Polygon primed for hard fork aimed at reducing gas fee spikes: New details revealed

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Ethereum layer‑2 scal­ing solu­tion Poly­gon will under­go a hard fork on Jan. 17 in order to address gas spikes and chain reor­ga­ni­za­tions issues that has affect­ed user expe­ri­ence on the Poly­gon proof-of-stake (POS) chain. 

Poly­gon offi­cial­ly con­firmed the hard fork event in Jan. 12 a blog post, which came after weeks of pre­lim­i­nary dis­cus­sion on Poly­gon Improve­ment Pro­pos­al (PIP) forum page in late December. 

A Poly­gon spokesper­son also pro­vid­ed Coin­tele­graph with addi­tion­al details of the hard fork on Jan. 14:

“The hard fork is cod­ed for the Block >= 38,189,056. No cen­tral­ized, sin­gle actor is going to ini­ti­ate it. Val­ida­tors of the net­work have to update their nodes pri­or to the indi­cat­ed block, and they are already doing so.”

87% of the 15 vot­ers of the Poly­gon Gov­er­nance Team vot­ed in favor of increas­ing the Base­FeeChange­De­nom­i­na­tor func­tion from 8 to 16 to reduce gas fee spikes and to decrease the Sprint­Length func­tion from 64 blocks to 16 in order to fix the chain reor­ga­ni­za­tion problem.

In address­ing the gas spike issue, the Poly­gon Team explained that because the base fee price 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 severe fluc­tu­a­tions” in gas prices.

Recent gas price spikes on the Poly­gon POS chain (blue) com­pared with Polygon’s data-dri­ven expec­ta­tions post hard fork (red). Source. Poly­gon.

Relat­ed: Poly­gon tests zero-knowl­edge rollups, main­net inte­gra­tion inbound

As for the chain reor­ga­ni­za­tion prob­lem, Poly­gon explained that by decreas­ing sprint length, trans­ac­tion final­i­ty will improve, allow­ing a sin­gle block pro­duc­er to add blocks con­tin­u­ous­ly 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 there will be no change in rewards over­all,” they added.

Chain reor­ga­ni­za­tion occurs when a block is delet­ed from the blockchain to make room for the new, longer chain to ensure that all node oper­a­tors have the same copy of the ledger. 

How­ev­er, the reor­ga­ni­za­tion must pro­ceed as effi­cient­ly as pos­si­ble as it increas­es the risk of a 51% attack. 

The Poly­gon Team also con­firmed that MATIC token hold­ers and del­e­ga­tors will not need to take action and that appli­ca­tions will not be affect­ed dur­ing the hard fork. 

The price of Polygon’s token, MATIC is cur­rent­ly $0.977, up 13.6% since Poly­gon announced the news on Jan. 12. 



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