June 2025, which targets 100,000 TPS for global-scale payments and real-world asset settlement.

The phased plan began with the Bhilai upgrade in July 2025, which boosted throughput to over 1,000 TPS and reduced finality from over 60 seconds to roughly 5.

The network now processes around 2,600 TPS, with internal devnets reportedly hitting above 5,000. Whether faster finality and better fee tooling translate into sustained usage growth will depend on post-upgrade network data in the coming weeks.

Polygon (POL) Price Performance. Source: Coingecko

Despite anticipation for the harfork, Polygon’s powering token, POL, was down by almost 5%, trading for $0.09003 as of this writing.

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