From Rio to GigaGas: Polygon’s Path to 5,000 TPS & Beyond

Polygon continues its march toward massive scalability with the Rio Upgrade, a key step in its broader GigaGas vision. This milestone introduces higher throughput, streamlined block production, and stateless verification, i.e., designed to accelerate adoption, reduce costs, and make the network future-ready.

• The Rio Upgrade: What’s New
• Scaling Towards GigaGas
• Why It Matters
• Challenges Ahead

The Rio Upgrade: What’s New

The Rio upgrade introduces three major enhancements that collectively push Polygon’s performance envelope forward.

1. First, the block gas limit has been raised from 45 million to 60 million, increasing the ceiling on transaction throughput by around 33%. This simple but significant change directly improves scalability, enabling the network to handle more transactions per block without immediate cost spikes.
2. Second, Polygon has redesigned its block production architecture with the Validator-Elected Block Producer (VEBloP) model. This approach allows validators to have a more active role in block creation, which improves efficiency, reduces wasted computation, and minimizes the chances of reorganizations (reorgs).
3. Finally, stateless block verification has been introduced. With this, nodes no longer need to maintain the entire historical state to validate new blocks. This reduces hardware requirements, lowers barriers for participation, and makes the network more resilient and inclusive while further eliminating reorg risks.

Scaling Towards GigaGas

The GigaGas roadmap sets a bold direction for Polygon, aiming for massive throughput and near-instant transaction finality. The Rio upgrade follows earlier milestones such as the Bhilai release and Heimdall v2, each designed to incrementally improve network performance and stability.

With the increase in block gas limits, a more efficient block producer model, and stateless verification, Polygon is now positioned to reach around 5,000 transactions per second on its Proof-of-Stake mainnet. This trajectory ensures that Polygon remains competitive as one of the most scalable and user-friendly blockchains in the industry, aligning with its ambition to power global-scale applications.

Polygon's roadmap is (still) scaling towards GigaGas.

Enabled by the Rio Upgrade:
- Block gas limit increasing from 45M to 60M, raising the ceiling on tps by 33%
- Redesigned block production architecture for efficiency
- Stateless block verification cuts hardware requirements +… https://t.co/ENYbri4xLR

— Polygon (@0xPolygon) September 17, 2025

Why It Matters

Higher throughput and cost efficiency are essential for user adoption, and the Rio upgrade directly addresses this by enabling more transactions at lower costs. As demand grows, such improvements ensure the network remains affordable and accessible to developers and end-users alike.

Another critical aspect is user confidence. By reducing the likelihood of reorgs, the upgrade enhances predictability and finality.

Users, especially those dealing with payments and tokenized assets, benefit from greater reliability, knowing that once their transactions are confirmed, they are final and secure. Decentralization also benefits from Rio’s design.

By lowering the hardware and storage requirements for node operators through stateless verification, more validators can join the network, strengthening its decentralization and resilience. Finally, institutional use cases are increasingly reliant on blockchains that combine high throughput with stability.

Challenges Ahead

Despite the optimism, several challenges remain. The Rio upgrade has been launched on testnet, but the real test will be its rollout on mainnet.

Only then will its performance under stress and high transaction volumes become evident. Validators also need to adapt to the new architecture.

Even with reduced hardware requirements, incentives and alignment within the validator ecosystem are crucial to ensure smooth adoption. Without widespread validator support, the benefits of Rio could remain underutilized.

Finally, no upgrade is without risk. Security considerations, centralization trade-offs, and interoperability with tools and applications in the ecosystem must all be carefully monitored. Scaling at this pace always brings the potential for new vulnerabilities, making continuous vigilance essential.

If successfully adopted on mainnet, Rio will position Polygon as a truly high-performance blockchain capable of handling thousands of transactions per second, delivering faster finality, and maintaining affordability for users worldwide. With this upgrade, Polygon is accelerating toward its goal of being a foundational layer for global-scale applications in Web3.

If you find any issues in this blog or notice any missing information, please feel free to reach out at yash@etherworld.co for clarifications or updates.

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