Polygon to undergo hard fork to reduce reorgs and gas spikes

Layer 2 PoS blockchain Polygon has announced a hard fork upgrade to its platform to deal with gas spikes and improve the security of blocks on the sidechain network.

The hard fork debate was first presented to the Polygon community in December 2022.

In its recent post, Polygon Labs claims that the proposed hard fork on Jan. 17 will help reduce network gas fee spikes and chain reorganizations, or reorgs. Hard forks, unlike soft forks, are not backward-compatible and necessitate all node operators on a network to update to the latest recent software at a specified time.

Hardfork upgrade to address gas spikes and reorgs

The upgrade will lower the impact of gas fee spikes by increasing the “BaseFeeChangeDenominator” from 8 to 16 to smooth out the base fee change rate. BaseFeeChangeDenominator is a factor that inversely determines the rate at which the base transaction fee changes in response to the current demand for block space.

The goal of this change is to smooth out the rate of change of the base fee, thereby reducing the severity of gas price fluctuations during periods of high demand and enhancing the customer’s experience with the chain.

Polygon is confident that the change will work because it has backtested it against historical Polygon PoS mainnet data.

Another issue that Polygon intends to address with the hard fork update is chain reorgs. Blockchain networks may briefly split in two due to reorgs, which can result from network congestion or malicious attacks.

This hard fork upgrade reduces the production time of a single block producer from the current 128 seconds to 32 seconds by reducing the sprint length from 64 blocks to 16 blocks.

The hard fork will aid in reducing the sprint length, enhancing transaction finality, and lowering the frequency and depth of reorgs.

There will be no change to overall rewards, as the change has no effect on the number of blocks a validator produces or the total time.

Before January 17, all Polygon PoS nodes must upgrade to Bor to keep their nodes in sync.