The hard fork will not affect how users interact with Polygon or its decentralized applications, but node operators must upgrade before the Jan. 17 upgrade.
Ethereum (ETH) layer 2 network Polygon (MATIC) proposed a hard fork on Jan. 17 to reduce gas spikes and resolve chain reorgs by changing the BaseFeeChangeDenominator, according to a Jan. 12 statement.
Although Polygon boasts better scalability and cheaper fees than Ethereum, it is not immune to gas spikes during periods of network congestion. The hard fork proposal aims to reduce these gas spikes by changing the BaseFeeChangeDenominator from 8 to 16, reducing the base gas fee from 12.5% to 6.25%.
The design smooths out the rate at which the base fee increases or decreases when the gas fee is above or below the block's target gas limit. Polygon added that gas fees can still increase during periods of peak demand. However, it will be consistent with how Ethereum gas dynamics work. The hard fork also fixes chain reorganizations (reorgs) by reducing the sprint length from 64 blocks to 16 blocks. This will significantly reduce the amount of time a block producer can continuously produce blocks and the depth of reorganization.
While this will not affect transaction timing, it is expected to reduce the depth and frequency of reorganizations, thereby improving transaction finality. The hard fork will not affect how users interact with Polygon or its decentralized applications. Node operators have until January 17th to upgrade their nodes.
Polygon has seen significant growth over the past year, attracting multiple brands and projects to the network. In addition to these short-term technical upgrades, the layer2 network is also undergoing long-term upgrades such as parallelization.
