Polygon team has outlined a hard fork proposal with plans to commence on Jan 17, according to a blog post on its website.
The proposed crucial upgrade would aim at reducing the severity of gas spikes and address chain reorganizations [reorgs] in an effort to reduce time to finality.
As per the blog, the hard fork is expected to change the rate of the base gas fee, dropping from the current 12.5% [100/8] to 6.25% [100/16] in a bid to smoothen severe swings in gas prices.
Gas prices will still rise during periods of high demand, but they will be more in line with current Ethereum gas dynamics. The objective is to eliminate spikes and create a more continuous interaction with the chain, it claimed.
Next in terms of addressing chain reorganizations, the Polygon team proposed to reduce the “sprint length” from 64 to 16 blocks.
This according to the blog, meant a single block producer will produce blocks continuously for a much shorter time [~32 sec] than the current [~128 seconds]. Doing so will decrease the depth of reorgs.
By decreasing the sprint length, the hard fork will help reduce the frequency and depth of reorgs and improve transaction finality.
That being said, there would be no change in overall rewards as these abovementioned modifications are in no way connected to the number of blocks or how much time a validator produces.
The blog also answers some queries in its FAQ section.
All Polygon Nodes Will Need To Upgrade Before Jan 17
For instance, delegators and MATIC holders do not need to take any action to prepare for the upgrades. Additionally, dApps deployed on Polygon PoS will also be not affected.
However, all PoS nodes [sentry, full node, validator, or archive node] will be required to upgrade the Bor node before Jan. 17.
For those new, Matic’s existing PoS chain consists of two layers: One of them is the Bor [Block Producer Layer] which is responsible for aggregating transactions into blocks.
It needs to be reminded that Polygon faced technical problems last year. In March, the sidechain network went offline for roughly 11 hours due to a node issue.
And in December last year, a “critical network vulnerability” was patched by an unexpected [and contentious] hard fork of the Polygon blockchain.