Last Updated on January 14, 2023 by Bitfinsider

Polygon PoS blockchain developers recommended a hard fork software upgrade to mitigate gas spikes and improve the security of blocks on the sidechain network.

According to a memo shared with Bitfinsider, the upgrade, recommended by Polygon Labs engineers, is set to take place on January 17. If the hard fork is accepted by the community, it will try to lessen the impact of transaction fee spikes and chain reorganizations, claiming to enhance Polygon’s performance and security. The Polygon community has been discussing the update on the governance forum for some time.

The upgrade is part of a larger attempt to increase the Polygon side chain’s technological capabilities, including parallelization and Polygon zkEVM. Polygon PoS works alongside Ethereum and is home to some of the most important Web3 projects, like Uniswap and Aave, as well as large corporations such as Robinhood, Adobe, and Stripe.

The hard fork’s initial purpose is to make Polygon more resistant to restructuring. A chain reorganization, often known as a “reorg,” is the temporary creation of a new version of the blockchain by deviating from the prior version. The Polygon PoS chain is prone to reorgs, which occur when successive blocks overwrite prior ones as a result of various nodes achieving consensus at different times. This might cause difficulty when attempting to determine whether or not a transaction was completed correctly.

To solve this issue, developers want to adopt techniques that will assist minimize the time it takes for block finality in terms of confirming completed transactions. The proposed update reduces sprint duration, which reduces the likelihood of a secondary or tertiary validator stepping in to create blocks, resulting in fewer reorgs overall.

The upgrade will mitigate the severity of gas spikes by increasing the “BaseFeeChangeDenominator” from 8 to 16 in order to balance out the rate of change of the base fee. The BaseFeeChangeDenominator parameter specifies the rate at which the base charge for a transaction varies inversely to the current demand for block space.

The present value of Polygon’s BaseFeeChangeDenominator is 8, and the plan is to alter it to 16. The purpose of this update is to balance out the rate of change of the base charge, eliminating extreme volatility in gas prices during periods of strong demand, and resulting in a better experience while engaging with the chain.