Polygon to undergo a hard fork on January 17th

The Polygon Team confirmed that token holders will not need to take any action and that applications will not be impacted during the hard fork

By Shashank Bhardwaj

Published: Jan 16, 2023 06:10:05 PM IST

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Polygon will be undergoing a hard fork on January 17th to address issues with gas spikes and chain reorganisation that have negatively impacted the user experience on the Polygon proof-of-stake chain.

The decision to do this was officially announced by Polygon in a blog post on January 12th, following weeks of discussion on the Polygon Improvement Proposal forum page in December.

The Polygon Governance Team, which is made up of 15 voters, recently voted on changes to the BaseFeeChangeDenominator and SprintLength functions in order to address issues with gas fee spikes and chain reorganisation.

Out of the 15 voters, 87 percent were in favour of increasing the BaseFeeChangeDenominator function from 8 to 16 and decreasing the SprintLength function from 64 blocks to 16.

The Polygon team explained that increasing the denominator of BaseFeeChangeDenominator function from 8 to 16 will help smooth out severe fluctuations in gas prices by flattening the growth curve of base fee prices when on-chain activity increases rapidly.

The Polygon team added that they are decreasing the sprint length to improve transaction finality, which will allow a single block producer to continuously add blocks at a frequency of 32 seconds in place of the present 128 seconds.

The team emphasised that the change will not change the total time or number of blocks a validator produces, and thus there will be no change in rewards overall.

Chain reorganisation is the process of deleting a block from the blockchain and replacing it with a new, longer chain to ensure that all nodes have the same copy of the ledger. However, this process must be done as efficiently as possible to minimise the risk of a 51 percent attack.

The Polygon Team also confirmed that token holders and delegators will not be required to take any action and that applications will not be impacted during the hard fork.

On January 14th, a spokesperson from Polygon provided additional information about the upcoming hard fork. They stated that the hard fork is set to occur at Block >= 38,189,056, and that it will not be initiated by a central authority.

Instead, validators of the network are responsible for updating their nodes prior to the designated block and are currently in the process of doing so.

Shashank is the founder of yMedia. He ventured into crypto in 2013 and is an ETH maximalist. Twitter: @bhardwajshash