According to the Polygon Foundation, the Giugliano hard fork will be activated on the main network at block 85,268,500. It is expected that the upgrade will go live around 2 p.m. UTC on April 8, targeting faster transaction finality and clearer fee data.
The upgrade allows earlier block announcements by producers. This reduces the waiting time for transactions to become irreversible. Faster confirmation is a key focus of this change.
Testing on the Amoy testnet showed measurable gains. Finality time improved by about two seconds during trials. This indicates a practical speed increase under real conditions.
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Fee Transparency and RPC Access Upgrade
The upgrade introduces fee settings of the EIP-1559 type in block headers. This change enables direct access to gas pricing data in block headers. It means that developers have direct access to such information, which makes additional computational layers unnecessary.
Moreover, the upgrade comes with new RPC endpoints, which will allow wallets and DApps to gain access to the fee-related data without the help of additional estimation services.
As stated by the Polygon Foundation, the Giugliano upgrade includes several changes in order to increase the efficiency of the protocol. Such changes are earlier block announcements, direct fee data, and updated RPC endpoints.
Node operators are to upgrade their software before the activation date to Bor v2.7.0 or Erigon v3.5.0. Regular users and developers do not have any actions to perform.
The upgrade comes after a series of technical problems experienced in 2025. Specifically, there was a problem in the consensus of the network, leading to a finality delay of 15 minutes. To solve this issue, the emergency hardfork was deployed.
There is also an incident with the Heimdall layer. It started because of the validator exit and led to the finality delay of nearly one hour.
These incidents led to multiple upgrades, and the first of them is Madhugiri. It allowed boosting network throughput to 1,400 transactions per second.
Polygon Foundation Advances Gigagas Roadmap
The Lisovo hardfork in March 2026 included additional upgrades. These improved the robustness of smart contracts. They also included subsidized gas costs for AI transaction support.
Giugliano is part of the Gigagas roadmap unveiled in June 2025. Its objective is to achieve 100,000 transactions per second. It prioritizes scalability for payment systems and tokenized assets.
Previous stages of the roadmap demonstrated success. The Bhilai upgrade increased capacity beyond 1,000 TPS. It also lowered finality latency from over 60 seconds to about 5 seconds.
Current network capacity levels are around 2,600 TPS. Internal development networks have been able to surpass 5,000 TPS. Additional gains will rely on actual results post-upgrade.
Despite the anticipated hard fork, market sentiment has remained weak. According to CoinGecko data, the POL token fell by 3.1%. At the time of writing, it is trading at $0.09024.
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