The Polygon Foundation has confirmed that the Giugliano hardfork will be activated on the mainnet at block 85.268.500, around 14:00 UTC on April 8.

With this upgrade, the network aims to become faster and provide more transparency in costs. This is part of their larger plan to increase the capacity for payments and tokenized assets.

What changes with the Giugliano upgrade

The hardfork allows block producers to announce blocks earlier. As a result, users have to wait less time for a transaction to become final.

Testing on the Amoy testnet last month showed that the time until a transaction is finalized became about two seconds faster.

Giugliano also adds EIP-1559-like fee settings directly to the block headers. This allows developers and applications more efficient access to gas price data at the protocol level.

New Remote Procedure Call (RPC) endpoints are also part of the fee change. This allows wallets and decentralized applications to directly request cost information without relying on external estimates.

"This upgrade provides faster finality as block producers announce blocks earlier, adds fee parameters directly to block headers, and introduces new RPC support for fee data," shared Polygon.

Node operators must update to Bor v2.7.0 or Erigon v3.5.0 before the time of activation. Ordinary users and developers do not need to do anything themselves.

A more stable chain after a difficult 2025

This upgrade follows a turbulent period for the reliability of the Polygon (POL) network. In September 2025, a consensus bug caused delays in finality of up to 15 minutes, after which an emergency hardfork was needed to restore normal network operations.

Two months earlier, a validator who stopped caused a bug in the Heimdall consensus layer, resulting in the network having no finality for an hour.

Since then, the team has executed several hardforks to stabilize the network. The Madhugiri upgrade in December 2025 increased the capacity to approximately 1,400 transactions per second.

In March 2026, the Lisovo hardfork brought improvements in the reliability of smart contracts, and AI agent transactions received subsidies on gas costs.

Part of the Gigagas vision

Giugliano is part of the Gigagas roadmap of Polygon, announced in June 2025. This plan aims for 100,000 TPS for global payments and settlement of real-world assets.

The phased plan began with the Bhilai upgrade in July 2025, which increased the capacity above 1,000 TPS and reduced the final confirmation time from over 60 seconds to about 5 seconds.

The network now processes around 2,600 TPS, while internal devnets even exceed 5,000. Whether the faster finality and better fee data will indeed lead to more usage of the network will have to be shown by the data in the coming weeks.

Despite expectations surrounding the hardfork, the token of Polygon, POL, was nearly 5% lower and traded at $0.09003 at the time of writing.