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.

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

🟪What happened: Polygon launched Heimdall v2, “the most technically complex hard-fork Polygon PoS has seen since its launch in 2020,” Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal describes it as. The upgrade aims to reduce finality to approximately 5 seconds and eliminate reorgs beyond 2 blocks.

🟪Why does it matter: The upgrade rebuilds Polygon’s foundational consensus layer from the ground up. While last week's Bhilai hardfork increased transactional throughput, Heimdall v2 modernizes the core infrastructure that validates and finalizes all network activity.

Heimdall v2 provides major improvements that boost network performance on Polygon. Notably, the network’s finality drops to 5 seconds and reorgs are eliminated after 2 blocks. This means transactions become irreversible almost instantly, matching traditional payment processing speeds, while still maintaining blockchain security. Additionally, the faster confirmation of transactions can provide a smoother user experience across decentralized applications (dApps), and can make for safer bridging of assets between chains.

For DeFi protocols, these help improve the traditionally longer confirmation delays for transactions, while for institutional users, it provides faster settlement thare important for high value transactions.

The upgrade also modernizes Polygon's consensus architecture from legacy 2018-era code to current standards. Specifically, Heimdall v2 migrates from Tendermint + Cosmos-SDK v0.37 to CometBFT + Cosmos-SDK v0.50, representing a shift from foundational blockchain technologies to its modern successors. This brings improved consensus-to-application communication and optimistic execution capabilities, removing performance bottlenecks and the technical debt that has accumulated over years of operation.

🟪The big picture: This infrastructure overhaul builds toward Polygon's Gigagas roadmap toward 5,000 TPS by Q3 and eventually 100,000 TPS by 2026. The new consensus layer can handle significantly higher throughput without compromising the fast finality that makes Polygon competitive against traditional payment rails.

These improvements align with Polygon's broader Agglayer vision of fast interop and less than 5 second of finality. Heimdall v2’s 5 second finality and less frequent reorgs can create a more reliable foundation for cross-chain operations on the interoperability layer.

The modernized consensus architecture also provides the scalability needed for better user experiences while still managing unified liquidity and state across multiple chains. When Polygon connects to Agglayer, these infrastructure upgrades can enable faster cross-chain bridging and create an aggregated unified layer that delivers smoother user experiences across the entire ecosystem.

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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.