Polygon Proclaims Proposed Hardfork Aimed At Improving Chain Performance

Leading Ethereum scaling solution Polygon has unveiled its plans to implement a hardfork on its PoS chain on Jan 17, 2023. In accordance with a tweet on Jan. 12, Polygon stated the proposed hardfork is “excellent news” for developers and users alike, as it is going to help create a “higher” user experience.

Via a blog post on their official website, Polygon revealed more details on the upcoming hardfork stating it goals at upgrading the network performance by decreasing the occurrence of gas spikes and eliminating reorgs.

Polygon’s Hardfork To Reduce Gas Spikes

The Polygon PoS chain is arguably the most important Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution, allowing developers and users to enjoy faster transactions and low gas fees while maintaining the safety of the Ethereum network.

Nevertheless, Polygon experiences a high network demand sometimes, which sometimes leads to an exponential increase in gas fees referred to as “gas spikes”. While higher gas fees are expected during increased network activity, “gas spikes” are considered an anomaly in blockchain operations. 

To deal with this issue, Polygon states that the proposed hardfork will double the “BaseFeeChangeDenominator” from 8 to 16, thereby decreasing the change rate for the bottom gas fee from 12.5% to six.25%.

With this upgrade, users should still anticipate an increase in gas fees during increased on-chain activity. Nevertheless, extreme fluctuation in gas fees can be a thing of the past.

Proposed Hardfork Will Also Resolve Chain Reorgs

A reorg or chain reorganization causes a blockchain to supply two parallel versions of itself temporarily. Reorgs are high risk as they may end up in duplicate or lost transactions. Furthermore, they increase the vulnerability of a blockchain to attack for the period of their existence. 

To eliminate the occurrence of reorgs on the Polygon PoS Chain, its developers’ team plans to scale back the time it takes to validate transactions and produce a block.

In accordance with the blog post, the upcoming hardfork will reduce the network’s sprint length from 64 blocks to 16 blocks, thus allowing latest blocks to be created in 32 seconds in comparison with the present block production time of 128 seconds.

Now, it’s value noting that the proposed polygon hardfork continues to be awaiting approval for implementation by its network community. 

Nevertheless, in preparing its users for the hardfork, Polygon has stated that each one its existing infrastructure providers might want to upgrade their nodes ahead of Jan 17. The team also gave assurance that the operations of dApps won’t be influenced by the upcoming network changes. 

Finally, Polygon stated that each one MATIC holders and network delegators don’t have to do anything in regard to the proposed hardfork. MATIC is the native coin of the Polygon network and the tenth best-performing cryptocurrency on this planet, with a complete market cap of $8,693,212,413, based on data from CoinGecko.

On the time of writing, it’s valued at $0.9694 per unit, having lost only 0.5% of its value within the last 24 hours. 

MATIC trading at $0.9726 | Source: MATICUSD Chart on Tradingview.com. 

Featured Image: Polygon.com, Chart from Tradingview.com

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