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Polygon Developers Propose Hard Fork To Address Chain Reorganizations And Gas Spikes

Published date:

February 2, 2026

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Polygon (MATIC) developers will launch a hard fork on January 17 to reduce gas spikes and address chain reorganizations.

According to the proposal dated December 2022, the London hard fork released at the beginning of the year increased the base fees. This, in turn, led to “huge” spikes in the network’s gas fees.

The developers also sought to resolve the issue of chain reorgs. A chain reorganization (or reorg) occurs when a node receives blocks that belong to different versions of the blockchain. This causes the validator node to deactivate the older/shorter blocks and proceed with the blocks belonging to the highest chain. The transactions in the deactivated blocks become invalid, leading to the problem of duplicate transactions.

GET READY FOR THE HARDFORK

The proposed hardfork for the #Polygon PoS chain will make key upgrades to the network on Jan 17th.

This is good news for devs & users -- & will make for better UX.

You will NOT need to do anything differently. Details:https://t.co/RaBWDjEGrI pic.twitter.com/nipa15YQdZ
— Polygon (@0xPolygon) January 12, 2023

As a result, the developers have suggested changes that will address these issues in the latest hard fork. The first one involves reducing the gas spikes by increasing the “BaseFeeChangeDenominator” value from 8 to 16.

The update will also decrease the "SpiritLength" to 16 from 64. The devs believe that a decrease in the spirit length will lead to a reduction in chain reorgs.

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The dApps running on Polygon will not be affected by the upcoming hard fork. On the other hand, staking infrastructure providers will need to upgrade their nodes before January 17.

The developers revealed their plans to propose another hard fork in the coming months to improve the network.

The MATIC token has seen an uptrend in its pricing after the announcement. The coin has surged by over 2.5% and is priced at $0.9157 as of writing.

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Ayush Pande

Written by:

Ayush Pande

Writer

As a tech enthusiast who's always on the prowl for the latest developments concerning crypto and hardware, you can find him covering news stories or tinkering with PCs.

About the Author

As a tech enthusiast who's always on the prowl for the latest developments concerning crypto and hardware, you can find him covering news stories or tinkering with PCs.

About the Author

Radica Maneva

Reviewed by:

Radica Maneva

Senior Editor

Radica is a Senior Editor at Bitcompare. She has worked for more than a decade at leading publications as an Editor across various industries, including crypto and finance.

Bitcompare is a trading name of Blue Venture Studios Pty Ltd.

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