Polygon surges 10% ahead of Heimdall v2 upgrade

Polygon’s Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network will undergo a major consensus upgrade with the rollout of Heimdall v2 on July 10.

Sandeep Nailwal, Polygon’s co-founder, described it as the most technically advanced hard fork the chain has undertaken since its launch in 2020.

Following the announcement, the network’s native token, POL, gained nearly 10% within 24 hours, climbing to its highest level in a month at around $0.20.

Polygon’s Heimdall update

Heimdall v2 replaces the original Heimdall client, modernizing Polygon’s validator management system and improving how the network syncs states between Ethereum and Polygon PoS.

This is a significant shift from the legacy Tendermint + CosmosSDK setup to the newer CometBFT + CosmosSDK architecture.

The upcoming migration follows successful testing on the Amoy testnet on June 24. Nailwal stated that the upgrade clears out the technical debt from Heimdall’s earlier build, originally based on frameworks from 2018 and 2019.

With Heimdall v2, Polygon expects major performance gains. Finality time is set to drop from 90 seconds to just 4–6 seconds. Block times will also shrink from roughly 5–6 seconds to around 2 seconds, paving the way for a much smoother user experience.

Nailwal said the upgrade will unlock faster checkpoints and improve bridging security while laying the groundwork for future enhancements.

He also warned of a possible three-hour delay in checkpoint finality during the migration period. He also urged decentralized applications to increase confirmation thresholds to 256 blocks for the day, as rare chain reorganizations could still occur.

The transition will carry over application data, balances, accounts, supply metrics, and past milestones.

However, Heimdall v2 will launch with a new chain ID and its own genesis block, based on the final state of Heimdall v1. Blockchain history will not be transferred during the upgrade.

Bhilai hardfork

This impending upgrade builds on the Ethereum layer-2 network’s recent Bhilai hardfork, which helped the network achieve the 1,000 transactions per second milestone.

Speaking on this update, Nailwal said:

“This hardfork accelerates capacity, allowing money flow on Polygon to move even faster, and support the next wave of onchain payments and RWAs. It also enables significant improvement for account abstraction via Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade, EIP-7702.”

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