After a successful testnet run, a bleeding-edge upgrade is now live on Polygon mainnet.
The Rio hardfork marks a major step in Polygon’s gigagas roadmap, as the network continues evolving its core architecture to meet the demands of global payments and real-world assets (RWAs).
With Rio live, Polygon PoS becomes faster, lighter, and more energy-efficient than ever.
By making validation less resource-intensive, the upgrade opens the door for more validators (in the future) to join the network with lower hardware costs. The outcome is a network that can reach roughly 5,000 transactions per second, all while eliminating the risk of chain reorganizations (reorgs) that disrupt user and application experience.
New block production model: VEBloP for speed and stability
Rio introduces a new block production architecture called the Validator-Elected Block Producer (VEBloP).
Instead of the traditional approach where many validators produce blocks in each span, validators on the network now elect a small pool of validators, each of which produce blocks for a major longer span. This fundamentally improves efficiency: with one producer at a time, blocks can be created faster, block times shorten, and reorgs are essentially eliminated.
The VEBloP model gives the validator community the ability to vote on which node will produce blocks. If an elected producer falters, designated backups can immediately step in to keep blocks flowing.
Rio brings reorgs to an end, with no “do-overs” in chain history, so users and developers can treat a verified block as final instantaneously; transactions are confirmed fast and stay confirmed.
To keep incentives aligned under this new paradigm, Rio introduces an updated economic framework so that all validators, not just the active block producer, earn a fairer share of fees. Transaction fees (including any MEV revenue) are redistributed between the block proposer and the broader validator set. In other words, even validators running lightweight nodes (thanks to stateless verification) can still participate fully in the network’s rewards without needing high-end hardware.
This ensures that boosting performance doesn’t come at the cost of validator revenue.
Stateless validation brings light nodes, low costs, & no reorgs
Rio essentially provides reorg resistance as a built-in feature of Polygon.
The Rio upgrade implements witness-based stateless block validation (PIP-72). Polygon will be one of the first blockchains to run this architecture on mainnet. This transformative upgrade to the network lets nodes verify new blocks without storing the entire blockchain state.
Instead of keeping gigabytes of historical data, validators can use succinct cryptographic “witness” proofs to check each block’s correctness. This drastically cuts down storage bloat, speeds up node sync times, and lowers the hardware requirements for participation.
Running a validator becomes much more accessible, potentially allowing, in the future, a broader community of participants to help secure the network. By lowering the barrier to entry, Polygon can attract a larger, more diverse validator set, strengthening the network’s decentralization and security.
Crucially, stateless validation works hand-in-hand with the VEBloP architecture to virtually eliminate chain reorganizations.
Since all validators, even those not storing the full state, can swiftly validate each block produced, finality is achieved almost instantly. Honest blocks won’t be overturned.
For institutions, enterprises, and builders, that means greater reliability.
Transactions won’t be reverted after being confirmed, which is critical for use cases like payments where certainty is paramount.
Unlocking 5,000+ TPS and the path to gigagas
By overhauling how blocks are created and verified, the Rio upgrade sets the stage for Polygon PoS to reach ~5,000 transactions per second in the near term. Other optimizations can kick throughput to even higher levels, with increased support for agentic payments.
Even more importantly, Polygon achieves this gain in capacity without sacrificing the network’s security.
For context, “gigagas” refers to Polygon’s long-term scaling vision, which targets performance on the order of tens of thousands of TPS. In earlier upgrades, like the Bhilai hardfork and Heimdall upgrade, Polygon already hit ~1,000 TPS on mainnet.
Rio takes this leap further, bringing more efficiency to Polygon every level.
With a higher per-block gas limit and the new VEBloP + stateless design, Polygon can handle surging demand for global stablecoin payments without slowing down or driving up fees.
Included in the Rio upgrade are three core Polygon Improvement Proposals (PIPs) that detail these changes (you can read the full specifications on the Polygon forum):
- PIP-64: Validator-Elected Block Producer – Outlines the VEBloP architecture. By electing a single block producer per span and separating block creation from validation, this proposal boosts throughput and guarantees one-block finality, all while preserving decentralized verification. It fundamentally shifts block production to be decided by validators, which shortens confirmation times and eliminates reorgs.
- PIP-65: Economic Model for VEBloP – Defines how fees and rewards are shared between the elected block producer and the entire validator set. This ensures non-producing validators remain financially incentivized to participate, aligning with the performance gains of PIP-64.
- PIP-72: Witness-Based Stateless Validation – Enables stateless block verification, allowing nodes to validate blocks without maintaining the full state. This cuts storage bloat and hardware costs for validators, and in combination with PIP-64’s design it effectively ends chain reorgs on the network.
A faster, more reliable network for global payments
With the Rio upgrade now live, Polygon is evolving into a faster, fairer, and more resilient network built for long-term growth.
This upgrade removes key technical obstacles, like reorgs risk and throughput bottlenecks. The result is a blockchain that can handle the world’s payment rails and real-world asset transactions at scale without compromising security or user trust.
Polygon’s continual technical improvements underscore its ambition to become the de facto infrastructure for moving value onchain.
By achieving high speeds and instant finality on a robust, decentralized foundation, Polygon is positioned to be universal rails for global payments and asset markets, where millions of daily transactions can flow seamlessly. Rio’s mainnet debut is a major step toward a future where sending money or assets on Polygon is as fast, reliable, and effortless as using traditional payment networks, but with better capital efficiency, and where markets never sleep.
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Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
