Polygon : A hard fork soon to save on fees

Layer 2 Polygon developers are proposing a hard fork of the blockchain, scheduled for Jan. 17 to improve performance and reduce fee hikes.

This development is part of “more immediate measures to improve the performance and predictability of Polygon PoS”. And for its deployment, “network approval” is required.

The hard fork aims to reduce the severity of gas spikes,” i.e., increases in transaction fees paid by users of the blockchain.

The rate of change in the base gas rate is expected to decrease from 12.5% (100/8) to 6.25% (100/16) to mitigate large fluctuations in gas prices.”

Polygon hard fork, smoothing out the spikes?

The developers are keen to point out, however, that the update does not mean stagnation of fees. The mechanism will, however, be “more in line with the way Ethereum’s gas dynamics work.”

“The goal is to smooth out the spikes and ensure a more seamless experience when interacting with the chain,” the Web3 project further justifies. As far as reorgs are concerned, the hard fork will result in a reduction from 64 to 16 blocks. Result:

A single block producer will produce blocks continuously for a much shorter time (~32 sec) than the current time (~128 seconds). This will reduce the depth of the reorgs.”

Important clarification: “This change will not affect the total time or number of blocks produced by a validator, so there will be no change in overall rewards.”