Following weeks of discussion on the Polygon Improvement Proposal (PIP) forum, on January 12, 2023, Polygon posted a blog post wherein it officially confirmed that a hard fork will occur. The hard fork will happen at block 38,189,056 on January 17, 2023 and is to be initiated in the absence of central actor influence.
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The purpose of the hard fork is designed to address platform gas spikes and chain reorganization issues which have affected chain users. More specifically, 87% of the 15 voters comprising the Polygon Governance Team affirmatively voted to increase Polygon's BaseFeeChangeDenominator from 8 to 16 for the purpose of reducing gas spikes and to decrease Polygon's SprintLength function from 64 to 16 blocks for the purpose of fixing the chain reorganization issues.
Relative to the gas spike issue, the Polygon Team described the problem as the base fee price repeatedly 'experiences exponential spikes' when the on-chain activity increases. They believe that 'the growth curve can be flattened' by increasing the denominator from 8 to 16. This action should smooth out any severe gas price fluctuations as demonstrated by the following graph:
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** Polygon expects that this change will result in the rate of change for the gas fee to fall to 6.25% from its present rate of 12.5% in the effort to smooth out any gas severe fluctuations. **
Relative to the chain reorganization problems, the Polygon Team explained reorganizations could impact transaction finality thereby disrupting the applications ability to be confident that their transactions are, in fact, part of the canonical version of the chain. By decreasing the sprint length from 64 to 16, one single block producer will produce blocks continuously for a shorter period of time, approximately 32 seconds, than the current rate of approximately 128 seconds.
These chain reorganizations occur each time a block is deleted from the chain to make room for the new and longer canonical chain to ensure all node operators are in possession of identical ledger copies. Nonetheless, this reorganization process must take place efficiently as when it is taking place there is a greater chance for a 51% attack.
** Polygon believes that by decreasing the sprint length will aid in the reduction of the frequency and depth of reorganizations, thereby improving transaction finality. This change does not affect a validator's total time or number of blocks for production resulting in no change to overall rewards. **
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The Polygon Team has advised that the holders of MATIC tokens and token delegators have no need to take any action during or before this hard fork. Platform applications will be unaffected. Network validators must update their nodes prior to the indicated block for the hard fork.
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