Polygon, an Ethereum scaling project, successfully completed a hard fork designed to reduce instances of spiking gas fees and disruptive chain reorganizations known as "reorgs."
The software upgrade occurred at 10:45 UTC (5:45 a.m. ET) on Jan. 17, according to a tweet from the lead company behind the project, Polygon Labs.
The two proposals included in the hard fork were put forth in December. Some 87 of Polygon validator teams that participated voted for approval. Only 15 validator teams took part in the voting process, which is extremely low given the number of active validators at a time is limited to 100.
The first proposal adjusted a mechanism that sets gas fees – a kind of tax one pays in order to transact on the 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 amount of time it takes to finalize a data block – part of an effort to prevent frequent reorgs, which occur when a validator node receives information that temporarily creates a new version of the blockchain.
The price of Polygon’s native token, MATIC, is up nearly 15 over the last seven days – in keeping with a broad rally in digital-asset markets.
UPDATE (Jan 17 17:25 UTC): Adds that only 15 validator teams took part in the voting process.
