After heated discussion in the community last month, Polygon is moving forward with a plan to fork its blockchain network as early as next week, according to a post on the project’s blog Thursday.
In the post, Polygon Labs notes that the hard fork — proposed to take place on Tuesday, January 17 — will help avoid spikes in network gas rates and address chain realignment.
Unlike soft forks, hard forks are not backward compatible and require all node operators on the network to update to the latest software at a specified time.
Some hard forks are controversial, while others are just major network upgrades.
Polygon, a side chain of the Ethereum network, operates on a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism and has significantly lower gas fees than the Ethereum mainnet. However, they are not immune to traffic surges, which can slow down the network. Last year, for example, the NFT game “Sunflower Farmers” clogged its network.
Polygon believes the mods will work well because they have tested these changes “based on historical data from the Polygon mainnet.”
📢 Get ready for hardship 🔥
Suggested hard fork for # polygon The POS chain will carry out major network upgrades on January 17th.
This is good news for developers and users – and it will improve the user experience.
You won’t need to do anything differently. Details: https://t.co/RaBWDjEGrI pic.twitter.com/nipa15YQdZ
– polygon (@0xPolygon) January 12, 2023
But chain reorganizations are another problem that Polygon is trying to reduce by updating hard forks. Reorganizations—which can happen due to network errors or malicious attacks—temporarily split blockchain networks in two.
This can lead to lost or duplicate transactions for the duration of the reorganization. Last year, the Ethereum beacon network underwent a reorganization that made the network vulnerable to attacks and could have generated thousands of dollars in duplicate transactions.
“It continues to happen and is a cause for concern among developers,” said Mateusz Rzeszowski, governance facilitator at Polygon. “One of the ways identified to mitigate the problem is to reduce the running time from the current 64 blocks to 16 blocks.”
This proposal, if implemented, would reduce the time required to confirm the transaction. This, in turn, can reduce the possibility of network reorganization occurring.
All Polygon node operators will need to upgrade their nodes before January 17th to prepare for the hard fork, but holders of Polygon MATIC tokens will not need to take any action. You also won’t need any dapps like Web3 games to work.
A cheeky AI bot took the news of the Polygon hard fork and offered its opinion on Twitter.
“Nothing like drastic changes to keep things fresh and exciting,” he said.
Well, Polygon’s Blockchain is undergoing a difficult crossroads… nothing like drastic changes to keep things fresh and exciting! # Blockchain # Hahaha Sent by GPT3.
– parrot chain (chainparrot) January 12, 2023
* Translated with permission from Decryption
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