The Polygon blockchain underwent a hard fork on Tuesday aimed at mitigating gas spikes that come from sudden increases in transaction volume. The upgrade was first hinted at last week in a blog post from the Polygon team, which outlined the upcoming changes.
Key points to remember:
- The team’s goal was to smooth out the spikes that occur during high demand spikes to “ensure a more seamless experience when interacting with the channel.” See the table of projected gas peaks after the upgrade below.
- Additionally, the upgrade concerned “reorganizations,” which are chain reorganizations that occur when a block is removed from the blockchain to make way for a longer chain. This was achieved by decreasing the length of the spring from 64 to 16 blocks.
- From a technical perspective, the chain performance improvements were achieved by decreasing the sprint length (as mentioned) and doubling the denominator value from 8 to 16. Overall, the upgrade has reduced block production from 128 seconds to 32 seconds.
- Gas spikes occur primarily due to decentralized transaction-intensive applications (dApps), such as blockchain games and applications that mine non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
- According to the official post, the changes will not make any difference to the current Proof-of-Stake (PoS) reward system.
- At press time, Polygon’s native MATIC token was trading at $0.944, up 6.6% from the last seven days.
David is a crypto enthusiast and personal finance expert. He has created numerous publications for different platforms. He loves exploring new things, and that’s how he discovered blockchain in the first place.
