The Polygon network has announced an official hard fork that will create significant upgrades to the PoS chain including faster speeds and mitigated gas fee surges. 

Matic, as it is alternatively known, has made many notable strides over the past year that have both helped grow its user base and maintain a relatively stable price compared to other popular cryptocurrencies, such as Solana. 

Why did Polygon need a hard fork?

Due to the network’s explosion in popularity, the team has been tasked with additional work to maintain the network and seek immediate updates to help the blockchain host the growing number of users, transactions, and Dapps. 

Talking to their community, the team identified that gas price surges and transaction finality were the two most pressing concerns and devised a solution by proposing the hard fork. 

1. Upgrade #1: Reducing Gas Spikes

   Low gas fees are one of the major draws to the Polygon network because it offers a lucrative alternative to Ethereum, which is known for having some of the highest gas fees regardless of its popularity.

   However, during times of high activity, gas fees have been known to surge in price and cause issues for users that are suddenly unable to operate because of the suddenly high prices. 

   To prevent this, the hard fork is updating a line of code that will change their BaseFeeChangeDenominator from 8 to 16 to reduce gas prices when activity hits peak highs. While surges will still continue, the change in the denominator will help scale the price of gas to more appropriate levels. 

2. Upgrade #2: Addressing Chain Reorganizations

   Reorganizations, or Reorgs, was another issue that caused problems for users who were having difficulties with the finality of transactions, which was causing some transactions to not complete themselves. 

   To solve this problem, the team decided to reduce the sprint length required by the blockchain, which causes validators to continuously produce blocks on the Bor chain (Polygon’s side-chain). By reducing this time for validators to produce blocks on Bor, less reorgs will occur because the chance of multiple validators sprinting to fill out the transaction will reduce. 

   However, this reduction to sprint times will not have an impact on the time it takes or number of blocks that are validated on Polygon’s mainnet, leaving the rewards for validators to be the same. 

Impact on Polygon price and activity

The team at Polygon expects these changes to make major improvements to the efficiency of the network overall by reducing the clutter created by reorgs and mitigating the price swings when gas fees surge which may not be noticeable to the average user, but are necessary for the overall performance of the Matic blockchain. 

As Polygon continues to grow, it will become increasingly important for the team to continue pushing out updates that optimize and improve its ability to scale and facilitate more transactions as user activity keeps growing. 

Polygon is gaining notable attention from major companies including Mastercard, Reddit, Meta, Starbucks, so it is imperative that the network positions itself as reliable and efficient.