Polygon Giugliano Hard Fork Approaching: Faster Transaction Confirmations, Improved Fee Transparency

Gate News: Polygon announced that its Giugliano hard fork will be activated on the mainnet at block 85,268,500 at 2:00 PM (UTC) on April 8. This upgrade is designed to improve transaction confirmation speed and fee transparency, laying the groundwork for high-throughput payments and tokenized assets. A hard fork allows block producers to publish blocks in advance, shortening the irreversible transaction window. Verification on the Amoy testnet last month showed that transaction confirmation time was reduced by about 2 seconds.

The Giugliano upgrade will also directly embed EIP-1559-style fee parameters into the block header, enabling developers and decentralized applications to efficiently access gas pricing information at the protocol level. At the same time, a brand-new remote procedure call (RPC) endpoint will launch in parallel, allowing wallets and applications to query fees directly without relying on external estimates. Polygon said that this upgrade achieves faster finality through quicker block publication, fee parameters in the block header, and RPC support. Node operators need to update Bor to v2.7.0 or Erigon to v3.5.0; ordinary users do not need to take action.

This upgrade comes after Polygon’s network went through multiple disruptions throughout 2025. Last September, a consensus vulnerability caused finality delays of 15 minutes, prompting Polygon to urgently hard fork to restore operations. Two months ago, a Heimdall consensus-layer vulnerability was triggered when validating nodes exited, resulting in about an hour-long finality interruption. In December 2025, the Madhugiri upgrade increased throughput to about 1,400 transactions per second. In March 2026, the Lisovo hard fork improved smart contract reliability and provided gas subsidies for AI agent transactions.

Giugliano aligns with the Gigagas roadmap Polygon published in June 2025, with the goal of achieving 100k TPS for global payments and real-world asset settlement. This phased plan is being rolled out step by step starting with the Bhilai upgrade. Currently, the mainnet processing capacity is about 2,600 transactions per second, while Polygon’s internal development network exceeds 5,000 TPS. Faster finality and improved fee tooling will become important indicators for future user growth and ecosystem activity.

As of the time of publication, despite strong market expectations for the hard fork, the Polygon token POL is down nearly 5%, trading at $0.09003.