The Polygon blockchain underwent a hard fork on Tuesday aimed at alleviating gas spikes that come from sudden increases in transaction volume. The upgrade was first proposed last week in a blog post by the Polygon team, which outlined the coming changes.
Key takeaways:
- The team’s goal was to smooth out spikes that occur during surges of high demand to “ensure a more seamless experience when interacting with the chain.” See the projected gas spike chart after the upgrade below.
- In addition, the upgrade addressed “reorgs,” which are chain reorganizations that occur when a block is deleted from the blockchain to make room for a longer chain. This was achieved by decreasing the spring length from 64 to 16 blocks.
- From a technical standpoint, the improvements in chain performance were achieved by decreasing sprint length (as mentioned) and by doubling the denominator value from 8 to 16. Overall, the upgrade has decreased block production from 128 seconds to 32 seconds.
- Gas spikes occur primarily due to transaction-intensive decentralized applications (dApps), such as blockchain games and applications that leverage non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
- According to the official post, the changes will not make any difference to the current system of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) rewards.
- At press time, Polygon’s native MATIC token was trading at $0.944, up 6.6% from over the past seven days.
