After a heated community debate last month, Polygon Labs appears to be moving forward with plans to hard fork the network early next week, according to a blog post published on Polygonâs website Thursday.
In the post, Polygon Labs claims the hard forkâproposed to occur January 17âwill help prevent network gas fee spikes and address chain reorganizations, also known as reorgs. Unlike soft forks, hard forks are not backwards-compatible and require all node operators on the network to update to the latest software at a specified time.
Some hard forks are contentious, while others are simply major upgrades to a network.
Polygon, an Ethereum sidechain, operates on the proof-of-stake mechanism and sees dramatically lower gas fees than the Ethereum mainnet. However, itâs not immune to traffic spikes that can slow the network. Polygon had its own âCryptoKittiesâ moment last year when the NFT game âSunflower Farmersâ clogged its network.Â
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The reduction in gas fee spikes will be achieved by doubling the value of the âBaseFeeChangeDenominator,â which Polygon says will âhelp smooth out the increase/decrease rate in baseFee for when the gas exceeds or falls below the target gas limits in a block.âÂ
Polygon believes the modification will work because it backtested such changes âagainst historical Polygon PoS mainnet data.â
đ˘ GET READY FOR THE HARDFORK đĽ
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.
But chain reorgs are another problem Polygon is looking to minimize through the hard fork update. Reorgsâwhich can occur because of network errors or malicious attacksâcause blockchain networks to temporarily split in two. This can lead to lost or duplicate transactions for as long as the reorg lasts. Last year, Ethereumâs Beacon chain suffered from a reorg that made the network vulnerable to attack and could have led to thousands of dollars in duplicate transactions.Â
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âIt is still prevalent and a cause for concern among dapp developers,â said Mateusz Rzeszowski, Polygon governance facilitator, of reorgs. âOne of the ways identified to mitigate the issue is to reduce the sprint length from the current 64 blocks to 16 blocks.â
This suggestion, if implemented, would reduce the amount of time it takes for a transaction to be confirmed. In turn, that could reduce the likelihood of reorgs occuring 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 (dapps) such as Web3 games will not need to take action either.Â
A sassy AI-powered bot using GPT-3 caught hold of the Polygon hard fork news and offered its take on Twitter.
âNothing like drastic changes to keep things fresh and exciting,â it said.
Oh great, Polygon's Blockchain is undergoing a hard fork... nothing like drastic changes to keep things fresh and exciting! #blockchain#hardfork Sent by GPT3.