Polygon will hold a hard fork in January to improve network performance

What’s new? The team of Polygon blockchain announced a network hard fork to improve its performance. The company noted that Polygon on the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithm has become a major destination for decentralized applications (DApps), for major Web 3.0 projects such as Uniswap and Aave, as well as large companies such as Robinhood, Adobe, and Stripe. The network’s hard fork is designed to improve the technical characteristics of the blockchain by introducing new features.

Post on the Polygon blog

Formerly known as the Matic Network, Polygon is a secure Layer 2 (L2) and sidechain network powered by the Ethereum blockchain. Polygon’s main goal is to increase Ethereum scalability, reduce network load, reduce transaction fees, and create decentralized finance (DeFi) services. As of January 13, the native token MATIC ranks 10th in the cryptocurrency ranking with a capitalization of $8,17 billion and is trading at $0,91, having gained 2,88% in 24 hours.

A hard fork is a process of splitting the main blockchain into two separate networks. In a hard fork, the developers drastically change the project’s protocols and algorithms, and create new tokens that are in no way related to the old version.

What else is known? The main goals of the hard fork will be to reduce transaction fee spikes, as well as to reorganize the network to reduce transaction processing time. The first phase of the hard fork will take place as early as January 17, 2023. The company expects the changes to reduce the base fee to 6,25% from the current 12,5%. In addition, the innovations are designed to improve the speed of transactions on the network.

All of the abovementioned changes will only be adopted with the consent of the community, Polygon said. In the coming months, the team may propose another hard fork, aimed at improving the network.

The developers also noted that at the moment in the network, there are tens of thousands of DApps with 207 million unique users, and the number of processed transactions has exceeded 2,3 billion.

In late 2022, Hi, a financial application, with the support of Polygon, launched the platformfor Mastercard’s debit card customization. With it, holders can create NFTs from their own images and use them to customize the face of a Web 3.0 card. There are 90 million retail outlets worldwide available to pay for purchases with cryptocurrency or fiat.