Polygon’s Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution will undergo a hard fork on January 17 to address gas surge and chain reorganization issues that have affected user experience on Polygon’s proof-of-stake (POS) chain.
Polygon officially confirmed the hard fork event on January 12th in a blog post, which came after a week of preliminary discussion on the Polygon Improvement Proposal (PIP) forum page at the end of December.
Get READY to hardfork
The proposed hardfork for #Polygon The PoS chain will upgrade its network key on Jan 17.
This is great news for devs & users — & will make for a better UX.
You don’t 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 about the January 14th hard fork:
Hard fork is coded for Block > = 38,189,056. There is no single centralized actor to begin with. The network validator needs to update the node before the indicated block, and he has done so.
87% of 15 Voters from the Polygon Governance Team voted to increase the BaseFeeChangeDenominator function from 8 to 16 to reduce gas fee spikes and reduce the SprintLength function from 64 blocks to 16 to fix the chain reorganization problem.
When addressing the problem of gas spikes, the Polygon Team explained that since the base price often “experiences exponential spikes” when on-chain activity increases rapidly, by increasing the denominator from 8 to 16, they believe that “the growth curve can be flattened” and thus “heavy fluctuations Gamelan” in gas prices.
related: Polygon tests zero knowledge rollup, incoming mainnet integration
As for the chain reorganization problem, Polygon explains that by reducing the length of the sprint, the finality of the transaction will increase, allowing the producer of a single block to add blocks continuously with a frequency of 32 seconds instead of the current time of 128 seconds.
“These changes will not affect the total time or the number of blocks created by validators, so there will be no change in the overall reward,” he added.
Chain reorganization occurs when a block is removed from a blockchain to make room for a new, longer chain to ensure that all node operators have the same copy of the ledger.
However, the reorganization must continue efficiently because it can increase the risk of an attack by 51%.
The Polygon team also confirmed that token holders and MATIC delegates do not need to take action and that the application 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 January 12.