Polygon, one of the leading Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solutions, has officially launched the Rio hard fork on its Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mainnet. This major upgrade is designed to supercharge the network’s performance, making it faster, lighter, and more suitable for global payments and real-world asset transactions.
What Is the Rio Hard Fork?
The Rio hard fork is part of Polygon’s broader “GigaGas” roadmap, aimed at drastically improving scalability. The update brings two groundbreaking changes:
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A new block production model, and
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Stateless validation for improved efficiency.
At the heart of the Rio upgrade is the Validator-Elected Block Producer (VEBloP) system. This innovation allows Polygon validators to elect a small group of block producers who create blocks for extended periods, reducing overhead and improving consistency. By doing this, Polygon minimizes chain reorganizations (reorgs), speeds up block times, and ensures fairer distribution of fees. All validators remain incentivized, which strengthens the network’s decentralization and long-term security.
Stateless Validation and PIP-72
Another core component of the Rio upgrade is PIP-72, which introduces witness-based stateless validation. This means that network nodes can now verify transactions and blocks without needing to store the entire blockchain state. In practical terms, this drastically reduces hardware requirements and speeds up performance — a critical improvement for developers and businesses looking to scale on Polygon.
By cutting down on storage needs and increasing throughput, this change lays the groundwork for high-performance applications that demand both speed and cost-efficiency.
Looking Ahead: 5,000 TPS and Beyond
With Rio in place, Polygon is setting its sights on achieving up to 5,000 transactions per second (TPS). This would position the network as one of the fastest and most reliable blockchain infrastructures available, capable of handling mass adoption scenarios across industries such as fintech, gaming, supply chain, and more.
The Rio hard fork is more than just a technical upgrade — it’s a leap toward building a more scalable, inclusive, and powerful Web3 ecosystem.
