There has been tremendous buzz around Polygon’s upcoming hard fork over the last couple of weeks. Talk about the updates began after developers posted a pre-performance improvement proposal (pre-PIP) discussion on the network’s forum page early in December 2022. After a lot of back and forth, 87 percent of users voted in favour of the proposal and Polygon announced that the hard fork would go live on January 17 at block number 38,189,056.
But what problems is Polygon’s hard fork looking to solve and will it cause MATIC to spike? Tag along to find out.
Polygon’s hard fork — what changes will it bring?
As per the network’s forum post, the hard fork will bring changes to Polygon’s BaseFeeChangeDenominator and SprintLength. The update will decrease SprintLength to 16 blocks from its current 64 blocks. This is expected to help reduce the effect of chain reorganisations. Additionally, the update will also increase the BaseFeeChangeDenominator to 16 from its current 8. This is expected to reduce gas fee spikes.
Does that sound like a bunch of alien tech talk? Let us explain what both these changes mean. Firstly, a chain organisation occurs when two nodes mine a block simultaneously. This could lead to a network fork, which results in the creation of two chains. Since this is not acceptable, blockchains have come up with a solution called chain reorganisation (reorg) which follows the “longest chain rule.”
As per this rule, only the longer version of the chain is retained whereas the shorter one is reorganised to match the longer one. This ensures that all node operators have the right version blockchain ledger at all times.
Now SprintLength refers to the maximum amount of consecutive blocks a validator can produce in the Polygon PoS chain. Therefore, the reduction of SprintLength from 64 to 16 ensures that validators can generate blocks continuously for 32 seconds, which is much less than the current 128 seconds at SprintLength of 64. As such, the hard fork will help reduce the depth of a reorg, if and when one does occur.
Coming to the BaseFeeChangeDenominator; this update is expected to reduce gas fee fluctuations. Developers behind the hard fork have already back-tested an increased BaseFeeChangeDenominator “against historical Polygon PoS mainnet data” and believe it will work. According to the blog post, “after this change, the rate of change will decrease to 6.25 percent (100/16) as compared to the current 12.5 percent (100/8).” Therefore, gas fees spikes will still be around, it’s just that they will be much smoother now.
Conclusion
It is important to note that both gas fee fluctuations and reorganisations only occur on busy networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, since Polygon has attracted a lot of activity in recent months, these are good forward-thinking changes for the network.
As such, the price of MATIC, Polygon’s native cryptocurrency, spiked nearly 10 percent after the hard fork was announced. At the time of writing, the token was changing hands at $0.98, up 15.51 percent for the week and nearly 30 percent since the start of the year. If the hard fork is pulled off successfully, it could result in even further gains. However, crypto markets are highly volatile and nothing can be certain.
And finally, as per Polygon’s blog post on the hard fork, normal users and decentralised apps on the network will not have to do a thing during the update. It is only validators that need to upgrade to the latest software to prepare for the fork.
