Polygon launches Bhilai Hardfork, boosting network throughput 50% to over 1,000 TPS

Polygon Weekly Overview - July 4, 2025

Welcome back to the Polygon Weekly Overview. The best place for Polygon community members to get up to speed on the chain’s latest updates, metrics, releases, insights, ecosystem developments and more. All in one place.

By The Numbers

• Polygon daily active users: 626.66K (-5.99%)

• Polygon daily txns: 3.62M (-10.84%)

• Polygon Total Volume Locked (TVL): $1.1B (+4.17%)

• NFT weekly sales volume: $23.78M (+47.87%)

• Top 3 NFT collections by sales volume:

  • Courtyard: $18.81M (+27.27%)

  • DNS: $3.78M (+4760.72%)

  • OKX NFT Creation: $74.97K (+2314.97%)

The percentages and metrics are based on a 7-day timeframe, unless noted otherwise.

Polygon Spotlight

🟪What happened: Polygon launched the Bhilai Hardfork, increasing network throughput by 50% to over 1,000 TPS, while maintaining sub one cent transaction fees.

🟪Why does it matter: This first milestone in the gigagas roadmap gives Polygon’s infrastructure a major upgrade as retail and institutional adoption accelerates across payments, lending and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs).

The hardfork implements three key improvements that work together, like upgrading a highway system for rush hour traffic.

First, the gas limit increase from 30 million to 45 million acts like adding extra lanes to a busy highway, allowing more transactions to process simultaneously. This directly enables the 1,000+ TPS throughput that institutional players like Stripe, Nexo and Reliance Jio need for their blockchain infrastructure.

Second, the BaseFeeChangeDenominator adjustment to 64 helps to smooth gas price volatility during network congestion. Think of it as implementing dynamic toll pricing that prevents sudden spikes, while still keeping transaction costs fractions of a cent per transaction.

Third, the Bor upgrade to Go-Ethereum v1.15.x brings support for Ethereum's upcoming Pectra upgrade EIPs, particularly EIP-7702 for account abstraction. This enables user experiences that are familiar in web2 with gasless transactions and PassKey authentication that can remove friction for mainstream adoption.

Essentially, account abstraction through EIP-7702 allows users to interact with blockchain apps without managing private keys or gas fees directly. Apps can sponsor transactions and use simple authentication methods, making the blockchain invisible to end users, similar to how Polymarket achieved mainstream adoption in prediction markets.

🟪The big picture: The timing of this upgrade aligns with Polygon's growing ecosystem momentum. The network currently has a stablecoin market cap of $2.47 billion and has processed over $500 billion in stablecoin transaction volume since the start of the year. Polygon is also a leader in RWAs as the chain with the most tokenized RWAs.

The next major upgrade, Heimdall v2, launches mid-July with ~5-second finality and reduced block times, setting the foundation for 5,000 TPS by Q3. This roadmap positions Polygon as a settlement layer for institutional payments and RWA tokenization, where speed and cost predictability are key.

Later this year, Polygon plans to integrate into Agglayer’s cross-chain interoperability layer. This will unify its liquidity, users and performance within a multi-chain ecosystem.

With institutional demand increasing and retail users expecting simpler onchain experiences, performance upgrades and account abstraction can bridge the gap by making blockchain technology invisible to end users. This can potentially create a unified web3 ecosystem where both institutional and consumer applications can operate with the simplicity of traditional web2 platforms.

Into the Agglayer

• Katana has locked in over $240M in productive pre-deposited assets

• Check out the this guide to learn how to launch a custom L2 or rollup using Agglayer CDK

• Agora partnered with Conduit to enable chains like Katana to earn yield on stablecoin assets

• QuickSwap, a DEX connected to Agglayer, announced it will be expanding its connectivity to Base

• Learn about the current state of scaling decentralized settlement in a multi-chain world in this video with Polygon Labs Head of Protocol and Research DevRel Coogan Brennan

Ecosystem Showcase

• Learn about the Polygon Community Grants Program Season 2 winners

• Circle’s CCTP V2 is live on Polygon allowing USDC to flow natively 1:1 between chains

• Router Protocol now supports native USDC transactions on Polygon

• CoW DAO launched on Polygon to provide intent-based trading and protection on gas, slippage and MEV

• Polygon hit a milestone of 500K unique active addresses on the network

Join in the fun

Want to dive into the Polygon ecosystem full-time? Find the latest job postings here.

• Earn points for providing liquidity to Smart Pools on Polygon

• Join Binance “soft staking” to earn staking rewards from your spot account

To get this newsletter delivered to your inbox every week, subscribe here.

This product was built by Token Relations.

This information is for entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial advice, nor should it be used to make investment decisions. Cryptocurrencies are high risk and you should consult a financial professional before making any financial decisions. Make sure you do your own research.