Polygon Announces Proposed Hardfork To Improve Chain Performance

Leading Ethereum scaling solution Polygon has unveiled its plans to implement a hardfork on its PoS chain on Jan 17, 2023. According to a tweet on Jan. 12, Polygon stated the proposed hardfork is “good news” for developers and users alike, as it will help create a “better” user experience.

Via a blog post on their official website, Polygon revealed more details on the upcoming hardfork stating it aims at upgrading the network performance by decreasing the occurrence of gas spikes and eliminating reorgs.

Polygon’s Hardfork To Reduce Gas Spikes

The Polygon PoS chain is arguably the biggest Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution, allowing developers and users to enjoy faster transactions and low gas fees while maintaining the security of the Ethereum network.

However, Polygon experiences a high network demand from time to time, which sometimes results in an exponential increase in gas fees known as “gas spikes”. While higher gas fees are expected during increased network activity, “gas spikes” are considered an anomaly in blockchain operations.

To address this issue, Polygon states that the proposed hardfork will double the “BaseFeeChangeDenominator” from 8 to 16, thereby decreasing the change rate for the base gas fee from 12.5% to 6.25%.

With this upgrade, users should still anticipate a rise in gas fees during increased on-chain activity. However, extreme fluctuation in gas fees would be a thing of the past.

Proposed Hardfork Will Also Resolve Chain Reorgs

A reorg or chain reorganization causes a blockchain to produce two parallel versions of itself temporarily. Reorgs are high risk as they can result in duplicate or lost transactions. Moreover, they increase the vulnerability of a blockchain to attack for the period of their existence.

To eliminate the occurrence of reorgs on the Polygon PoS Chain, its developers’ team plans to reduce the time it takes to validate transactions and produce a block.

According to the blog post, the upcoming hardfork will reduce the network’s sprint length from 64 blocks to 16 blocks, thus allowing new blocks to be created in 32 seconds compared to the current block production time of 128 seconds.

Now, it is worth noting that the proposed polygon hardfork is still awaiting approval for implementation by its network community.

However, in preparing its users for the hardfork, Polygon has stated that all its existing infrastructure providers will need to upgrade their nodes ahead of Jan 17. The team also gave assurance that the operations of dApps will not be influenced by the upcoming network changes.

Finally, Polygon stated that all MATIC holders and network delegators do not need to do anything in regard to the proposed hardfork. MATIC is the native coin of the Polygon network and the 10th best-performing cryptocurrency in the world, with a total market cap of $8,693,212,413, based on data from CoinGecko.

At the time of writing, it is valued at $0.9694 per unit, having lost only 0.5% of its value in the last 24 hours.