Polygon, the Ethereum (ETH) layer-2 scaling solution, will undergo a hard fork next January 17. The hard fork is aimed at mitigating the gas spikes and addressing chain reorganizations that have impacted the user experience on Polygon’s blockchain.
Hard fork on block 38,189,056
The hard fork event isn’t officially in until January 12th a blog post confirmed by Polygon. This came shortly after weeks of preliminary discussion on the Polygon Improvement Proposal (PIP) forum page. Through Twitter the announcement was reaffirmed.
According to a Polygon spokesperson, the hard fork is coded for the block 38,189,056. All validators on the network are required to update their nodes prior to the update, some have reportedly already started doing so.
Vote for solving problems
Of a total of 15 voters on the Polygon Governance Team, 13 (87%) reportedly voted to increase the ‘BaseFeeChangeDenominator’ feature, from 8 to 16. This, in turn, should help lower gas costs .
To solve the chain reorganization problem, there was also a vote to lower the ‘SprintLength’ function from 64 blocks to 16 blocks.
In addressing the gas spike problem, the Polygon team explained that because 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 leveled off so that more smooth fluctuations in gas prices can be achieved.
Regarding the chain reorganization problem, Polygon explained that by reducing the sprint length, the finality of the transaction 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. She added the following:
The change will not affect the total time or number of blocks a validator produces, so there will generally be no change to the rewards earned.
Chain reorganization basically occurs when a block is removed from the blockchain to make room for the new, longer chain to ensure that every node operator has the same version of the ledger. However, this reorganization must be done as efficiently as possible, as the risk of a 51% attack increases.
It is worth noting that all MATIC token holders are basically required to do nothing for the upgrade and applications will reportedly be unaffected during the hard fork. The value of the token has already increased by almost 15% since its announcement.