Polygon Getting Ready for the PoS Chain Hard Fork

Polygon (MATIC) network, an Ethereum scaling solution, has announced a hard fork that will take place on January 17. The goal of this fork is to lessen the impact of gas spikes and address chain reorganizations (reorgs) to cut down on the amount of time it takes for transactions to reach finality.

Details of the Hard Fork Proposal

In a forum discussion that followed the provision of updates by the governance team, the Polygon community decided (1) to give the hard fork proposal. The Polygon community members were allowed to cast their votes regarding modifications to BaseFeeChangeDenominator and SprintLength at the very top of the discussion thread.

With 15 votes cast, 87 percent of respondents agreed that the current standoff regarding polygons may be resolved by reducing the SprintLength from 64 blocks to 16 blocks and increasing the BaseFeeChangeDenominator from 8 to 16.

The team in charge of governance at Polygon saw that the when the value of the BaseFeeChangeDenominator is increased from 8 to 16, it will help to smooth out the rate of increase and reduction in base Fee whenever the gas in a block either exceeds or falls below the intended gas limits.

Over the past year, the Polygon ecosystem has experienced meteoric expansion, reaching over 207 million unique addresses and over 2.3 billion completed transactions.

Since over 37,000 decentralized applications have already been built on the Polygon network, including Uniswap and Aave, and large firms such as Robinhood, Adobe, and Stripe, the system must undergo modifications to improve its overall performance.

In addition, alternative smart contract chains have the scalable infrastructure, and Polygon is not impervious to the threat posed by these chains.

"Long-term technical modifications to Polygon PoS are now being worked on, such as parallelization, even though the construction of another promising scaling technology, such as Polygon zkEVM, is taking place. However, there are also more urgent steps that can be taken to improve the performance and predictability of Polygon PoS, and these are recommendations that need the consent of the network to become a reality," the Polygon network noted.

Polygon Network Market Presence

The Polygon network now has a market value of around $7,964,643,386 and a trading volume of $538,218,050 for every twenty hours. Approximately 4 billion MATIC units have already been staked on the PoS program, with the total MATIC supply reaching 8,734,317,475 coins. In addition, the Polygon network boasts 13 thousand delegators on the Proof of Stake network and one hundred active validators.

Currently, MATIC is trading at $ 0.9092, up 8 % on the weekly chart.

As a result of the impending hard fork, concerns around gas taxes and the finality of transactions will be addressed, which is expected to stimulate a more significant number of DeFi engagements on the Polygon network.

Despite the development of potential ETH substitutes, it is anticipated that the Ethereum network will, in the end, continue to hold the lead in the competition for smart contracts.