Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Polygon will undergo a hard fork on Jan. 17 in order to address gas spikes and chain reorganizations issues that has affected user experience on the Polygon proof-of-stake (POS) chain. 

Polygon officially confirmed the hard fork event in Jan. 12 a blog post, which came after weeks of preliminary discussion on Polygon Improvement Proposal (PIP) forum page in late December.

A Polygon spokesperson also provided Cointelegraph with additional details of the hard fork on Jan. 14:

“The hard fork is coded for the Block >= 38,189,056. No centralized, single actor is going to initiate it. Validators of the network have to update their nodes prior to the indicated block, and they are already doing so.”

87% of the 15 voters of the Polygon Governance Team voted in favor of increasing the BaseFeeChangeDenominator function from 8 to 16 to reduce gas fee spikes and to decrease the SprintLength function from 64 blocks to 16 in order to fix the chain reorganization problem.