Polygon has completed the Hard Fork to reduce gas price increases, disruptive reorganizations. The Polygon Hard Fork aims to lower gas fees and address the refactoring of the Blockchain. Meanwhile, gas fees on Polygon Blockchain are higher than on Ethereum, despite being a Layer-2 solution built on Ethereum.
Polygon Hard Fork successfully executed
The software upgrade for the Ethereum scaling project went live on Tuesday. The upgrade included two proposals that Polygon validator teams voted to approve as of December. Polygon, an Ethereum scaling project, has successfully completed a Hard Fork. According to a post from Polygon Labs, the lead company behind the project, the software upgrade was successful today.
Two proposals included in the Polygon Hard Fork proposal were put forward in December. Approximately 87% of the participating Polygon validator teams voted for approval. Only 15 validator teams took part in the voting process. This is extremely low considering the number of active validators is limited to 100 at a time. The initial proposal set a mechanism for determining gas fees, a type of tax paid for transacting on a Blockchain. The new mechanism aims to keep gas prices low when there is a lot of activity on the network.
The second proposal aims to reduce the time required to complete a block of data, which is part of an effort to avoid the frequent refactorings that occur when a validator node temporarily receives information that creates a new version of the Blockchain.
Meanwhile, as you follow on Kriptokoin.com, the price of Polygon (MATIC) has increased by about 15% in the last seven days in line with the wide rally in the cryptocurrency markets.
Upgrade and expectations
As part of the binary bid for the Polygon Hard Fork, Polygon has prepared a double bid with expected results. To reduce exponential gas prices, Hard Fork will reduce the rate of change of the base gas fee from the current 12.5% to 6.25%. When gas exceeds or falls below the target gas limits in a block, this helps smooth out the base rate. Polygon says the growth curve should flatten as it expects gas prices to rise during peak demand.
Second, Polygon hopes to improve transaction certainty with Hard Fork by reducing Blockchain refactorings. It plans to do this by reducing sprint lengths from 64 to 16 blocks. By reducing the depth of rebuilds in this way, the Hard Fork will reduce the chances of a secondary or tertiary validator stepping in and generating blocks. Polygon says this will result in better transaction precision and less refactoring overall.
According to Polygon, dApps deployed in the protocol and MATIC token holders will not be affected by the hard fork. Unlike validators and infrastructure providers, which do not require any additional steps, they will need to upgrade before January 17.
Comparison with Ethereum
Although Polygon says the Hard Fork will lower gas prices, they don’t seem very competitive at the moment compared to Ethereum. Gas prices on Ethereum currently average 35 gwei, while on Polygon it’s closer to 88. Gwei is a cryptocurrency that represents one billionth of a single Ethereum token. Ethereum has been in an uptrend since the new year and it settled just under $1,600 the past day.