Polygon is preparing to activate the Giugliano hardfork on April 8, 2026, at block height 85,268,500, with the upgrade expected around 2 p.m. UTC. The release is aimed squarely at the instability that hit the network in 2025, when outages, delayed finality and erratic fee conditions disrupted normal operations.
At the center of the upgrade is an effort to make the network more predictable for validators, node operators and applications. Giugliano is designed to strengthen finality, reduce reorganization risk and give wallets and dApps a clearer on-chain view of transaction costs.
Giugliano is built to fix the weak points exposed last year
The hardfork introduces two major protocol changes that developers have tied directly to the failures seen in 2025. The first is the return of the PIP-66 changes, which are meant to accelerate block propagation and reduce the time window in which chain reorganizations can occur.
That matters because earlier block announcements can make the network more stable under load. By pushing proposed blocks through the network faster, Polygon is trying to shorten time-to-finality and reduce the sort of confirmation uncertainty that became visible during last year’s disruption.
The second major change brings EIP-1559-style fee parameters directly into block headers. That adjustment gives the protocol a canonical base fee and optional priority fee structure inside signed blocks, allowing wallets and decentralized applications to read gas pricing directly from the chain instead of relying so heavily on external estimation tools.
Developers say early testing supports the direction of the upgrade. Results from the Amoy testnet indicated roughly a two-second improvement in finality time, which Polygon is presenting as evidence that Giugliano can directly address the long confirmation delays that surfaced during the September 2025 consensus bug.
The fork also raises the operational stakes for validators and infrastructure providers
For node operators and validators, this is not an optional update. Anyone participating in the network will need to move to Bor v2.7.0 or Erigon v3.5.0 before the activation block, because older clients will not understand the new block format or fee fields and will fall out of sync with mainnet.
That creates an immediate operational risk for infrastructure teams. Operators who fail to upgrade will lose consensus compatibility, face service interruption and, under the new rules, could also expose themselves to missed attestations, equivocation issues and possible slashing penalties.
The appeal of the upgrade is more practical than technical. If the testnet improvements translate cleanly to mainnet, Giugliano should deliver faster confirmations and more predictable fees while reducing the number of failed transactions caused by poor gas estimation.
Polygon is also treating this release as more than a maintenance patch. The company frames Giugliano as a foundational step within its broader Gigagas roadmap, meaning the stability and fee improvements introduced here are meant to support later work aimed at much higher throughput.
In that sense, the hardfork is both corrective and strategic. It is meant to fix the network conditions that caused friction in 2025 while laying the groundwork for the next phase of Polygon’s scaling ambitions.