Polygon Blockchain Hits 5,000 TPS with Stable Fee Upgrade

Polygon Labs has upgraded its Polygon Chain, the settlement layer at the core of its Open Money Stack, to support up to 5,000 payment transactions per second. The upgrade was achieved by raising the block gas limit to 160 million at 1.5-second block times, and fees will remain low and predictable under peak load rather than scaling with volume.

This positions Polygon Chain as a public blockchain rail operating at a throughput tier comparable to legacy card networks, but at a fraction of their cost. For fintech and enterprise treasury teams, the critical claim is not raw speed, but fee stability: unpredictable fees have been a persistent obstacle to moving production payment workloads onto public blockchain infrastructure.

Polygon cited a run of institutional activity as context for the upgrade. In December 2025, Stripe launched USDC stablecoin payments on Polygon for merchants across more than 150 countries at a flat fee. Cash App and Meta are also reported users of the rail for payroll, remittances and cross-border settlement.

Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, said: 'When fees spike at scale, you can't build a real product on top of it.' The upgrade sits within Polygon's Gigagas roadmap, a multi-phase engineering programme targeting throughput measured in billions of gas per second. Each phase maintains backward compatibility, so teams already building on the stack inherit capacity gains without contract migration.