Polygon is gearing up for a major technical upgrade on July 10, called Heimdall v2. It is expected to speed up transaction finality and fix old system issues and is being called the most complex upgrade to the Polygon PoS chain since it launched in 2020.
In a post on X, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal called the upcoming upgrade a major milestone. “Shipping Announcement! We’ve been on a shipping spree, and next up is Polygon PoS’s consensus layer, Heimdall v2, landing 10 July 2025,” he wrote. “This is the most technically complex hard fork Polygon PoS has seen since its launch in 2020.”
The changes coming with Heimdall v2 are substantial. The upgrade will move the consensus infrastructure from Tendermint and Cosmos-SDK v0.37 to CometBFT and Cosmos-SDK v0.50. According to Nailwal, this shift will eliminate outdated code from 2018–2019 and significantly improve network performance.
Finality, in particular, is expected to drop to around five seconds. Nailwal highlighted that this would mean no reorgs beyond two blocks, translating into faster checkpoints, safer bridging, and an overall smoother user experience.
There are, however, a few caveats to note. During the upgrade window on July 10, Heimdall’s finality will lag by about three hours. A large reorg is still considered unlikely, but dApps have been advised to temporarily raise confirmation thresholds to 256 blocks for the day.
For node operators, the migration process is expected to take roughly 30 minutes on the mainnet. According to the technical documentation, they will need 20 GB of RAM and double the existing disk space for Heimdall.
“Most validators have already upgraded,” Nailwal added, “but in case you haven’t yet, test early, spread the word, and ping us if you hit snags.”
Detailed runbooks and migration scripts are already available on the official Polygon forum.
The excitement around the upgrade is also reflected in the market. Polygon’s native POL token jumped by more than 9% in the past 24 hours, trading at around $0.20 at the time of writing. POL now holds a market cap of $2.11 billion.
With this upgrade, Polygon is not just optimizing finality but simultaneously clearing technical baggage and preparing its infrastructure for a new phase of upgrades that could reshape its position among Ethereum scaling solutions.
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