2 - 3 minute read
The Polygon community was abuzz with excitement today as the highly anticipated “Polygon Delhi Fork” went live at block 38,189,056. This hard fork aims to boost the performance of Polygon, the Ethereum layer-2 scaling protocol, by reducing gas spikes during transactions and improving transaction finality by reducing chain reorganization (reorgs).
The upgrade was triggered automatically and required no action from MATIC holders. The Polygon team had previously confirmed that the hard fork would proceed as scheduled. The team had also noted that the upgrade would change the base fee from 8 to 16. The base fee is the minimum gas needed for a transaction to be included in a new block.
In a blog post last week, the Polygon team explained that the goal of the upgrade is to smooth out gas price fluctuations and ensure a more seamless experience when interacting with the chain. The team expects that the rate of change for the base gas fee will fall to 6.25% from the current 12.5% to reduce spikes in gas prices. They also noted that while gas prices will still increase during peak demand, it will be more in line with the way Ethereum gas dynamics work now.
The second objective of the upgrade is to reduce chain reorgs and sprint lengths from 64 to 16 blocks. This will allow a single block producer to produce blocks continuously for a much shorter time (about 35 seconds) compared to the current time (about 128 seconds).
Polygon was first launched in 2017 as a scaling solution for Ethereum. Since then, it has been widely adopted by users and developers for its faster throughput and lower fees. More than 2.3 billion transactions have been processed on Polygon, and over 203 million unique addresses have signed up. Many decentralized apps (DApps), including UniSwap and Aave, have been built on top of Polygon. The upcoming upgrade is one of the more immediate steps in improving the chain’s performance and predictability.
As for the price of MATIC, the native token for Polygon, it has not yet made any major moves following the upgrade. However, it is expected to continue its ascent towards $2 after surging over 20% in the past seven days. At the time of writing, MATIC was trading at $1.02, up 0.74% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap data.
