Polygon announces hard fork: upgrade should reduce fees

The Polygon development team gives green light for the next network upgrade: Next Tuesday, January 17, the “Delhi Fork” is to be rolled out. Decisive improvements should result in particular in the network fees. In addition, the block finality is optimized with the hard fork.

Hard fork to reduce costs

As a scaling project for Ethereum, one of Polygon’s core features is throttling fees. However, gas fees can still escalate when traffic is high and the network is busy. “Although the gas dynamics on the blockchain work well most of the time, when demand is high, there are exponential swings in the base gas fee,” Polygon said. This flaw is to be addressed with the Delhi Fork.

The upgrade flattens the rashes, also known as “gas spikes”, with increasing base fees. Fluctuations are smoothed out and transactions are cheaper on average. An improvement that Polygon says is meaningful to “users, validators, and developers.” Ultimately, better “interaction with the blockchain is guaranteed”.

Polygon tightens block finality

In addition, the hard fork shortens the so-called “sprint length” from 64 to 16 blocks. Means: validators produce blocks in shorter periods of time than before.

The “sprint length” means the number of blocks that a validator produces in a row. However, the higher the number, the higher the likelihood of “reorgs”: the temporary splitting of the blockchain before consensus is reached. By making blocks faster, the hard fork reduces the frequency of such reorgs.

Polygon nodes must be updated to the latest software before January 17th. Users do not have to pay attention to updates.