Polygon has taken a step forward as the global payments chain in web3 with the Rio upgrade, which is being described as a product-focused network rehaul, now live on mainnet. As explained in the update, Rio now aims to make Polygon a lighter, more reliable, and “significantly faster” blockchain.
With changes being made to underlying block production and validation, now it’s said to be easier and lower-cost to participate in the network. As noted in a blog post by Polygon, Rio enables 5k TPS on the network and “makes nodes lightweight, slashing the cost of compute.”
By removing the risk of reorgs, Rio provides a “step function improvement in the reliability of finality.”
This upgrade is said to be a key turning point, according to the team at Polygon which noted that the network is “faster, more reliable, and more open for builders, not someday soon, but now.”
As stated in the update, each aspect of Rio’s core upgrade is “intended to make building and using payments products on Polygon easy” and seamless:
- Speed: a new block production model (VEBloP) brings 5k TPS
- Stability: alongside VEBloP, stateless validation completely eliminates the risk of reorgs (a network rolling back the state)–and makes finality near-instant
- Light-weight: Rio reduces the barrier of entry, enabling payments solutions to spin up lightweight nodes without burdensome costs or compute requirements
Everything institutions, fintechs, and developers need for a global payments solution is ready to go, “making the Rio hardfork the most significant step yet in Polygon’s gigagas roadmap.”
With VEBlop, the network increases “throughput by over 3x, reaching ~5k transactions TPS, while also becoming significantly more stable, and reaching finality near-instantly.”
Instead of the more traditional approach where many validators produce blocks in each span, validators on the network now “elect a small pool of validators, each of which produce blocks for a major longer span.”
This upgrade fundamentally improves efficiency and makes time to finality near-instant:
- with one producer at a time, blocks can be created faster;
- block times shorten; and
- reorgs are essentially eliminated.
The VEBloP model gives the validator community “the ability to vote on which node will produce blocks.”
If an elected producer falters, “designated backups can immediately step in to keep blocks flowing.”
Rio reportedly brings reorgs to an end, with no “do-overs” in chain history, so users and developers “can treat a verified block as final instantaneously; transactions are confirmed fast and stay confirmed.”