Polygon Hits ~5 Second Fast Finality in Significant Upgrade

tl;dr

• Good for payments & RWAs: Finality is everything for payments solutions and RWAs; when finality is fast, users benefit
• Good for builders: Faster consensus significantly reduces the chance and depth of reorgs, bringing an environment for better UX
• Superior onboarding for users: Centralized exchanges can confirm transactions faster
• Follows Bhilai Hardfork: A recent hardfork accelerated Polygon to 1000 TPS and extended support for account abstraction in EIP-7702; coupled with ~5 second finality, Polygon is becoming the premiere chain for payments and RWAs

A new upgrade for Polygon brings transaction finality to ~5 seconds, down from 1-2 minutes, alongside other payments-focused improvements for better user and developer experience. 

Heimdall v2 checks off another significant milestone on Polygon’s gigagas roadmap: 

• Accelerates finality by decreasing time to consensus 
• Cements network stability
• Modernizes and future-proofs core infrastructure

Fast finality helps users onboard to Polygon more seamlessly than ever before. Centralized exchanges can now enable user funds to move twelve times faster. 

And developers can build high-throughput, low-cost payments solutions onchain, leaning on Polygon’s battle-tested stability at a fraction of time to finality. Faster finality significantly reduces the chance and depth of reorgs.

Earlier this month, Polygon successfully increased throughput to over 1000 TPS in a hardfork, extending support to Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade. Smart accounts are growing rapidly on Polygon, after the hardfork. Combined with today’s news, Polygon has taken two major strides to become the go-to chain for payments and RWAs. With $2.7B in stablecoin supply, Polygon continues to be a leader in payments velocity against other chains, crossing $1B in payments in the first six months of 2025 alone.

Together, these upgrades allow builders to create experiences that just feel like the internet: easy, account-abstracted logins with high throughput and fast finality. 

Importantly, Heimdall v2 will play a major role in facilitating the best UX in onchain payment integrations, from fintech startups to traditional finance. By modernizing core architecture, Polygon can offer real-time inclusion guarantees that are critical for high-frequency use cases.

Understand the technical aspects of the upgrade in the developer docs, here. 

What fast finality on Polygon means for you

Once a transaction is confirmed and it can’t be reversed or altered, it is considered final.

In a blockchain context, we call this finality. For financial applications and tokenized assets, finality is everything. Institutions and people need to know when a transaction can’t be rolled back. The tricky part, from a decentralized point of view, is providing fast finality in a stable network without compromising on security or decentralization.

This is exactly what the Heimdall v2 upgrade brings. 

Speed, but with stability. Improved consensus operations, without added trust. 

The Heimdall v2 upgrade sets builders free:

1. Better payments rails that enable faster finality than Venmo, so users and apps can send and confirm a stablecoin transfer in real time.
2. Better RWA rails to provide fast, final settlement for tokenized T-bills, stocks, or real estate, making Polygon viable for regulated financial flows and custodial systems.

But Heimdall v2 is about more than speed. 

With finality down to ~5 seconds, builders can create high-performance apps with real-time guarantees. Users get the confidence that their transactions are settled, fast and for good.

Rebuilding Heimdall with a focus on payments 

Heimdall v2 rebuilds the consensus client from the ground up. 

As Polygon PoS’s consensus layer—the part of the network that confirms block finality—Heimdall v2 has been retrofitted with a modern, streamlined engine that runs faster and more efficiently. This upgrade is cleaner for apps, making operations simpler and paving the way for future improvements like instant finality and native support for large-scale apps.

The following PIPs were included in this upgrade. You can read about these changes in more depth on the Polygon Forum:

PIP-43, “Replace tendermint with cometBFT in Heimdall”: 

• This proposal upgrades Heimdall’s consensus layer by replacing Tendermint with CometBFT v0.38.x

PIP-44, “Upgrade cosmos-sdk in Heimdall” 

• Remove tech debt currently anchoring Heimdall to an outdated cosmos-sdk.

PIP-62, Heimdall v2 Migration

• Deprecate Heimdall v1 and activate Heimdall v2 features on Polygon.

What’s next?

With Bhilai (1000 TPS, EIP-7702, stable gas) and Heimdall v2 now live, Polygon has become the premiere chain for fast, low-cost payments and RWAs.

That’s the end goal: building a chain that can support the financial world, especially for payments and RWAs.

Next up? Polygon PoS is joining the Agglayer for unified liquidity, cross-chain interop, and multichain unity by the end of the year. In the coming months, single block instant finality is going to roll out, Polygon can hit 5000+ TPS, and there are more opportunities for POL stakers to help validators to secure the network.

Buckle in. Build mode activated.

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About Polygon Labs:

Polygon Labs is a Web3 software company developing Polygon Proof-of-Stake network, the premiere blockchain for payments and RWAs, and Agglayer, a unified web of chains that feels like the Internet. Polygon is known as the low-cost, high velocity network, with billions secured in stablecoins, supporting a robust payments ecosystem to help grow Agglayer use cases in an interoperable Web3. Research from Polygon Labs has contributed to the development of widely-adopted zero-knowledge technology, with successful, independent projects incubated through the Agglayer Breakout Program, such as Katana, ZisK, Miden, PrivadoID, and more

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