Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution Polygon will undergo a hard fork on January 3rd. 17 in order to address gas spikes and chain realignment issues that affected user experience on Polygon’s Proof of Stake (PoS) chain.
Polygon has officially confirmed the Hard Fork event on January 3rd. 12 in a blog post, which came weeks after the initial discussion on the Polygon Improvement Proposal (PIP) forum page in late December.
Prepare for trouble
Suggested hard fork for # polygon The POS chain will carry out major network upgrades on January 17th.
This is good news for developers and users – and it will improve the user experience.
You won’t need to do anything differently. Details: https://t.co/RaBWDjEGrI pic.twitter.com/nipa15YQdZ
– polygon (@0xPolygon) January 12, 2023
A Polygon spokesperson provided Cointelegraph with additional details about the hard fork on January 3. 14:
“The hard fork is coded for Block >= 38,189,056. No single central actor will initiate it. Validators of the network have to update their nodes before the indicated block, and they already do.”
87% of the 15 voters in the Polygon Governance team voted to increase the BaseFeeChangeDenominator function from 8 to 16 to reduce gas fee hikes and reduce the SprintLength function from 64 blocks to 16 in order to fix the chain realignment issue.
Addressing the problem of rising gas, the Polygon team explained that because the price of the underlying fee often “experiences exponential spikes” when on-chain activity increases rapidly, by increasing the denominator from 8 to 16, they believe “the growth curve can be flattened” and thus “smooth out the wild swings.” in gas prices.
Related: Polygon test zero datasets, mainnet internal integration
As for the chain reorganization problem, Polygon explained that by reducing the sprint length, the final transaction would improve, allowing a single block producer to add blocks continuously with a frequency of 32 seconds instead of the current 128 seconds.
They added: “The change will not affect the total time or the number of blocks produced by the validator, so there will be no change in rewards overall.”
Chain reorganization occurs when a block is deleted from the blockchain to make room for a new, longer chain to ensure that all contract operators have the same copy of the ledger.
However, reorganization must be done as efficiently as possible, as it increases the risk of an attack by 51%.
The Polygon team also confirmed that Polygon (MATIC) token holders and delegates will not need to take action and that applications will not be affected during a hard fork.
Polygon’s token, MATIC, is currently priced at $0.977, up 13.6% since Polygon announced the news on January 3. 12.
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