After suffering multiple delays in June and July, Cardano’s long-awaited network upgrade, the Vasil hard fork, has successfully been implemented, bringing “significant performance and capability” enhancements to the network.
The Vasil Hard Fork Is Live
Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the development team behind Cardano, announced via Twitter that the Vasil hard fork upgrade was carried out on the blockchain at 21:44 UTC on Thursday, September 22nd. IOHK tweeted:
#Vasil mainnet HFC event successful!
We’re happy to announce that today, at 21:44:00 UTC, the IOG team, in collaboration with the @CardanoStiftung, successfully hard forked the Cardano mainnet via a HFC event, thus deploying new #Vasil features to the chain.
1/5— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) September 22, 2022
The successful launch of Vasil signals the start of a five-day hard fork process, which is expected to be finalized on September 27th. The hard fork will introduce new features, while protecting the blockchain from data loss.
The Significance of the Vasil Hard Fork
The upgrade has been touted as the most significant period since Cardano’s launch. For one, Vasil will serve to enhance Cardano’s smart contract capabilities through Plutus V2, which was initially released in September 2021.
Cardano has long been criticized for failing to compete with other smart contract platforms, but Vasil is expected to fix that. The upgrade’s implementation could potentially lead to the development of more decentralized applications on Cardano.
The hard fork also aims to improve Cardano’s throughput capability via diffusion pipelining, thereby increasing the overall scalability of the network, while also lowering the cost of transactions.
On the Flipside
- In addition to Vasil, Cardano is also developing a new Layer-2 scaling solution called Hydra, which is expected to launch in 2023.
Why You Should Care
With Vasil working to make Cardano more developer friendly, the project may finally begin to live up to its hype as an “Ethereum-killer.”
Read how Cardano (ADA) is reacting to the launch below:
Uniglo (GLO) Price Spikes Mid Presale. Fantom (FTM) And Cardano (ADA) Holders Are Joining In
Learn more about Hydra in:
Cardano launches Hydra scalability protocol