Rio hardfork upgrades Polygon payments infrastructure with 5,000 TPS and zero reorgs
Polygon Weekly Overview - October 10, 2025
Welcome back to the Polygon Weekly Overview, the best place for the Polygon community 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 addresses: 555.41K (-3.00%)
Polygon daily txns: 3.93M (+6.22%)
Polygon Total Volume Locked (TVL): $1.18B (+1.04%)
Daily DEX Trading Volume: $248.54M (+51.73%)
Daily Stablecoin Transfer Volume: $806M (-0.86%)
NFT weekly sales volume: $3.63M (-12.34%)
Top 3 NFT collections by sales volume:
Courtyard: $2.62M (-28.92%)
neokhat: $134.19K (+129.1%)
Voxies: $73.65K (-14.04%)
The percentages and metrics are based on a 7-day timeframe, unless noted otherwise.
Polygon Spotlight
🟪 What happened: Polygon launched the Rio hardfork on mainnet, a major payments-focused upgrade bringing 5,000 TPS, near-instant finality, and lightweight nodes through stateless validation.
🟪 Why it matters: Rio transforms Polygon into a faster, more reliable payments network by introducing a new block production model called Validator-Elected Block Producer (VEBloP). This architecture increases throughput by over three times while eliminating reorgs, which is the risk of a network rolling back its state.
VEBloP changes the consensus mechanism by having validators vote to select a limited number of block producers, each of which serve for extended periods. This replaces the previous model, in which numerous validators would simultaneously participate in block production during shorter intervals.
With a single producer handling blocks at any given time, the network achieves faster block generation, shrinks confirmation periods, and transactions reach finality almost immediately. When a block is verified, transactions are confirmed immediately and stay confirmed, removing the uncertainty of potential reversals and reorgs.
The upgrade also implements witness-based stateless block validation, making Polygon one of the first blockchains to run this architecture on mainnet. Nodes no longer need to maintain massive databases of historical blockchain data to participate in network validation, as validators can confirm block validity using compact cryptographic witness proofs rather than storing full-state data. This significantly reduces storage demands and consequently makes running nodes more affordable, similar to how light clients work in Ethereum, where nodes can verify transactions without downloading the entire chain state.
This also lowers the barrier to entry for enterprises and developers to participate in the network. Organizations can deploy lightweight nodes with minimal computational overhead, lowering the technical barriers for building payment infrastructure or integrating with Polygon’s network.
Additionally, Rio introduces an updated economic framework to keep validator incentives aligned. Transaction fees and MEV revenue are redistributed between block producers and the broader validator set, letting all validators earn a fair share of fees, even those running lightweight nodes, and ensuring broad participation without the need for high-end hardware.
🟪 The big picture: Rio is a major milestone in Polygon’s gigagas roadmap, which targets 100,000 TPS. Previous upgrades like the Bhilai hardfork and Heimdall v2 brought Polygon to around 1,000 TPS, and Rio pushes this to 5,000 TPS while improving reliability and accessibility.
The timing also aligns with growing payments activity on Polygon. This week turned out to be the best so far this year, facilitating $146.3 million in volume.
By removing technical obstacles like reorg risk and throughput bottlenecks, Rio positions the network to handle global stablecoin payments and real-world asset transactions at scale. The upgrade delivers enterprise-grade performance with better capital efficiency than traditional payment networks while maintaining security and decentralization.
Overall, Rio makes Polygon a production-ready payments chain. The combination of speed, stability and low-cost participation gives institutions, fintechs and developers the infrastructure they need to build global payments rails on blockchain.
Into the Agglayer
Spectra Finance launched on Katana, enabling yield tokenization for AUSD and Katana yearn vault tokens
Lumia Mainnet upgraded to Pessimistic Proofs, eliminating prover costs and complex transaction limits
Check out AggKit, a new, standardized toolkit for connecting non-CDK chains to Agglayer’s ecosystem
Tune into Agglayer’s “Gaming Without Fragmentation” X Space, featuring Immutable and Polygon leaders discussing cross-chain gaming solutions
Ecosystem Showcase
AMINA Bank launches a regulated POL staking service that offers institutional investors 15% yield
ICE announces a strategic investment into Polymarket to expand prediction markets
Listen to the Polygon x Payy X Space to learn about stablecoin native banking
Velora DEX has processed over $131B in volume on Polygon
Tune into the Polygon Leadership Fireside Chat for updates on the ecosystem and roadmap insights
Join in the fun
Join the Binance Creator Pad to complete tasks and earn POL
Polygon’s Dubai accelerator program for Payments & RWAs is launching on October 13, and will offer mentorship and dedicated capital
Billions Supermasks NFT is available on Polygon
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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.