Key Takeaways:
- Polygon’s unexpected code change has sparked debate.
- The fact that Polygon’s blockchain was hard forked without warning raised some eyebrows.
There aren’t many words in web3 that are more hotly debated than “decentralization.” So if someone questions the decentralization of a blockchain, it will gather a crowd.
Engineer Nathan Worsley’s tweet on December 15 alleging that Polygon’s blockchain had been hard forked without warning raised some questions. This is because a project would have to be centralized in order for nodes to upgrade that quickly.
Worsley’s tweet received over 1,800 likes on Twitter, and people like Chris Blec, an outspoken critic of several DeFi projects’ security procedures, added their two cents.
“What surprises me the most is that people are still surprised that Polygon is centralized enough to pull off this overhaul so rapidly,” he says.
Polygon is a platform that caters to Ethereum users and provides a variety of options for making transactions cheaper and faster. Polygon did not react to messages left on their press contact page or their public relations representative. On Twitter, co-founder Mihailo Bjelic explained that the codebase modification was made in response to a vulnerability discovered by one of the project’s security partners.
Bjelic also said he was working on a lengthy blog post regarding the patch.
Many proponents believe that decentralization is the key value proposition of blockchains. For those who desire to spend their money outside of the control of centralized parties, an uncensorable substrate through which anyone can transfer value and interact with DeFi applications is a compelling motivator. As a result, one of the worst things a person can term a blockchain is “centralized.”
“I believe the absence of decentralization in DeFi to be an incredibly basic flaw, and I don’t understand why the community is so forgiving of it,” Pilar wrote in a Twitter DM to The Defiant.
While the exact nature of the modification to Polygon’s coding and its spread around the project’s nodes is unknown, it’s clear that decentralization is still a contentious topic in the web3 community.
