Along with the gas fee, the upcoming hardfork of Polygon will also address the issue of chain reorganization.
Ethereum’s Layer-2 scalability platform Polygon is now gearing up for a hardfork ahead this week on January 17. After discussing with its community, the Polygon team has agreed to a hardfork in order to address gas spikes and chain reorganization issues.
Polygon Hardfork
The Ethereum Layer-2 platform officially confirmed the hardfork last week on January 12. As said, this comes after weeks of discussion on the Polygon Improvement Proposal (PIP) forum page last month in December.
📢 GET READY FOR THE HARDFORK 🔥
The proposed hardfork for the #Polygon PoS chain will make key upgrades to the network on Jan 17th.
This is good news for devs & users — & will make for better UX.
You will NOT need to do anything differently. Details:https://t.co/RaBWDjEGrI pic.twitter.com/nipa15YQdZ
— Polygon | Aggregated (@0xPolygon) January 12, 2023
Last year, the Proof-of-Stake Polygon blockchain network witnessed some spikes in the gas fee amid surging NFT activity on the platform. With its upcoming hardfork, Polygon will thus change the BaseFeeChangeDenominator from 8 to 16. 87% of the 15 voters in the Polygon Governance Team have voted in favor of increasing the baseFee.
This will further make it easy to dynamically increase/decrease the rate of baseFee whenever the gas shoots above or falls below the target gas limits in a block. Speaking on the details of the upcoming hardfork, a Polygon spokesperson said:
“The hard fork is coded for the Block >= 38,189,056. No centralized, single actor is going to initiate it. Validators of the network have to update their nodes prior to the indicated block, and they are already doing so.”
Addressing the Chain Reorg Issue
Along with the issue of gas fees, another problem that Polygon is facing is chain reorganization. Chain reorgs occur whenever a block is deleted from the blockchain to make space for the new, longer chain in order to ensure that all node operators have the same copy of the ledger.
However, the chain reorg process should take place efficiently or it could increase the risk of a 51% attack. To fix this, the Polygon team has decided to reduce the SprintLength function from 64 blocks to 16.
The Polygon team notes that by decreasing the Sprint Length, the transaction finality will improve. This would allow a single block producer to add blocks continuously at a frequency of 32 seconds against the current time of 128 seconds.
The team also noted that “the change will not affect the total time or number of blocks a validator produces, so there will be no change in rewards overall”. The Polygon team has confirmed that the Polygon delegators and token holders don’t need to take any action and the applications running on the Polygon blockchain won’t be affected.
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