The much-awaited hard fork aimed at boosting Polygon’s performance went live today at block 38,189,056, brewing a wave of optimism among the MATIC community.
Earlier today, the team behind the Ethereum layer-2 scaling protocol confirmed that the hard fork would proceed as scheduled, noting that no action will be required from MATIC holders as it will be triggered automatically.
The upgrade, dubbed the “Polygon Delhi Fork”, seeks to achieve two key objectives; reducing gas spikes during transactions and improving transaction finality by reducing chain reorganization (reorgs).
In a blog last week, the polygon team noted that the upgrade would change the base fee from 8 to 16. The base fee is the minimum gas needed for a transaction to be included in a new block. Although gas prices normally work most of the time, when the chain experiences high demand, the base gas fees may experience exponential spikes.
According to the team, “the expectation is that the rate of change for the base gas fee will fall to 6.25% from the current 12.5% to smooth severe fluctuations in gas prices.”
And although gas will still increase during peak demand, it will be more in line with the way Ethereum gas dynamics work now, the team noted, adding, “The goal is smooth out spikes and ensure a more seamless experience when interacting with the chain.”
Concerning the upgrade’s second objective, the team noted that addressing chain reorgs will reduce the sprint lengths from 64 to 16 blocks. As a result, a single block producer will be able to produce blocks continuously for a much shorter time (about 35 seconds), far less than the current time (about 128 seconds).
Polygon was first launched in 2017 to offer the much-needed scaling solution for Ethereum. Since then, users and developers have enjoyed faster throughput and lower fees, with more than 2.3 billion transactions being processed. Over 203 million unique addresses have signed up on Polygon with thousands of decentralized apps (DApps), including some of the biggest Web3 projects like UniSwap and Aave building atop it. Thus, the upcoming upgrade is one of the more immediate steps in improving the chain’s performance and predictability.
Meanwhile, while MATIC, the native token for Polygon, is yet to make any colossal moves following the upgrade, the crypto asset is expected to continue with its ascent towards $2 after surging over 20% in the past seven days. At press time, the crypto asset was trading at $1.02, up 0.74% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Source : zycrypto
