Polygon is planning for Hardfork this month to present new features for the community on 17 January. Read here.
Polygon is a Layer-2 scaling solution for the Ethereum blockchain with the purpose of providing faster transactions at lower costs. Polygon being the parallel blockchain to Ethereum is helping out the community and is being preferred by brands laboriously.
In December 2022 there was a heated discussion between the company after the Polygon authorities about the upcoming hardfork plan. The network posted a blog post on Thursday where they have cleared that they are going ahead with the decision of doing an Hardfork. The network has announced through the Twitter post that V0.3.1 Hardfork is planned to happen on 17 January.
The beginning of 2022 saw a significant update to the Polygon PoS chain also has a mega update in early 2022 where EIP-1559 is out as a component of London Hardfork3. This altered the dynamics of on-chain gas prices.
Why Polygon Is Planning For Hardfork?
The blog post stated that after the discussion with the community, they have decided to go ahead with the Hardfork and we are aiming the reducing the gas spikes and address chain reorganizations (reorgs). The network has proposed increasing the BaseFeeChangeDenominator from the current value of 8 to 16. This will aid in reducing the rate at which the base fee increases or decreases when gas levels in a block are above or below target levels.
Gas fees are required to add a transaction to the block and the minimum fee that is required for the inclusion of the block is called the Base fee. On any blockchain network, rising gas prices are typical during periods of increased demand. However, “gas spikes,” which signify an increase in price that is exponential, are not. They result from EIP-1559 and the quicker block timings (2s) of the Polygon PoS chain.
What Can Be Expected After This Hardfork?
If this Hardfork happened the denominator will be raised from 8 to 16, which will flatten the growth curve. With this, the gas fees will drop from 12.5% (100/8) to 6.25% (100/16), and this will smooth the severe fluctuations in gas prices of the blockchain.
Another upgrade will be reducing the sprint length from 64 to 16 blocks. If the length is reduced to 16 blocks, a single block producer will generate blocks continuously for 32 seconds. Earlier it was taking 128 seconds to do the same. And finally, the depth of reorgs will be reduced after this.
The term “sprint length” refers to how many consecutive blocks on the Bor chain a validator produces. The amount of time a validator needs to continually produce blocks will be lowered with the decrease in sprint length. This will lower the probability of a secondary or tertiary validator will create blocks. As a result, there will be a reduction in the overall number of reorgs.
When a validator node receives fresh data revealing a longer or higher version of the chain, a reorg takes place. Reorgs affect transaction finality and make it difficult for an application to ensure the status of transactions on the chain’s canonical version. This hard fork will assist in decreasing the sprint length, which will enhance transaction finality and lessen the frequency and depth of reorgs. There will be no change in overall rewards because the modification has no impact on how many blocks or how much time a validator produces overall.
The Result of Community Discussion
In December when Polygon discussed hard fork with the community, around 87% of them agreed to decrease the SprintLength. This will decrease it to 16 blocks from 64 and increase BaseFeeChangeDenominator from 8 to 16. Whereas 13% agreed on Only Decreasing SprintLength to 16 blocks from 64. While presenting this idea to the community, the network provided a detailed analysis report to them to make it easier for people to understand the network’s vision. You can check out all the details with this link.
Final Thought
The Polygon’s hard fork will happen on 17 January, where we will see two major changes. The Network has cleared that the users won’t have to make any changes to adjust these changes. Polygon had a major update in 2022, announcing this hard fork seems like Polygon is getting ready for something big.
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