Polygon Proposes Hard Fork to address, Gas fee spikes

  Blockchain News   Jan 13, 2023   1109

Polygon has plans to substantial upgrade within a week. 

Polygon Proposes Hard Fork to address, Gas fee spikes

After a community debate last month, Polygon Labs appears to move forward with plans to hard-fork the network within a week.

Polygon Labs claims that the hard fork proposed to occur on January 17 will help prevent network gas fees spike and address chain reorganizations. Unlike soft forks, hard forks are not backward compatible and require all node operators on the network to update to the latest software. 

Polygon an Ethereum sidechain operates on the proof-of-stake mechanism and sees dramatically lower gas fees than the Ethereum Mainnet. 

However, it's not immune to traffic spikes that can slow the network Polygon had its crypto kitties moment when the NFT game Sunflower farmers clogged its network.

The reduction in gas fee spikes will be achieved by doubling the value of the BaseFeeChange Denominator which Polygon says will help smooth out the increase/decrease rate in base fee for when the gas exceeds or fails below the target gas limits in a block. 

Polygon believes the modification will work because it backtested changes against historical Polygon PoS Mainnet data.


Polygon is looking to minimize through the hard fork update reorgs which can occur because of network errors or malicious attacks that cause blockchain networks to temporarily split in two. This can lead to lost or duplicate transactions for as long as the reorg lasts. Ethereum's Beacon chain suffered from a reorg that made the network vulnerable to attack and could have led to thousands of dollars in duplicate transactions. 

According to Mateusz Rzeszowski a Polygon Governance facilitator express: it is still prevalent and a cause for concern among dApps developers.

One of the ways identified to mitigate the issue is to reduce the sprint length from the current 64 blocks to 16 blocks.

The amount of time it takes for a transaction to be confirmed could reduce the likelihood of reorgs occurring on the network. 

All Polygon node operators will have to upgrade their nodes before January 17 to prepare for the hard fork but holders of Polygon token MATIC will not need to take any action. any decentralized applications like Web3 games will not need to take action either.

GPT-3 A sassy AI Powered bot caught hold of the Polygon hard fork news and offered its take on Twitter. 

Related: Optimism and arbitrum flip Ethereum transaction volume

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