Polygon Foundation has linked a temporary network disruption on Wednesday to a validator's unexpected exit, which exposed a bug in Heimdall, the network's validation layer. The incident halted network progress for over an hour, though the Bor layer continued to produce blocks during the disruption.Initially reported in a now-deleted post on X, Polygon Foundation stated that the validator exit caused a breakdown in Heimdall's ability to progress. While the post was later replaced with one offering more detail, the organization has not clarified the root cause of the issue.
“We are actively working with network participants to restore all user-facing services impacted by the Heimdall bug,” a Polygon Foundation spokesperson told Decrypt. As of 3 p.m. ET on the same day, several services had yet to return to normal.
Polygon’s POL token, previously known as MATIC, currently ranks 66th by market capitalization at $1.9 billion, according to CoinGecko. Over the last 24 hours, POL saw a 2% dip, trading at approximately $0.21.
UPDATE:Approximately 6 hours ago, Heimdall experienced a temporary disruption that led to a delay in consensus finalization.To be clear: the Polygon PoS chain has remained live, but due to RPC issues, users may experience disruptions accessing various apps.We are now…— Polygon Foundation (@0xPolygonFdn) July 30, 2025
This disruption comes shortly after a major network upgrade, which Polygon founder and CEO Sandeep Naiwal described as the most technically complex in the network’s history. The upgrade aimed to accelerate transaction finality and included a transition of Heimdall to a newer version based on the Cosmos SDK.
According to DefiLlama, over $1.2 billion worth of digital assets are currently locked in DeFi protocols on Polygon, while stablecoins on the network amount to $2.8 billion.
Validators, integral to the Polygon network’s security and transaction validation, are expected to exit without causing disruptions. Such events, although not uncommon in blockchain ecosystems, risk damaging a network's credibility, as seen with past outages on platforms like Solana.
This is not the first time Polygon has faced an outage. Its zkEVM network was down for 10 hours last year, and in March 2022, the network experienced an 11-hour downtime due to a node issue.
As the Polygon Foundation works to stabilize the network and investigate the issue further, investor sentiment remains cautious. The recurrence of outages, particularly in the wake of critical upgrades, may place additional scrutiny on the project’s future developments.
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