Polygon Launches Madhugiri Hardfork, Boosting Throughput 33% and Targeting Enterprise Adoption

Polygon has successfully deployed the Madhugiri Hardfork, a major protocol upgrade for its Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network, on December 9, 2025. The upgrade, which went live around 10 a.m. UTC, is designed to significantly enhance network stability, performance, and future scalability.

The core technical improvement is a 33% increase in network throughput, with developers stating future speed increases can be achieved through simple configuration changes, "like flipping a few switches." A key feature is the reduction of block consensus time to one second from two, enabled by PIP-75, allowing for faster block announcements.

The hardfork integrates several Ethereum Fusaka EIPs (EIP-7823, EIP-7825, EIP-7883) to improve cross-chain security and efficiency. These proposals make heavy mathematical operations like ModExp more efficient by capping their gas consumption, preventing single transactions from monopolizing network resources and ensuring smoother operation.

This upgrade is part of Polygon's broader GigaGas roadmap, which has a long-term goal of reaching 100,000 transactions per second. It follows a series of recent major upgrades: the Heimdall v2 fork in early 2025, which reduced finality to five seconds; the Bhilai Hardfork in July, which pushed throughput past 1,000 TPS; and the Rio upgrade in October, which introduced a Validator-Elected Block Producer model and stateless validation.

Polygon Labs executives highlight that these cumulative enhancements position the network for high-trust, high-frequency use cases like stablecoin transfers and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization. Aishwary Gupta, Global Head of Payments and RWAs at Polygon Labs, has forecasted a "stablecoin supercycle" and emphasized that infrastructure capable of predictable, stable performance is a prerequisite for unlocking trillions in institutional capital for RWAs.