Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution Polygon undergoes a hard fork on January 17 to address gas spike and chain reorganization issues that have impacted user experience on the Polygon Proof-of-Stake (POS) chain.
Polygon officially confirmed the hard fork event on Jan. 12 in a blog post published on the Polygon Improvement Proposal (PIP) forums page in late December, after weeks of preliminary discussion.
GET READY FOR THE HARDFORK
The proposed hard fork for the #polygon The PoS chain will make major upgrades to the network on January 17th.
This is good news for developers and users – and will make for better UX.
You don’t have to do ANYTHING differently. Details: https://t.co/RaBWDjEGrI pic.twitter.com/nipa15YQdZ
— Polygon (@0xPolygon) January 12, 2023
A Polygon spokesperson also provided Cointelegraph with additional details of the hard fork on Jan. 14:
“The hard fork is encoded for the block >= 38.189.056. No centralized, single actor will initiate it. Network validators need to update their nodes before the specified block, and they are already doing so.”
87% of the 15 Polygon Governance Team voters voted to increase the BaseFeeChangeDenominator function from 8 to 16 to reduce gas fee spikes and decrease the SprintLength function from 64 blocks to 16 to fix the chain reorganization issue.
In addressing the gas spike issue, the Polygon team explained that because the subscription price often “experiences exponential spikes” when activity on the chain increases rapidly, they believe that “the growth curve can be flattened” by increasing the denominator from 8 16 is increased. and thus “smooth out” strong fluctuations in gas prices.
Recent gas price spikes in the Polygon POS chain (blue) compared to Polygon’s data-driven expectations after the hard fork (red). Source. Polygon.
Related: Polygon tests zero-knowledge rollups, mainnet integration inbound
Regarding the chain reorganization issue, Polygon stated that by reducing the sprint length, transaction finality will improve, allowing a single block producer to continuously add blocks at a frequency of 32 seconds, as opposed to the current time of 128 seconds.
“The change will not affect the total time or number of blocks a validator produces, so the overall rewards will not change,” they added.
A chain reorganization occurs when a block is deleted from the blockchain to make room for the new, longer chain to ensure all node operators have the same copy of the ledger.
However, the reorganization must be done as efficiently as possible because it increases the risk of a 51% attack.
The Polygon team also confirmed that MATIC token holders and delegators do not need to take any action and that applications will not be affected during the hard fork.
Polygon’s token, MATIC, is currently priced at $0.977, up 13.6% since Polygon announced the news on Jan. 12.