Polygon has completed a hard fork to fix a finality bug on its PoS chain that caused 10–15 minute transaction delays. The upgrade restored validator sync and checkpoint milestones, with POL briefly dipping 4% before recovering.

Polygon has executed an emergency hard fork on its Proof-of-Stake (PoS) chain to resolve a finality bug that had been causing transactions to take around 10–15 minutes to reach final confirmation. The issue stemmed from a consensus milestone problem impacting Polygon’s validation and checkpoint process: blocks continued to be produced, but finality checkpoints lagged, delaying when transactions could be considered irreversible and disrupting validators, RPC providers and some applications reliant on fast, high-assurance settlement. According to the Polygon Foundation’s incident communications, the fix was rolled out to validators via upgraded node software, restoring normal validator sync, state sync and checkpoint processing, and bringing finality times back to typical levels. The incident briefly pressured Polygon’s native POL token, which fell roughly 3–4% intraday as markets reacted to the network disruption before rebounding once the hard fork was completed and the network stabilized. The event has drawn attention to the operational risks around finality and consensus bugs on major Ethereum scaling networks, especially as Polygon has been working to strengthen performance and reliability after previous finality issues that required similar emergency upgrades. Observers note that while Polygon’s rapid deployment of the hard fork limited the disruption window, recurring finality incidents underscore both the importance—and the centralization trade-offs—of coordinated validator upgrades to maintain trust in high-throughput PoS and Layer 2-style infrastructure.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

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