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.

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.