Polygon Blockchain To See Major Shift With Upcoming Hard Fork

Polygon, an Ethereum scaling solution, will hard fork its proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain to handle gas spikes and chain reorganization. The proposed hard fork is scheduled for January 17. It said in a blog post that it will modify its software to solve gas spikes and chain reorganizations (reorgs).

The first phase of the hard fork will involve a change in how the blockchain calculates gas fees. Gas fees are a type of tax paid to a blockchain to transact on it. Polygon’s goal with the fork is to decrease gas price spikes that might occur when there is a lot of activity on the chain.

Although gas will still increase during peak demand, it will be more in line with the way Ethereum gas dynamics work now. The goal is to smooth out spikes and ensure a more seamless experience when interacting with the chain.

Polygon said that a reduction in gas fee spikes will be achieved by doubling the value of the “BaseFeeChangeDenominator,” which the company says will “help smooth out the increase or decrease rate of the baseFee for when the gas exceeds or falls below the target gas limits in a block.” The project believes the modification will be successful as it backtested such changes “against historical Polygon PoS mainnet data.”

The second suggested portion of the hard fork will deal with reorgs, which can happen when a validator node—a computer that runs the blockchain—receives information that can temporarily generate a new version of the blockchain. Reorganizations might occur as a result of network faults or malicious activities. A reorg can result in lost or duplicate transactions for as long as it lasts.

To address this issue, Polygon aims to minimize the time it takes to finish a block to validate a successful transaction, and the hard fork will cut Polygon’s “sprint length” from 64 to 16 blocks, implying that a block producer can create blocks for a considerably shorter period.

Hard forks differ from soft forks in that they are not backward-compatible and will require all network node operators to update to the most recent software at a predetermined period. To prepare for the hard fork, all Polygon node operators will need to upgrade their nodes before the scheduled date. Holders of Polygon’s native token, MATIC, will not be affected and will not need to take any action. Decentralized apps, such as Web3 games, will be unaffected and will not need to take any action.

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