Polygon Activates Mandatory Hardforks to Prevent Network Crashes

Polygon has activated two hardforks across its proof-of-stake clients to fix denial-of-service vectors, disclosing details only after both were active on mainnet.

The upgrades, Austin and Kyoto, are mandatory and address critical issues that could cause block stalls or network crashes. The patches were rolled out privately and validated on the Amoy testnet before activation on mainnet.

Austin fixes two paths in block processing: a per-block state-sync gas limit to prevent slow block processing, and removal of an unbounded TxDependency field that could crash peer nodes.

Kyoto bundles consensus-hardening and input-validation fixes, including a bound on nested google.protobuf.Any depth to prevent costly correlated work across the whole validator set, and normalizing recovery bytes on checkpoint signatures.