Leading Ethereum scaling solution Polygon has announced plans to implement a hardfork on the PoS chain on Jan 17, 2023. According to a tweet on January 12, Polygon stated that the proposed hardfork is “good news” for developers and users, as it will help create a “better” user experience.
Through a blog post on its official website, Polygon revealed more details about the upcoming hardfork with the aim of improving network performance by reducing the occurrence of gas spikes and eliminating reorgans.
Hardfork Polygon To Reduce Gas Spikes
The Polygon PoS chain is perhaps the largest Ethereum layer-2 scale solution, allowing developers and users to enjoy faster transactions and lower gas costs while maintaining the security of the Ethereum network.
However, Polygon experiences high network demand from time to time, which sometimes results in exponential increases in gas costs known as “gas spikes”. While higher gas costs are expected during increased network activity, “gas spikes” are considered anomalies in blockchain operations.
To solve this problem, Polygon stated that the proposed hardfork will double the “BaseFeeChangeDenominator” from 8 to 16, thus reducing the rate of change for base gas fees from 12.5% to 6.25%.
With this upgrade, users should still expect an increase in gas costs during on-chain activity. However, extreme fluctuations in the cost of gas will be a thing of the past.
The proposed hardfork will also complete a chain reorgan
A reorganization or chain reorganization causes the blockchain to produce two parallel versions of itself temporarily. Reorgs are high risk because they can result in duplicate or lost transactions. In addition, he increased the vulnerability of his blockers to attack during his tenure.
To eliminate the occurrence of reorgs in the Polygon PoS Chain, the development team plans to reduce the time to validate transactions and generate blocks.
According to the blog post, the upcoming hardfork will reduce the network sprint length from 64 blocks to 16 blocks, thus allowing new blocks to be generated in 32 seconds compared to the current block production time of 128 seconds.
Currently, it should be noted that the proposed polygon hardfork is still awaiting approval for implementation by the network community.
However, in preparing users for the hardfork, Polygon stated that all existing infrastructure providers must upgrade their nodes before January 17th. The team also assured that the operation of dApps will not be affected by the upcoming network changes.
Finally, Polygon stated that all MATIC owners and network delegates do not need to do anything about the proposed hardfork. MATIC is the original coin of the Polygon network and the 10th best performing cryptocurrency in the world, with a total market capitalization of $8,693,212,413, based on data from CoinGecko.
At the time of writing, the price is $0.9694 per unit, having lost only 0.5% of its value in the last 24 hours.
MATIC is trading at $0.9726 | Source: MATICUSD Chart on Tradingview.com.
Featured Images: Polygon.com, Charts from Tradingview.com