First Milestone to Gigagas, Live: Polygon PoS Goes Faster, Supports 1000 TPS with Bhilai Hardfork

tl;dr

• 1000 TPS, live, marking a 50% throughput increase that enables money to money to faster
• Maintaining industry-low fees and fewer spikes through gas optimization
• Support for Ethereum Pectra EIPs, like 7702, for account abstraction, better user and developer experience
• First milestone in Polygon’s renewed roadmap for payments and RWAs, going gigagas
• ~5s finality coming by mid-July in next major upgrade, decreasing blocktimes and setting the stage for 5000 TPS by Q3

Polygon just got faster. 

The Bhilai Hardfork goes live today, amplifying throughput, smoothing out gas fees, and extending support for account abstraction via EIP-7702. 

It’s the first milestone on the gigagas roadmap (100k TPS), allowing money to move even faster.

Polygon needs increased capacity for accelerating demand in payments and RWAs. The upgrade is like widening a major thoroughfare that tunnels through a mountain, allowing more cars to travel through at the same time.

Major institutional integrations on Polygon like Stripe, Nexo, Reliance Jio, BlindPay, and more are laying down TradFi infrastructure on blockchain rails. And Polymarket has integrated to become X’s official prediction market, bringing 110M+ total transactions. All of this has led to increased velocity for stablecoins and payments on Polygon: Over $2.6B stables locked onchain, with $1.7B in monthly transfers across 2.5M addresses. 

Today’s hardfork accelerates capacity. Good for users, good for devs. 

Get nerdsniped below.

Increasing gas limit for higher TPS; lower and smoother gas fees

The hardfork raises the gas limit from 30M to 45M, allowing the network to support over 1000 TPS. Combined with prior improvements that build on parallelized block execution, Polygon continues to innovate the mainchain to index hard on creating the best payment and RWA rails in the industry. 

A change to the BaseFeeChangeDenominator lowers base gas even more, still fractions of $.01, while smoothing pricing volatility during congestion. 

Think industry-low fees, without volatility. 

Pectra, get over here: Polygon support for EIP-7702 account abstraction

Bhilai upgrades Bor, Polygon’s transaction execution layer, to Go-Ethereum (GETH) v1.15.x.

Effectively, this upgrade to Bor enables support for the Pectra EIPs, including 7702. 

What does this mean for users? Better, seamless user experience. Think: Gasless transactions and PassKey-based authentication. Users can just use an app, without worrying about the blockchain technology underneath. This is how Polymarket has jiu-jitsued crypto’s unique selling points to become a leading global predictions market.

Now devs and apps on Polygon can integrate account abstraction to adopt Web2-like experiences, easily onboarding new users unfamiliar to Web3. 

Included Polygon Improvement Proposals (PIPs)

The following PIPs were included in this hardfork. The Polygon Forum is always the best place to scan for upcoming upgrades. Click and read to understand each component of this hardfork in more depth.

PIP-58, “Increase BaseFeeChangeDenominator to 64”: 

• Reduces gas volatility during high demand

PiP 60, “Increase block gas limit to 45M” 

• 50% increase in the chain throughput to over 1000 TPS
• Maintain low transaction fees (<0.01) in POL by increasing block gas limit to meet increased demand for block space

PIP-61, Bor Upgrade for Ethereum Pectra EIPs

• Upgrades Bor to Go-Ethereum v1.15.x and adds support for EIP-7702

What’s next?

Haven’t you heard? We’re in shipping mode. And we’re shipping fast and hard. 

From new the revenue lego for EVM chains in VaultBridge to Agglayer v0.3 to incubating a purpose built DeFi chain in Katana that is now live on mainnet, Polygon Labs. Is. Shipping. Agglayer Breakout Program is…breaking out, with Katana, ZisK, Miden, and more bringing increased value to Agglayer—and therefore, to POL stakers that secure the network.  

The roadmap leads to gigagas for Polygon. 

Next up is the Heimdall v2 upgrade, scheduled for mid July, which will significantly decrease blocktimes, bring ~5s finality, and set the stage for 5000 TPS support by Q3. Relevant PIPs below:

• PIP-43 (CometBFT v0.38.x)
• PIP-44 (Cosmos SDK v0.50.x)
• PIP-62 (Heimdall v2)

See you out there, builder!