• The Polygon hardfork upgrade will occur on January 17 and validators need to update their nodes beforehand.
• The Polygon hardfork will address the issues of rising gas fees and network reorganization.

Polygon, the Layer-2 scalability solution of Ethereum, will be undergoing a hardfork ahead this week on Tuesday, January 17. This comes as part of a scheduled development as the Polygon blockchain seeks to address the issue of gas spikes and chain reorganization which have been affecting the user experiences on the PoS Polygon blockchain network.

Polygon confirmed this hardfork last week after the team had a preliminary discussion on the Polygon Improvement Proposal (PIP) forum page last month.

To address the matter of gas-fee spikes, the Polygon team will change the BaseFeeChangeDenominator from its existing value of 8 to 16. This would further help increase/decrease the rate of baseFee exceeds or drop under the target gas fee limits within a block. Nearly 87 percent of the 15 voters of the Polygon Governance Team had voted on increasing the BaseFeeChangeDenominator. Sharing further details regarding the hardfork with CoinTelegraph, a Polygon spokesperson said:

The hard fork is coded for the Block >= 38,189,056. No centralized, single actor is going to initiate it. Validators of the network have to update their nodes prior to the indicated block, and they are already doing so.

While addressing the gas fee issue, the Polygon team said that the base fee price often experiences “exponential spikes” whenever the on-chain activity increases rapidly. By raising the denominator by double, the growth curve can be flattened, and thus there would be “smooth severe fluctuations” in gas prices.

Addressing the Chain Reorganization Issue

Along with the gas fee changes, the Polygon development team will address the chain reorganization issues. As part of the hardfork, the Polygon team will decrease the SprintLength function from 64 blocks to 16 in order to fix the chain reorganization problem.

The Polygon team explained that by decreasing the Sprint length, the transaction finality will improve. This would allow a single block producer to add blocks continuously at a frequency of 32 seconds as against the current 128 seconds. “The change will not affect the total time or number of blocks a validator produces, so there will be no change in rewards overall,” they added.

Chain reorganizations occur due to malicious attacks or network errors and cause the blockchain to split into two. But any inefficiency in chain organization could lead to a 51 percent attack on the Polygon blockchain.

To prepare for the hard fork, all node operators on Polygon have to upgrade their nodes before January 17. But Polygon’s MATIC token holders and other Daaps running on the platform don’t need to take any action.

Over the weekend, Polygon’s native crypto MATIC witnessed an upswing. The MATIC token is currently trading at a price of $0.99 and a market cap of $8.6 billion.