Polygon Is Dealing With Hardfork Gas Fees But Is Enough To Compete?

Polygon has announced that it will be performing a hard fork, upgrading its proof-of-stake chain to boost performance.

Since Polygon launched its PoS series, it has been making incremental improvements to the protocol. Two of the latest steps to improve performance and predictability were recently discussed and approved by the network.

Based on discussion and feedback from the community, the hard fork intends to reduce the severity of gas spikes. It will also address series restructuring, in an effort to reduce finalization times.

polygon elevation and expectations

As part of the dual intent of the hard fork, Polygon has rolled out a pair of proposals with their expected outcomes. To reduce exponential gas prices, the hard fork will reduce the rate of change for the base gas fee from the current 12.5% ​​to 6.25%.

This will help in rate easing for a base fee whenever the gas in a block falls above or below the target gas limit. While gas prices are still expected to rise during peak demand, it said the growth curve should flatten.

Second, transaction finality is expected to improve with hard forks by reducing chain reorganization. It hopes to do this by reducing the sprint length from 64 to 16 blocks. By reducing the depth of the reorganization in this way, the hard fork will reduce the likelihood of kicking in a secondary or tertiary validator to create the block. Polygon said this would improve transaction finality and lead to less restructuring overall.

According to Polygon, DApps deployed on the protocol and Matic token holders will not be affected by the hard fork. Unlike them, which require no additional steps, validators and infrastructure providers will need to upgrade before January 17th.

compared to ethereum

Although Polygon states that the hard fork will lower gas prices compared to Ethereum, they do not appear to be very competitive at the moment. Gas prices on Ethereum currently average around 35 gwei, while on Polygon the figure is closer to 88.

Gwei is a denomination of cryptocurrency, representing one billionth of a single Ethereum token. Ethereum has been in an uptrend since the start of the new year, trading lows below $1,600 over the past few days.