The update is scheduled for January 17, 2022.
The developers of Layer 2 Polygon propose a hardfork of the Blockchain, whose goal is to smooth out gas load spikes, thereby reducing the time for potential Blockchain reorganizations.
The first change is related to adjusting how the network sets the gas fee to include a transaction in a block. During periods of high demand, the value traditionally increases, but sometimes it happens exponentially.
To smooth out gasoline spikes, the team proposed increasing the Base Fee Change Denominator (sets the base fee) from the current 8 to 16. This is expected to help smooth the rate of increase/decrease in gasoline prices.
Layer 2s are an obvious success in the world of public Blockchains. Polygon is an example of this in the Ethereum ecosystem. Its developers like to point this out, citing in particular the figure of 207 million unique addresses.
However, like the L1, Polygon is due for technical updates, one of which is coming very soon. In fact, the Blockchain plans to carry out a hardfork, classified as ‘critical’, starting on January 17, 2023. This is how Polygon tweeted about it:
“The proposed hardfork for the Polygon PoS chain will make key upgrades to the network on Jan 17th. This is good news for devs & users — & will make for better UX. You will NOT need to do anything differently.”
Gas Peaks Smoothed over Time
This development is part of the “more immediate steps to improve the performance and predictability of Polygon PoS,.” and for its deployment, “network approval” is required.
The announced hardfork has two main goals. One is therefore, “to reduce the severity of gas spikes, that is, increases in transaction fees paid by Blockchain users.”
The second goal consists of “reorganizations of the process chain (reorgs) with the aim of reducing the completion time.”
Blockchain reorganizations occur when a validating node receives information that temporarily creates a new version of the chain, the developers recalled.
Simulations performed using Polygon PoS mainnet history data suggest significant gains in fee predictability. “The basic gas rate exchange rate is expected to increase from 12.5% (100/8) to 6.25% (100/16) to smooth out sharp fluctuations in gas prices.”
Unchanged Block Rewards
The developers highlight that the upgrade does not mean cost stagnation. The mechanism will be “more in line with how Ethereum’s gas dynamics works.” They further explain that such change “will not affect the total time or number of blocks produced by a validator, so there will be no change to global rewards.”
The developers proposed to reduce the transaction completion time from the current ~128 seconds. up to ~32 sec. This is planned to be achieved by reducing the sprint duration (the number of blocks created by the validator continuously) from 64 to 16.
By Audy Castaneda
