The Giugliano upgrade at block 85,268,500 lets block producers announce blocks earlier in the pipeline and embeds fee parameters directly in headers, targeting the two-second finality gap that separates Polygon from card-rail settlement speeds.
Polygon will activate the Giugliano hard fork on 8 April at block height 85,268,500, approximately 2 p.m. UTC, introducing changes to block propagation and fee handling that compress transaction finality by roughly two seconds on the network's proof-of-stake chain.
The upgrade allows block producers to announce blocks earlier in the validation pipeline, shortening the interval between block creation and network-wide confirmation. Fee parameters will be embedded directly in block headers rather than requiring a separate lookup, and new RPC endpoints will deliver fee data more efficiently to wallets and decentralised applications querying the network. The changes are designed to reduce latency for end users and improve the developer experience for applications that depend on predictable fee estimation.
Testing on Polygon's Amoy testnet earlier this year demonstrated the two-second improvement in finality times. For high-frequency DeFi protocols, payment applications and gaming platforms that rely on Polygon's chain, the reduction is operationally meaningful. Settlement layers competing with traditional card payment rails need sub-second or low-single-digit-second confirmation times, and the Giugliano upgrade moves Polygon closer to that threshold.
Node operators must update their software to Bor version 2.7.0 or Erigon version 3.5.0 ahead of the activation block. Regular users, application developers and token holders face no immediate requirements, and the network is expected to continue operating without interruption once the fork completes. Polygon Labs published the node upgrade instructions on its community forum and GitHub repository in late March, giving operators approximately two weeks to prepare.
The hard fork forms part of Polygon's broader Gigagas initiative, a multi-phase roadmap aimed at pushing the network toward dramatically higher throughput targets. Gigagas takes its name from the goal of processing one billion gas units per second, roughly 25 times the current Ethereum mainnet capacity, while maintaining the security and decentralisation properties that underpin Polygon's proof-of-stake consensus. Previous Gigagas milestones included improvements to state synchronisation and parallel block processing that shipped in late 2025.
Polygon's proof-of-stake chain processes approximately $320 million in daily decentralised exchange volume and hosts more than 1,200 active applications, according to data from DeFiLlama and DappRadar. The chain remains the most widely used Ethereum sidechain by transaction count, though it faces intensifying competition from Layer 2 rollups including Arbitrum, Optimism and Base, all of which have made their own finality improvements in recent months.
The timing of the upgrade coincides with a period of renewed activity on Polygon's network. Aave V4's launch on Ethereum mainnet in early April included Polygon as one of the first expansion targets for its hub-and-spoke architecture, and several major NFT marketplaces have announced migrations to Polygon's chain in the second quarter. Faster finality could accelerate those migrations by reducing the friction that users experience when minting, trading or transferring assets on the network.
Polygon's MATIC token, which rebranded to POL under a token migration completed in 2025, traded at approximately $0.38 on Tuesday, down from a January high of $0.52 but up from its March low of $0.29. The token's price performance has lagged behind the broader altcoin market in 2026, partly due to competition from rival scaling solutions and partly due to uncertainty about the long-term value accrual mechanism for POL holders under Polygon's evolving multi-chain strategy.
The Giugliano name follows Polygon's convention of naming hard forks after Italian locations. Previous upgrades on the chain have included the Napoli and Delhi forks, reflecting the Italian heritage of several members of the Polygon Labs engineering team.
Unlike Ethereum's recent Glamsterdam hard fork, which introduced enshrined proposer-builder separation and parallel transaction processing at the consensus layer, Polygon's Giugliano fork focuses on execution-level optimisations that do not alter the chain's consensus mechanism. Validators will continue to operate under the same delegated proof-of-stake model, with checkpoint submissions to Ethereum mainnet providing the security anchor for the chain's state.
Polygon Labs has not disclosed a timeline for the next Gigagas milestone beyond Giugliano, though a roadmap presentation at ETHDenver in March indicated that a second major throughput upgrade is planned for the third quarter of 2026.
The fork's activation block of 85,268,500 corresponds to approximately 157 days of chain history at Polygon's current block production rate of roughly 2.3 seconds per block.
