Introduction

The Hard Fork was deployed on 17th January. Changes proposed by the hard fork were aimed to “reduce severity of gas spikes” and to “address chain reorganizations (reorgs) in an effort to reduce time to finality”. The reason behind this change is that when the chain experiences high demand, the base gas fee experiences exponential spikes, which are not normal during surges in demand on any blockchain protocol.

As update was relatively recent, and we have data for barely more than month after it was deployed so the date range of dataset that i was analyzing I chose from october 2022 till current in order to see how the network as a whole behaves and catch consequences of the update cause big date range can show us some previous updates but we need to concentrate on the actual one. Selected metrics should be directly or indirectly related to the gas price and blockchain work in general.

For now i have looked at the main blockchain metrics to my mind which can reflect updates: DAU(unique adresses), daily transferred matic volume, average TPS rate and number of total and confirmed transactions. As we can see these metrics are quite volatile during chosen date range so there is no any abnormal situations after hard fork deploy except TPS metric. The average value of tps increased from 73 to 79. Users still use polygon blockchain actively.

Next step i'm i wanna check the situation with average transaction and gas fee metrics, that in theory should have been affected due to the changes.

Definitely average transaction fee correlates with average gas price and daily transacted matic volume. Moreover usually fail transactions paid more fee. We can see two similar situations before and after hard fork around the tenth of November and the tenth of February when daily volume of matic was almost twice as much as average.

Conclusion:

1. Daily active users and total daily matic volume have been relatively unaffected by Hard Fork.
2. As well as metrics above ratio between success and total transactions remain to be normal.
3. Daily average TPS increased by 8% after Hard Fork.
4. The spike in average gas price and average transaction fee aligned with the spike in daily transferred matic volume. Although the gas spikes for success transactions were not so brightly expressed relatively to similar situation in November, but it still rise. Perhaps blockchain didn't experience appropriate demand to show us the result of reducing gas fee due to update.
5. After hard fork was implemented daily average gas used per block reached the plateau of 15millions per block.
6. As for block creation, it's clear that average block creation time increased by 5%
7. Also average amount of transactions in block increased by 8% after Hard Fork.