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

Ethereum’s Layer 2 scaling solution Polygon will undergo a hard task on January 17th to address issues with throttling and chain realignment that have affected user experience on Polygon’s proof-of-stake (POS) chain ).

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

GET READY FOR THE HARDFORK

Proposed hardfork for the #Polygon PoS chain will make major improvements to the network on January 17th.

This is good news for developers and users — and it will make for better UX.

You will NOT need 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 fork on January 14:

“Hard fork is coded for Block >= 38,189,056. No single centralized actor will initiate it. Network validators must update their nodes before the indicated block, and they are already doing so.”

87% of 15 Polygon Governance Team voters voted in favor of increasing the BaseFeeChangeDenominator function from 8 to 16 to reduce the gas fee increase and decreasing the SprintLength function from 64 blocks to 16 to fix the chain realignment issue .

In addressing the issue of gas growth, the Polygon Team explained that because the price of the base charge often “experiences exponential growth” when activity on the chain increases rapidly, increasing the denominator from 8 to 16, they believe that “the growth curve can be flattened”. and thus “soft heavy swings” in gas prices.

Recent gas price increases on the Polygon POS chain (blue) compared to expectations based on Polygon’s data after the hard fork (red). The source. The polygon.

Related: Polygon Tests Zero-Knowledge Aggregations, Incoming Mainnet Integration

Regarding the chain realignment problem, Polygon explained that by reducing the sprint length, transaction finality will be improved, allowing a single block producer to continuously add blocks at a frequency of 32 seconds compared 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 realignment 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, shuffling should 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.

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